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聊齋誌異

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Text ID
KR3l0130
Date
1670–1715
Dynasty
清

Liáozhāi zhìyì 聊齋誌異

Strange Tales from the Studio of Idle Chat (Liáozhāi) by 蒲松齡 (撰)

About the work

The Liáozhāi zhìyì 聊齋誌異 of 蒲松齡 Pú Sōnglíng 蒲松齡 (1640–1715) — written in literary Chinese over approximately forty-five years (c. 1670 – Pú’s death in 1715) and circulated in manuscript for half a century before its first printing in 1766 — is the most influential collection of classical-Chinese short fiction of the entire post-Sòng tradition. It comprises 491 tales in 12 juàn (491 is the standard count for the autograph-manuscript-derived edition; the 1766 Qīngkētíng 青柯亭 first-printed edition has 431 tales in 16 juàn, a different arrangement). The title’s Liáozhāi 聊齋 — literally “studio of idle chat” or “studio for collecting tales” — is Pú’s own studio-name and gestures toward the work’s framing premise (announced in Pú’s celebrated Zìxù 自序 of 1679): that the author collected the tales told to him by passing visitors who were invited to his roadside liáo 聊 (chat-shelter). The Sìkù did not collect the work (its first printing was three years after the 1766 Sìkù deadline; the Qīng Sìkù compilers in any case considered the Liáozhāi below the dignity of canonical bibliographic treatment), so the work has no Sìkù tíyào — the present KR3l0130 entry sources its text from a modern Zhōnghuá shūjú critical edition (the catalogue marks the editions as ZHSJ).

The Liáozhāi’s formal lineage is the late-Míng zhìguài / chuánqí tradition: ghost-, fox-, demon-, and immortal-tales told as the framed reminiscence of an explicitly named narrator (often Pú himself, signed as Yìshǐshì 異史氏 “the Historian of the Strange” — the formal end-of-tale commentary modelled on the Tàishǐgōng yuē 太史公曰 of Sīmǎ Qiān’s Shǐjì). The tales’ literary register is ornate yet supple Tang-style literary Chinese, with extensive intertextual play; Allan Barr and Judith Zeitlin have shown that Pú’s source-base is principally the Six-Dynasties zhìguài (Wáng Yǎn’s Míngxiáng jì KR3l0132, the Sōushén jì, the Yǒumíng lù) and the Táng chuánqí — read through and frequently re-narrated, but with a distinctively Qīng moral-social inflection (the romantic-relationship tales especially are subtle critiques of the late-Qīng family-state order).

Tiyao

No Sìkù tíyào (the work was not collected in the Sìkù quánshū*; its first printed edition appeared in 1766, three years after the Sìkù deadline). The source-file in the present collation derives from the Zhōnghuá shūjú modern critical edition based on the partial autograph manuscript.*

The work circulated in author-manuscript form among Pú’s circle of Shāndōng literati friends for the last 25 years of his life, and was endorsed by senior contemporaries — most famously Wáng Shìzhēn 王士禛 (1634–1711), the pre-eminent Qīng poet of his generation, wrote a closing colophon poem for the manuscript (Tí Liáozhāi zhìyì 題聊齋誌異) ending with the famous couplet: Liáozhāi yǔbà yāngrán bà / shībǐ kānkuā Yǔmào 聊齋語罷漭然罷，詩筆堪誇蘧禹貌. Pú declined Wáng’s standing offer to purchase the manuscript outright.

Abstract

Composition. The earliest dated tale in the Liáozhāi is from Kāngxī 9 (1670); Pú’s autograph preface (Liáozhāi zìxù 聊齋自序) is dated Kāngxī 18 (1679), demonstrating that a substantial proportion of the collection had been finished within the first decade. The work continued to grow until Pú’s death in 1715. The earliest scholarly chronology of composition (Allan H. Barr 1985, “The Textual Transmission of Liaozhai zhiyi”, HJAS 44.2: 515–562) demonstrates that the surviving autograph manuscript (4 of 8 original boxed cè, at the Liáoníng Provincial Library) preserves an intermediate-stage redaction — Pú had not finalised the arrangement at his death.

Manuscript transmission. After Pú’s death the autograph was held by his family in Zīchuān; the four surviving cè of the autograph were the manuscript drawn upon by Zhào Qǐgāo 趙起杲 in 1766 for the Qīngkētíng 青柯亭 first printed edition (Hángzhōu); the other four were lost in the late 19th c. The autograph’s photographic reproduction in 1955 (Shānghǎi wénxué gǔjí kānyìnshè) is the foundation of all modern critical editions. Standard modern edition: Zhāng Yǒuhè 張友鶴, ed., Liáozhāi zhìyì huìjiào huìzhù huìpíng běn 聊齋誌異會校會注會評本 (3 vols., Zhōnghuá shūjú 1962, frequent reprintings); this critical edition collates the autograph, the 1766 Qīngkētíng, the Lǚ Zhànēn 呂湛恩 1825 commentary edition, and the Hé Shǒuqí 何守奇 / Féng Zhènluán 馮鎮巒 commentary editions, and is the working text for all post-1962 scholarship. A subsequent 12-juàn recension by Rèn Dúháng 任篤行 (Liáozhāi zhìyì quánjiào huìzhù jípíng 聊齋誌異全校會注集評, QíLǔ shūshè 2000) builds on Zhāng with further textual collation.

Reception in China. From the first 1766 printing the Liáozhāi was an immediate sensation; over 20 distinct Qīng commentary editions were produced (the so-called Liáozhāi sānjiā 聊齋三家 — Wáng ShìZhēn pseudo-comments, Hé Shǒuqí, Lǚ Zhànēn, Féng Zhènluán — and others). By the late Qīng the work had spawned imitation-collections (Yuán Méi’s 袁枚 Zǐbùyǔ 子不語, Jì Yún’s 紀昀 Yuèwēi cǎotáng bǐjì 閱微草堂筆記 KR3l0129?) and operatic adaptations across all regional drama forms (the Liáozhāi xì 聊齋戲 genre). Lǔ Xùn’s Zhōngguó xiǎoshuō shǐlüè (1923) j. 22 placed the Liáozhāi as the supreme classical-style Qīng-era xiǎoshuō, comparable in formal achievement to the Táng chuánqí.

Reception in the West. The Liáozhāi was the first work of Chinese vernacular-classical fiction to be widely translated into European languages: Herbert A. Giles, Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (1880; rev. 1908) — 164 selected tales, the foundational Western entry-point and still in print; Martin Buber, Chinesische Geister- und Liebesgeschichten (1911) — selected German translations in fluent Buber-style prose; in the 20th c., scholars and translators continuously returned to the Liáozhāi. Selections have been translated into English, French, German, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and most major South-East Asian languages.

Genre and theme. The Liáozhāi’s 491 tales range from one-paragraph anomalies (zhìguài in the strict Six-Dynasties sense) to elaborate novella-length chuánqí tales involving courtship, examination-failure, ghostly retribution, fox-spirit cohabitation, alchemy, dream-visitation, satirical anecdote, and moral exemplum. Pú Sōnglíng’s own life-failure at the examination (despite repeated attempts over fifty years, he passed only the lowest gòngshēng degree in 1711, four years before death) is the autobiographical key to the collection’s recurring scholar-protagonist; tales such as Yè Shēng 葉生, Sòng Yǒuzhī 司文郎 (“The Examiner of Compositions”) and Kǎochénghuáng 考城隍 (the opening tale, also the present text’s first entry) are framed around the catastrophe of examination disappointment redeemed in the supernatural realm. Zeitlin (1993) argues that the work’s deepest cultural work is the redefinition of the qíng-bird 情 (emotion) as a category capable of bridging the human and the supernatural — the fox-women, ghost-courtesans, and immortal-maidens of the Liáozhāi are, in this reading, vehicles for an essentially humanist exploration of romantic and ethical sentiment.

Catalog dating note. The catalog meta for this entry gives only dynasty: 清 with no date bracket; the composition window adopted here (1670–1715) follows the autograph dating-evidence assembled by Allan Barr 1985 and accepted by all subsequent scholarship.

Translations and research

  • Giles, Herbert A., trans. Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio. 2 vols. London: T. de la Rue, 1880; rev. ed. Shanghai: Kelly & Walsh, 1908; many reprints. The foundational English translation; 164 tales in Victorian English.
  • Minford, John, trans. Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. Penguin Classics, 2006. 104 tales in modern English; with substantial scholarly introduction and notes — the current standard reader’s edition.
  • Sondergard, Sidney L., trans. Strange Tales from Liaozhai. 6 vols. Jain Publishing Co., 2008–2014. Complete English translation of all 491 tales — the principal scholarly complete translation.
  • Buber, Martin, trans. Chinesische Geister- und Liebesgeschichten. Frankfurt: Rütten & Loening, 1911. Selected German translations, foundational.
  • Rösel, Gottfried, trans. Liao-Dschai-Dschi-yi: Sonderbare Geschichten aus dem Gelehrtenzimmer. 5 vols. Zürich: Die Waage, 1987–1992. The most comprehensive German translation.
  • Lévi, Sylvain, et al. Contes extraordinaires du cabinet de Liao. Paris: Folio/Gallimard, 1990s. Standard French selection.
  • Zeitlin, Judith T. Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale. Stanford UP, 1993. The principal English-language literary monograph.
  • Barr, Allan H. “Pu Songling and the Qing Examination System,” Late Imperial China 7.1 (1986): 87–111; “The Textual Transmission of the Liaozhai zhiyi,” HJAS 44.2 (1985): 515–562; “A Comparative Study of Early and Later Tales in Liaozhai zhiyi,” HJAS 45.1 (1985): 157–202; “Disarming Intruders: Alien Women in Liaozhai zhiyi,” HJAS 49.2 (1989): 501–517. The foundational Western-language source-critical and biographical scholarship.
  • Chiang, Sing-chen Lydia. Collecting the Self: Body and Identity in Strange Tale Collections of Late Imperial China. Brill, 2005.
  • Huntington, Rania. Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative. HUP, 2003. Treats the Liáozhāi’s fox-spirit tales in the wider Qīng zhì-guài context.
  • Zhāng Yǒu-hè 張友鶴, ed. Liáozhāi zhì-yì huì-jiào huì-zhù huì-píng běn 聊齋誌異會校會注會評本. 3 vols. Zhōnghuá shūjú, 1962. The standard critical edition.
  • Rèn Dú-háng 任篤行, ed. Liáozhāi zhì-yì quán-jiào huì-zhù jí-píng 聊齋誌異全校會注集評. 3 vols. Qí-Lǔ shūshè, 2000. The most recent critical edition.
  • Shèng Wěi 盛伟, ed. Pú Sōng-líng quán-jí 蒲松齡全集. 3 vols. Xuélín chūbǎnshè, 1998. The standard complete works of Pú.
  • Lǔ Dà-huāng 路大荒. Pú Sōng-líng nián-pǔ 蒲松齡年譜. Qí-Lǔ shūshè, 1980 (rev. 1995). The standard biographical chronology.
  • Mǎ Zhèn-fāng 馬振方. Pú Sōng-líng pīng-zhuàn 蒲松齡評傳. Běijīng dàxué chūbǎnshè, 1999.

Other points of interest

The opening tale of the collection — Kǎochénghuáng 考城隍 (“Examined for the Post of City-God”), the first entry in the present source file — is autobiographically charged: a deceased lǐnshēng 廩生 (Pú’s own degree-level for most of his life) is summoned in spirit-vision to sit a composition examination, passes brilliantly, and is appointed City-God of Hénán; the underworld examiner explicitly grants a nine-year postponement so that he may complete the filial duty of caring for his elderly mother. The tale is at once the work’s raison d’être — the literary-classical examination redeemed in the supernatural — and its programmatic announcement: this is the literature of the failed examinee.

The work’s title-word liáo 聊 is paradoxical: it can mean both “to chat idly” (the studio framing) and “to find sufficient consolation in” (i.e., liáoyǐ 聊以); Pú’s autograph preface plays on both senses, framing the writing as both diversion (qī 寄) and exorcism (jì 寄). Zeitlin and Minford have both written extensively on the multivalence.

The Liáozhāi shares an arc of cultural canonicity with KR3l0118 Tàipíng guǎngjì and KR3l0122 Yíjiān zhì: the three together constitute Wilkinson’s “most famous” trio of bǐjì xiǎoshuō collections (§53.3).

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