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古墓斑狐記

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Text ID
KR3l0146
Date
280–400
Dynasty
西晉-東晉

Gǔmù bānhú jì 古墓斑狐記

Record of the Striped Fox at the Old Tomb by 闕名

About the work

A single-tale zhìguài 志怪 narrative, transmitted as an independently-titled “text” in modern Kanripo cataloguing but originally an excerpted version of the canonical Zhāng Huá yǔ bānhú 張華與斑狐 (“Zhāng Huá and the striped fox”) tale. A thousand-year-old striped fox living at the tomb of King Zhāo of Yān 燕昭王 wishes to test its powers by visiting 張華 Zhāng Huá (232–300), then sīkōng 司空 under Jìn Huìdì. The ancient huábiǎo 華表 (memorial pillar) at the tomb warns the fox that Zhāng’s perspicacity is too great to be tricked, but the fox proceeds and arrives as a fair-skinned youth in zǒngjiǎo 總角 hair-dress, dazzling Zhāng with conversation that ranges over wénzhāng, the sānshǐ histories, the bǎijiā masters, LǎoZhuāng, the Fēng and Yǎ of the Odes, the ten shèng, the three cái, the eight rú schools and the five lǐ. Zhāng, unable to match him, suspects a fox or ghost and detains him. Léi Huàn 雷煥 (zì Kǒngzhāng 孔章), prefect of Fēngchéng 豐城 and renowned bówù scholar, suggests a hunting-dog test; the fox is unmoved. Zhāng then sends for the millennial huábiǎo wood from King Zhāo’s tomb. The wood, intercepted by a “blue-clad child” who weeps that “the old fox would not heed me, today the disaster reaches me too”, is cut anyway; it bleeds; burnt to light the prisoner, it reveals the striped fox. Zhāng has both fox and pillar boiled.

Tiyao

Lost; no original 提要; fragments only.

Abstract

The narrative is the foundational early-medieval Chinese fox-spirit tale: it establishes (i) the long-lived fox (qiānsuì 千歲, the thousand-year fox) as a fully-fledged shape-changer, (ii) the literary motif of the fox impersonating a polished young scholar to test his powers against a learned official, (iii) the zhīyīn 知音 affinity between aged supernatural beings (the fox and the huábiǎo pillar) as fellow long-livers, and (iv) the canonical test-techniques (hunting-dog, ancient-wood torch) by which fox-spirits may be unmasked. It is the type-source for the entire later medieval and pre-modern fox-spirit literary tradition culminating in Pú Sōnglíng 蒲松齡’s Liáozhāi zhìyì 聊齋誌異.

It is transmitted in essentially the present form in Gān Bǎo’s 干寶 Sōushén jì (KR3l0099) juàn 18 and in the Bówùzhì 博物志 tradition surrounding Zhāng Huá’s own works (some Sòng léishū attribute the tale to a Zhāng Huá Lièyì zhuàn 張華列異傳); it is again cited in Tàipíng guǎngjì 太平廣記 juàn 442 (chùshòu “domestic animals” 9) and j. 460. Closely related fox-typology fragments survive in Guō Pú 郭璞’s Xuánzhōng jì 玄中記 (“the fox at fifty suì can transform into a woman; at a hundred, into a beautiful maiden; at a thousand, communicates with Heaven, and is a tiānhú heavenly fox”) — these are the systematising statements behind the present tale.

The present “Gǔmù bānhú jì” is therefore an editor’s title for an extracted tale, not the surviving fragment of a discrete pre-Táng collection of that name; no entry of this title appears in the Suí or LiǎngTáng monographs. The author is unknown — it is most economically read as a story from the Sōushén jì or a closely-related early-4th-c. compilation — and is recorded as 闕名; Zhāng Huá and Léi Huàn appear in the narrative as protagonists, not as compilers.

The dating bracket adopted here (280–400) reflects the assumed compilation horizon: lower bound late 3rd c. (Zhāng Huá’s floruit, since the tale must postdate his eminence); upper bound late 4th c. (the Sōushén jì).

Translations and research

  • Kang, Xiaofei. The Cult of the Fox: Power, Gender, and Popular Religion in Late Imperial and Modern China (Columbia 2006), Chs. 1–2, with extended treatment of the Zhāng Huá tale as the foundational text of the literary fox-spirit tradition.
  • Huntington, Rania. Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative (Harvard Asia Center 2003), Ch. 1.
  • DeWoskin, Kenneth J. and J. I. Crump, Jr., trans. In Search of the Supernatural: The Written Record (Stanford 1996) — translates the Sōushén jì j.18 recension.
  • Campany, Robert Ford. Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China (SUNY 1996), pp. 358ff.
  • Wáng Guóliáng 王國良. Liù-cháo zhì-guài xiǎoshuō kǎo-lùn (Wén-shǐ-zhé chū-bǎn-shè, 1988).
  • Lǐ Jiànguó 李劍國. Zhōng-guó hú-xìn xìn-yǎng zhī yán-jiū 中國狐信信仰之研究 (1988); Táng-qián zhì-guài xiǎoshuō shǐ (rev. 2005), §6.

Other points of interest

The grim coda — Zhāng Huá boils both the fox and the millennial pillar — is the only major early-medieval fox-tale in which the human-loving polymath (Zhāng Huá himself, the patron-saint of bówù universal-knowledge) is also the killing-judge; it reads, in retrospect, almost as a self-warning about the social and personal cost of bówù erudition. The tale’s most distinctive philosophical line — “Mínggōng dāng zūnxián róngzhòng, jiāshàn ér jīn bùnéng; nàihé zēngrén xuéwèn?” 明公當尊賢容眾，嘉善而矜不能，奈何憎人學問 — puts a Mòist plea (“you preach jiānài, do you not?”) into the mouth of the fox.

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