Is Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio Worth Reading? Where to Start with Pu Songling's Ghost Stories

Almost everyone who reads English has met this book without knowing it. The ghost who lures scholars to a ruined temple, the beautiful woman who turns out to be wearing a painted skin, the fox who marries into a respectable family and is a better wife than the neighbours: those are all Pu Songling, writing in classical Chinese in the second half of the seventeenth century, and almost none of the people who know the images have read the page they came from.

Everything quoted here comes from Herbert Giles’ 1880 translation, which is free and out of copyright, and every quotation carries its line reference. Giles published it as Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio; the Strange Tales form of the title comes from John Minford’s later Penguin translation, and both point to the same book. The same collection is a doorway in the playable Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, where you walk into one tale at a time and find out how far you are willing to push it.

The short answer

Read it if you like ghost stories that refuse to moralise at you. Pu Songling’s tales are brisk, physical and often very funny, and the supernatural in them behaves less like a threat than like weather: it arrives, it has its own rules, and the people in the story adjust. What the book will not give you is a single narrative to follow, because there is no such thing here. This is an anthology of independent tales, and the only thing holding them together is the man who collected them.

“Of the whole, I therefore selected one hundred and sixty-four of the best and most characteristic stories.”

That sentence is worth sitting with, because it tells you what the free English edition actually is. Giles did not translate the book. He translated a selection of it, roughly a third, chosen by a British consular officer in the 1870s according to his own taste and his own sense of what a Victorian reader could be handed. The book behind Giles’ selection is considerably larger, and considerably stranger, than the third of it he handed on.

What kind of book this actually is

It is a collection, assembled over decades, of short classical tales about encounters with foxes, ghosts, immortals, corpses, examiners, underworld clerks and talking animals. Calling it a novel is the single most common mistake English-language readers make about it, and it changes what you expect on the first page.

• ✅The tales are short. Most run two to six pages. A few are a single paragraph. You can read one on a bus and lose nothing by stopping there, which is the opposite of how a nineteenth-century novel asks to be read.
• ✅There is no arc and no protagonist. Names do not carry over between tales. A scholar in one story has nothing to do with the scholar in the next, beyond belonging to the same exhausted social class Pu Songling kept writing about.
• ✅The divisions are editorial, not authorial.Giles worked from an edition split into “these sixteen volumes” (Giles’ 1880 introduction, l.732-733); the complete Chinese text circulating today is commonly divided differently. Volume numbers you see quoted for a given tale depend entirely on which edition someone had in front of them.
• ✅The English canon is a filtered canon.Giles discarded tales he judged “quite unsuitable for the age in which we live”, and others he found “utterly pointless, or mere repetitions in a slightly altered form”. Both judgements are his, and both shaped which of these stories an English reader has ever been offered (Giles’ 1880 introduction, l.733-737).

Why you already half know it

The strangest thing about this book’s reputation in English is how completely the adaptations have outrun it. Go and look at what people actually ask for online when they want this exact genre, and you will watch readers describe Pu Songling’s material almost perfectly, ask for recommendations, and get answers that never once name the book or the author. The scenes have escaped the source.

That is a fixable problem rather than a verdict on the writing. The films came first for most people, and the films are excellent, and a reader who has seen one of them is already halfway in: the plots are familiar, the imagery is familiar, and the only unfamiliar thing is the prose, which is much drier and much faster than any adaptation of it. Anyone curious about which films came from which tales will find a separate essay here on the adaptation history more useful than this one.

The first doorway in the game drops you outside a study where a young woman has just talked her way in for the night, and you can raise it with the household or keep walking. Role-play Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio →

Where to actually start

Three tales will tell you within an hour whether this book is for you, and all three are in the free Giles text. Read them in this order and you will have met the collection’s horror register, its romantic register and its comic register, which is most of what it does.

• ✅The Painted Skin. The famous one, and the one people most often misremember. A scholar takes in a young woman with a hard-luck story and a Taoist priest tells him he is bewitched. What actually happens in it is laid out here, including the part almost every retelling drops.
• ✅Miss Ying-ning; or, the Laughing Girl.A fox spirit’s daughter who laughs at everything, married into a family that cannot decide whether she is simple or dangerous. It is the warmest thing in the book and it has a genuine sting in it.
• ✅Judge Lu.A dunce of a scholar befriends an underworld judge over wine, and the judge does him two favours that no reader is prepared for. It is the clearest example of this book’s flat, matter-of-fact handling of the impossible.

Ying-ning and Judge Lu are also the two clearest examples of the recurring figures this collection keeps casting, which are set out in the essay on its four standing character types. Read those three tales, then pick whatever title in the contents page sounds most unlikely, because that is roughly the method the book itself was assembled by.

Was it ever banned or censored

There is no crisp banning story here, and it would be easy to invent one. Searching the question in English turns up material about modern Chinese censorship of entirely different books and platforms, which is real enough as a subject and has nothing to do with a seventeenth-century tale collection. On the evidence available, this book was not suppressed.

What did happen is quieter and better documented, because the translator wrote it down himself. Giles cut what he found indelicate before English readers ever saw it, and said so in his own introduction, comparing the material he dropped to “the coarseness of our own writers of fiction in the last century”. The censorship that shaped this book’s English reputation happened at the point of translation, by a translator being candid about it. The complete text is free at Project Gutenberg, and so is the Chinese original.