Strange Tales from A Chinese Studio
by Pu Songling

This is a collection of Chinese supernatural tales, compiled by scholar Pu Songling in the late seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries. I have several translations of tales from the collection: the Herbert Giles translation from 1880 (probably the best known translation); Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisure, the 1913 translation by George Soulie; and the 2006 translation by John Minford.

The selections are all different, and none of them complete, but they are all a lot of fun to read. The Giles and Soulie translations are public domain, but the Minford translation is “less prudish,” as Minford puts it, and possibly the truest of the three to the original.

The post at Multo retells one of the stories, from the Giles translation.