About Cathay Tales

Cathay Tales is a small, independent editorial project. We translate short fiction from classical Chinese — strange tales, forensic case files, mythic epics, gothic horror, and fantasy travelogues — into careful, readable English with cultural notes.

What we do

Most of these books exist in English only as scholarly translations — out of print, behind paywalls, or written for graduate seminars. Meanwhile, English-language readers have an enormous appetite for Chinese ghost stories, wuxia, xianxia, donghua, and folk-horror — but very little of the original source material is easy to find.

Cathay Tales is a small attempt to close that gap. Several annotated tales per week, drawn from six parallel series:

• Notes from the Thatched Study — Yuewei Caotang Biji 阅微草堂笔记 (Ji Yun, c. 1798). A Qing scholar's notebook of foxes, ghosts, and karmic puzzles.
• Investiture of the Gods — Fengshen Yanyi 封神演义 (Xu Zhonglin, c. 1605). The mythic war that toppled the Shang dynasty, fought by gods, immortals, and mortals with magic weapons.
• The Coroner's Notebook — Xiyuan Jilu 洗冤集录 (Song Ci, 1247). The world's first systematic forensic manual, told as 13th-century true crime.
• What the Master Would Not Discuss — Zibuyu 子不语 (Yuan Mei, c. 1788). Gothic horror, gender-bending hauntings, and forbidden tales from a Qing libertine.
• Flowers in the Mirror — Jinghua Yuan 镜花缘 (Li Ruzhen, 1827). A Chinese Gulliver's Travels — thirty impossible kingdoms visited by sea, including a Country of Women that ruled men in 1827.
• Quelling the Demons' Revolt — Sansui Pingyao Zhuan 三遂平妖传 (Luo Guanzhong, Ming). Dark fantasy: rebel sorcerers, talismanic magic, and a holy woman who summons soldiers from beans.

How we work

Each tale goes through the same four stages before publishing:

1. Source check. We work only from public-domain Chinese editions, cross-checking against more than one printing where possible to catch typesetter errors.
2. Close translation. A literal pass first, then a story pass. We keep proper names in pinyin and gloss titles, ranks, and place-names on first mention.
3. Cultural annotation. Footnotes appear inline as small numbers and on hover. They explain only what an English reader needs to enjoy the story — never to lecture.
4. Editorial polish. A final read-aloud pass for rhythm. We write the way a friend telling you a strange story would — not the way a journal article would.

What we are not

We are not an academic journal. We do not claim philological authority. Where scholars disagree, we pick the reading that makes the story most alive and flag the disagreement in a footnote.

We are also not a content farm. We publish slowly — a small handful of tales per week — and never republish the same story under different titles or fabricate "tales" that don't exist in the source.

Sources, licensing, and credits

All source texts are in the public domain under both Chinese law and the Berne Convention; the latest of the six authors died in 1830, so even the youngest texts have been in the public domain for more than a century.

Our translations, annotations, and editorial commentary are released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). You are welcome to quote, share, and teach from them with credit; please ask first before reprinting commercially.

Site design, illustrations, and the fox-and-sun mark are © 2026 Cathay Tales.

Support

Cathay Tales is reader-supported. If a tale makes your week stranger, the most useful things you can do are:

• Subscribe to the email list — a couple of tales per week, no spam.
• Buy us a tea on Ko-fi — every cup funds the next translation.
• Tell one friend. Word of mouth is everything for a small project like this.

Contact

Editorial questions, source corrections, translation suggestions, or simply a hello — find our contact details here.

Story first, scholarship second. Welcome to Cathay.