The Cat That Grew Fangs in the Moonlight / 武林猫怪

In which a stray black cat in a Hangzhou silk-merchant's household begins worshipping the moon, grows too large, and forces the family to call a Taoist priest from the Baojun Temple

From Zi Bu Yu (子不语 · What the Master Would Not Discuss), Volume 6 — Compiled by Yuan Mei (袁枚, 1716–1797)

Translated and annotated by Cathay Tales

[Hook] In the thirty-eighth year of the Qianlong reign — 1773 by the Western calendar — the Shen family of Wulin (武林), the old literary name for the city of Hangzhou,^{[1]Wulin (武林) is one of the oldest literary names for Hangzhou, deriving from the name of the hill range that the city's original walls were built against. By the Qianlong period it was used in polite and literary contexts as an elegant alternative to "Hangzhou." Yuan Mei uses it throughout Zi Bu Yu for stories set in the city.} kept a black cat that they had found as a kitten during a summer rainstorm. For the first year it was a perfectly ordinary cat. It caught mice in the grain-store. It slept curled against the kitchen stove in winter. It purred when the cook's wife stroked its back. Then, in the second year, it began to climb onto the tiled roof of the main hall every night at the hour of zi — midnight — and sit perfectly still, facing east, with its two front paws folded neatly beneath its chest. The servants noticed first. Then the master of the house noticed. Then the cat began to grow.

The Story

The Shen family (沈家) of Wulin were not grand people, but they were comfortable. They dealt in silk — not the highest-grade palace silk that went to the imperial workshops in Suzhou, but the good middle-weight chóuduàn (绸缎) that the merchants of Hangzhou sold to the gentry families of Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Anhui. Their house sat on a lane behind the Gushan (孤山, Lone Hill) promontory on the north side of the West Lake, close enough to the water that on humid mornings the courtyard stones were damp with lake-mist. It was a good house: three courtyards deep, with a covered walkway connecting the inner quarters to a rear garden where the family kept four silkworm trays in the spring and a pomegranate tree that bore fruit the colour of cinnabar.^{[2]Gushan (孤山, Lone Hill) is a natural island at the northern end of the West Lake, connected to the shore by a causeway. It was, in the Qing, a centre of literary and artistic life — the site of the imperial library (Wenlan Ge), several temples, and the graves of famous poets. A silk-merchant's house on the lane behind Gushan would have been in a prestigious neighbourhood.}

The master of the house, Shen Yaocheng (沈尧成), was a careful man in his late fifties. He kept two ledgers — one for the shop and one for the household — and he trusted neither his apprentices nor his servants to make entries in either without supervision. His wife, Madam Xu (许氏), was a woman from a neighboring county, Xiaoshan, who had brought with her a dowry that included, among the standard trousseau items, a small painted screen depicting a lady reading a letter by lamplight. She ran the inner household with the same careful attention her husband gave to the silk bolts: nothing wasted, nothing out of place.

They had one son, Shen Deguang (沈德光), who was twenty-two and being trained to take over the business. They had one daughter, Shen Xiuyun (沈秀云), who was fourteen and being trained to marry well. The household also included the cook and his wife, two serving-maids, an old gatekeeper named Ah Fú (阿福), and a part-time tutor who came three afternoons a week to instruct young Deguang in the examination essays.

The cat arrived in the sixth month of the thirty-eighth year — the summer of 1773 — during a rainstorm that lasted three days.

The rain had been falling since the fourth watch of the second night when the cook's wife, opening the back door to empty a basin of wash-water, found a kitten huddled against the door-frame. It was black — entirely black, from the tip of its tail to the pads of its feet — and so thin that its ribs showed through its wet fur like the frame of a small boat. It was, the cook's wife said later, no more than two months old. It looked up at her and mewed.

She brought it inside. She dried it with a cloth. She gave it a saucer of warm rice-water. The kitten drank, washed its face with one paw, and fell asleep on the warm bricks beside the stove.

No one claimed ownership of the kitten. It was, in the way of cats in Chinese households, self-adopting — 自来猫 (zìlái māo), "the cat that came of its own will." There is an old saying in Jiangnan: 狗来富，猫来起大厝 — "A dog coming means wealth; a cat coming means a big house."^{[3]The saying 狗来富，猫来起大厝 ("A dog coming means wealth; a cat coming means building a big house") is widespread in southern Chinese dialects, with regional variations. In the Minnan (Hokkien) tradition the wording is slightly different, but the meaning is the same: a stray animal that voluntarily joins a household is an omen of prosperity. The irony in this story — that the cat brings not prosperity but danger — is part of Yuan Mei's narrative craft.} The cook's wife took this as a good omen. She named the cat Xiao Hei (小黑, Little Black) and allowed it to live in the kitchen.

For the first year Xiao Hei was an excellent cat. It caught mice with a diligence that the cook's wife praised often. It did not steal fish from the kitchen. It did not fight with the neighbor's tomcat. It grew at a normal rate and developed a sleek black coat that the serving-maids admired. In the winter it slept by the stove. In the summer it slept in the shade of the pomegranate tree. It was, by every measure, a good household cat.

The change began in the spring of the following year.

It was the second month — early spring, the time when the willows along the West Lake were just beginning to green — when the cook's wife first noticed that Xiao Hei was no longer sleeping in the kitchen at night. She had assumed the cat had found a warmer corner somewhere, or perhaps a more interesting mouse-hole to guard. She did not think much of it.

A week later, the old gatekeeper Ah Fú was the one who found it.

Ah Fú was a light sleeper — a habit from forty years of opening and closing gates for a household that kept valuable silk in its stores. At the hour of zi — between eleven and one in the morning — he had risen to check the back gate. Looking up as he crossed the second courtyard, he saw the cat.

It was on the roof of the main hall. It was sitting on the ridge-line, perfectly still, with its body facing east and its two front paws folded beneath its chest in a posture that Ah Fú had never seen a cat assume. Its head was tilted slightly upward. Its eyes were open.

The moon was full that night — the fifteenth of the second month — and it cast the courtyard in a white-blue light that showed the cat's outline clearly against the dark tiles. Ah Fú stood in the courtyard and watched for perhaps a quarter of an hour. The cat did not move. It did not blink. It sat as if carved from the black night itself, facing the moon with an attention that was, Ah Fú said later, not the attention of a cat.

He told the cook's wife in the morning. She laughed. Cats sit on roofs, she said. That is what cats do.

But Ah Fú did not laugh. He had been a gatekeeper for forty years, and he had seen things in households that the cook's wife had not. He told her: That cat is baiyue. 拜月. Worshipping the moon.

In Chinese folk belief, certain animals — foxes, snakes, weasels, hedgehogs, and, less commonly, cats — can cultivate themselves (liànyǎng 炼养) by absorbing the essence of the sun and moon. The practice is called baiyue (拜月), "moon-worship": the animal sits facing the moon, usually at midnight on the fifteenth of a lunar month when the moon is fullest, and opens itself to the lunar yin essence. Over years — decades, sometimes centuries — the accumulated yin energy transforms the animal's body and mind. It grows larger. It grows smarter. Eventually it gains the ability to change its form. Such creatures are called yāojing (妖精) — "animal spirits" or, more loosely, "demons."

The most famous moon-worshippers in Chinese folklore are fox spirits (húli jīng 狐狸精), which appear in story after story from the Tang dynasty onward. Cats are less common but not unknown. The great compendium of supernatural lore called the Gujin Tushu Chengjian (古今图书集成, completed 1726) records several cases of cat-demons (māoguài 猫怪) in its "Records of Anomalies" section, and the poet Yuan Mei — the same man who would later compile Zi Bu Yu — had written about a cat-spirit in an earlier collection.^{[4]The Gujin Tushu Chengjian (古今图书集成, "Complete Collection of Illustrations and Writings from the Earliest to Current Times"), compiled under the Kangxi and Yongzheng reigns and completed in 1726, is one of the largest encyclopaedias ever produced. Its section on "Records of Anomalies" (yìzhì 异志) includes several references to cat-demons. Yuan Mei, who was a prolific compiler and reader, would have known this material.}

What Ah Fú knew — what every person who had lived long enough in a Jiangnan household knew — was that a cat that worshipped the moon was a cat on its way to becoming something else. And something else was not, usually, something good.

Over the next three months, the changes in Xiao Hei were gradual but unmistakable.

Size. The cat grew. Not the way a kitten grows into an adult cat — steadily, then stopping — but the way a thing grows when it is not finished becoming what it is meant to be. By the fifth month it was as large as a full-grown tom. By the sixth month it was larger than any cat Ah Fú had seen in forty years. By the eighth month — the autumn of 1774 — it was, the cook's wife said, as big as a small dog. Its body was long and heavy. Its paws were wide. When it walked across the courtyard flagstones, its footsteps made a sound that a cat's footsteps should not make.

Eyes. The cat's eyes changed too. They had been the normal green-gold of a black cat's eyes. Now, in certain lights — candlelight, moonlight, the first grey light before dawn — they took on a different colour: a pale, steady yellow that the cook's wife compared to dēngyóu huǒ (灯油火), the colour of burning lamp-oil. They were not, she insisted, the eyes of an animal. They were the eyes of something that knew it was being watched and did not care.

Voice. The cat stopped mewing. It did not growl, either. Instead, at irregular intervals — always at night, always when the household was quiet — it made a sound from somewhere in the house that the servants described as dīyín (低吟), a low chanting or murmur. It was not a cat's sound. It was not, the servants agreed, any sound that any animal should make. It was the sound of something practicing.

Behaviour. The cat's routine became fixed. During the day it slept — but not in the open, the way ordinary cats sleep. It hid. It found corners of the house that the servants did not frequently clean: behind the grain-store, under the stairs to the upper floor, in the rafters above the rear garden's covered walkway. It emerged only at dusk. It ate the food the cook's wife left for it — always raw fish, now; it had refused cooked food since the fifth month — and then it disappeared again.

And every clear night, it climbed to the roof.

The moon-worship became more regular. In the first year it had been occasional — once a month, perhaps, on the fifteenth, when the moon was fullest. Now it was nightly. The cat climbed to the ridge of the main hall at the hour of zi and sat facing east — toward the moon's rising — for hours at a time. In winter, when the nights were longest, it would remain on the roof from midnight until just before dawn. Snow fell on it. Rain fell on it. Wind blew across the tiles. The cat sat motionless, its yellow eyes open, its paws folded.

The household was, by this point, deeply unsettled.

The first real crisis came in the third month of 1775 — the spring of the cat's third year.

The Shen family kept four trays of silkworms in the rear garden, as was customary for households of their standing in Hangzhou. Silkworm-raising was, in the Qianlong period, a delicate business: the worms were exquisitely sensitive to temperature, humidity, and — according to generations of Jiangnan sericulture — to supernatural contamination. There were strict taboos around silkworm trays. Pregnant women were not allowed near them. Mourners — people who had recently attended a funeral — were kept away. And animals, especially cats, were absolutely forbidden from approaching.

The cat was, until that spring, well aware of this. It had never approached the silkworm trays.

Then, on a night in the third month, Madam Xu woke to a sound she did not recognise. She shook her husband awake. He lit a candle. They listened. The sound came from the rear garden — a soft, rhythmic thumping, as of something heavy jumping down from a height, then another, then another.

Shen Yaocheng took the candle and went to the rear garden door. He opened it.

The cat was in the silkworm room.

It was crouched on the edge of the second tray, its enormous body hunched over the bamboo frame. Silkworms — dozens of them, pale and fat and in the last instar before spinning — were scattered across the floor. Some were crushed. Others were still moving feebly, their silk threads tangled and broken. The cat's mouth was open. Its tongue — which, in ordinary cats, is a small pink instrument for grooming — was, Madam Xu said when she arrived behind her husband, too long. It was the colour of raw liver. It was moving over the bamboo frame with a deliberateness that had nothing to do with eating.

Shen Yaocheng drove the cat away with the candle-holder. The cat left without resistance. It moved slowly — not the swift, startled scramble of a cat caught in mischief, but the deliberate withdrawal of something that had finished what it came to do.

The damage was severe. Of the four trays, two were destroyed — the worms killed or scattered beyond recovery. The other two were partially damaged. The Shen family lost that season's silk entirely.

It was after this incident that Shen Yaocheng began to consider that the cat was not, in fact, a cat at all.

The second crisis came a month later, and it was worse.

Shen Xiuyun — the fourteen-year-old daughter — began to sleep during the day and wander at night.

At first it seemed like a young girl's restlessness. She would rise at noon, eat little, and spend the afternoon in a daze — sitting in the garden, staring at the pomegranate tree, responding to questions with a delay of several seconds, as if the words had to travel a long distance to reach her. In the evenings she would eat a full meal. Then, at the hour of zi, she would rise from her bed and walk.

She walked through the house. She walked through the courtyards. She walked to the back gate, which she found the means to open despite its bolt and lock. Once, Ah Fú found her standing in the rear garden at three in the morning, barefoot on the cold stones, looking up at the roof of the main hall with an expression he described as empty — not asleep, not awake, not afraid, not anything.

She did not, when questioned the next morning, remember any of it.

Madam Xu tried locking the daughter's door from the outside at night. The girl slept through the locking. She slept through the key turning. And in the morning, when the door was opened, the girl was not in her bed. She was in the garden. She was looking at the roof.

The cook's wife said what everyone was thinking but no one had said: The cat is taking her. 猫摄其魂. "The cat is stealing her soul-spirit."

In Chinese folk medicine and supernatural belief, a cat-demon — a māoguài — has the power to 摄魂 (shè hún), "seize the soul." This is not the same as killing. It is a subtler and, in some ways, more frightening process: the demon slowly extracts a person's hún (魂, the higher soul-spirit that governs consciousness and identity) until the person becomes a hollow shell — alive, breathing, but no longer themselves. The process can take weeks or months. The victim sleeps more and more. The victim's eyes grow dull. The victim loses interest in food, in conversation, in the world. Eventually, the victim stops moving entirely.

The cook's wife had seen this before — in her mother's household, in Xiaoshan, twenty years earlier. A cat that had worshipped the moon had taken the soul of a young servant-girl. The girl had lain in bed for three months before a Taoist priest was called. The priest had performed a ritual. The girl had recovered. But she had never been the same. She had laughed less. She had married a man she did not love. She had lived to be forty and died of a fever.

The cook's wife told this story to Madam Xu. Madam Xu told it to Shen Yaocheng. Shen Yaocheng, who was a careful man and a practical man, sat in his study for a long time with his two ledgers closed in front of him.

Then he sent Ah Fú to the Baojun Temple (保君庙) on the north shore of the West Lake.

The Taoist priest at the Baojun Temple was a man named Chen Lingshan (陈灵山). He was old — seventy, perhaps older — and he served a small temple that the local gentry maintained for the performance of seasonal rites and the occasional exorcism. He was not a famous priest. He did not write books or command large congregations. He was, in the way of most working Taoist priests in Qianlong-period Hangzhou, a man who knew the rituals and performed them when called upon, and who knew the signs.

He arrived at the Shen house on a morning in the fourth month of 1775 — the spring was late that year, and the pomegranate tree had not yet leafed. He was a thin man in a clean but faded blue robe. He carried a cloth-wrapped bundle that contained, Shen Yaocheng would later learn, a peach-wood sword (táomù jiàn 桃木剑), a set of spirit-talismans (fúlù 符箓), and a small bronze mirror.

He walked through the first courtyard. He walked through the second. He stood in the threshold between the second courtyard and the rear garden and looked at the pomegranate tree, the silkworm trays (empty now, the damaged ones), and the tiled roof of the main hall.

Then he saw the cat.

The cat was in the rear garden. It was sitting at the base of the pomegranate tree, in a patch of morning sun. Its body was — the priest said afterward — not the body of an ordinary cat. It was too large. Its proportions were wrong. Its fur, while black and apparently normal, had a quality that the priest described as fú yīn zhī qì (伏阴之气) — "accumulated concealed yin energy." The priest said he could feel it: a coldness in the air around the animal, like standing near a well-shaft in summer.

The cat looked at the priest. The priest looked at the cat.

Chen Lingshan said three words: Cǐ wù bàiyuè yǐ jiǔ yǐ. 此物拜月已久矣. "This thing has worshipped the moon for a long time."

He then said something that Shen Yaocheng would repeat to his son for the rest of his life: It is not yet a demon. But it is no longer a cat. If you do not act before the seventh month — before the seventh-month fifteenth, when the ghost festival opens the gates between the living and the dead — it will cross the line. And after that line, it will not be a cat, and it will not be manageable, and your daughter will not come back.

The ritual that Chen Lingshan performed took three nights.

The first night was preparation. The priest walked the perimeter of the house with his bronze mirror, holding it before him so that it reflected the ground, the walls, and the roof. Wherever the mirror's surface fogged — a phenomenon the priest called yīn qì jié jìng (阴气结镜), "yin energy condensing on the mirror" — he marked the spot with a daub of cinnabar paste. By the end of the circuit, the base of the pomegranate tree, the eaves of the main hall, and the rear gate were all marked. The priest said the cat's yin energy had saturated these three places. They were, in effect, the cat's territories.

The second night was confrontation. At the hour of zi, the priest stationed himself in the second courtyard with his peach-wood sword and his talismans. He had instructed the household to stay inside with all doors and windows closed. He had placed a talisman — written that afternoon in cinnabar ink on yellow paper — on the door-frame of young Xiuyun's bedroom.

At midnight the cat appeared.

It did not come from the roof. It came from the base of the pomegranate tree, where it had been hiding. It walked into the courtyard with the slow, deliberate gait that the servants had noticed over the past months. Its yellow eyes found the priest. The priest raised the sword.

What followed was, in the priest's account, not a battle. It was a negotiation.

The cat stopped three paces from the priest. It sat. It looked at the sword. It looked at the talismans. And then — and this is the part of the story that Shen Yaocheng could never decide whether to believe — it spoke.

Not in words. Not exactly. The cook's wife, listening through the wall of the inner quarters, described it as like a cat's yowl but with tones — as if the animal were producing the music of speech without the articulation of consonants. The priest described it as the cat's yin energy attempting to communicate through the medium of sound. What the priest understood — he said, and Shen Yaocheng believed him — was this:

The cat said it had been worshipping the moon for two and a half years. It said it was close to the threshold. It said it did not wish to be destroyed. It said it had not meant to harm the girl.

The priest, holding the sword, responded. He told the cat — and this, in Taoist exorcism tradition, is the priest's role: not to destroy but to adjudicate — that it had three choices.

First: It could continue on its current path. The priest would then be obliged to destroy it. The peach-wood sword was for this purpose. The talismans were for this purpose. If the cat chose to stay, to continue worshipping the moon, to continue accumulating yin energy, it would cross the threshold into full demonhood — and the priest would kill it before it could do more harm.

Second: It could leave. It could abandon the household, the roof, the pomegranate tree, the moon-worship site. It could go to the deep mountains — the Tianmu Mountains to the west, or the summit of Tianzhu behind Lingyin Temple — and continue its cultivation there, where it would not threaten a human household. This was, the priest said, the path that had the most merit for the cat's own spiritual progress.

Third: It could release what it had taken. The girl's soul-spirit, which the cat had been slowly drawing out over the past months, had to be returned. The cat had to give up the yin energy it had stolen from the household — the warmth of the girl's hún, the vitality of the silkworms, the accumulated yang energy of the house itself. It had to let go. And then it had to leave.

The cat sat in the courtyard for a long time. The priest held the sword. The household held its breath.

Then, the priest said, the cat made a sound — a single, low tone — and turned. It walked to the base of the pomegranate tree. It placed its two front paws on the earth. It bowed — not the moon-worship bow, but a bow toward the ground, toward the earth — and then it walked to the rear gate and passed through it.

The gatekeeper Ah Fú, who had been standing on the other side of the gate with a lantern, said the cat passed him so close that he could have touched it with his foot. It did not look at him. Its fur, he said, was cold — not the cold of a winter night, but a different cold, a cold that came from inside the animal and radiated outward.

The cat was gone.

The third night was restoration. The priest performed a zhāo hún (招魂) ritual — a soul-calling ceremony — for the girl. He burned the remaining talismans. He used the bronze mirror to "collect" the residual yin energy from the three marked sites. He drew a new set of protective talismans and placed them at the four corners of the house.

By morning, Shen Xiuyun was awake. She was, her mother said, herself again — confused, frightened, but present. She remembered nothing of the previous months' nighttime wanderings. She remembered only, she said, dreams of a very large dark room where someone was calling her name in a voice that sounded like wind through bamboo.

The silkworm trays were replaced. The rear garden was swept clean. The pomegranate tree leafed in the fifth month and bore fruit in the eighth, as it always had.

Shen Yaocheng paid the priest. He also, at the priest's suggestion, commissioned a small stone to be placed at the rear gate — not a gravestone, but a jièshí (戒石), a "warning stone" — inscribed with four characters: 貓不拜月, māo bù bàiyuè — "Let no cat worship the moon."

The stone was still there, Shen Yaocheng said, when Yuan Mei's correspondent visited the house many years later and recorded the story.

Editor's Note

This story is from Zi Bu Yu (子不语, "What the Master Would Not Discuss"), a collection of supernatural tales compiled by Yuan Mei (袁枚, 1716–1797), one of the most celebrated literati of the Qianlong period. Yuan Mei was a poet, essayist, gastronome, and former county magistrate who, after resigning his post in his mid-thirties, spent the remaining four decades of his life writing, publishing, and running a literary salon at his garden estate on Xiao Cang Shan (小仓山) in Nanjing.

Zi Bu Yu takes its title from a line in the Analects of Confucius — zǐ bù yǔ (子不语怪力乱神), "The Master did not speak of anomalies, violence, disorder, and spirits" — and the collection is, in a sense, a deliberate counterpoint to that Confucian silence. Yuan Mei collected these stories from oral sources, from other collections, and from his own experience, and he recorded them with a characteristic blend of deadpan narration, dry humour, and occasional scepticism.

The cat-demon story belongs to a large category of Chinese supernatural narratives about animal spirits that cultivate themselves through absorbing natural energy — moonlight, sunlight, the essence of mountains and rivers. The process is drawn from Taoist inner alchemy (nèidān 内丹) and applied, in folk belief, to animals. A cat that worships the moon is not, in this worldview, doing anything unnatural — it is simply following the same path that a fox spirit or a snake spirit might follow. The question is always: how far has it gotten, and what is it willing to sacrifice to go further?

In this story, the cat is neither wholly villainous nor wholly sympathetic. It has harmed a household — damaged the silkworms, slowly drained the girl's soul-spirit — but it has also, until recently, been a good mouser and a harmless presence in the kitchen. The priest's role is not to judge but to set boundaries — to give the cat a choice and enforce the consequences. The resolution — the cat's departure to the mountains — is the best possible outcome for all parties, and it reflects a characteristically Chinese supernatural cosmology in which the boundary between human and animal, living and dead, natural and supernatural is permeable, negotiable, and constantly being tested.

This translation is based on the text of "武林猫怪" as recorded in Zi Bu Yu (子不语), Volume 6. The original is in classical Chinese; the English is a translation, not a literal transcription, and takes certain liberties with pacing and detail for readability. Cultural annotations are provided in the footnotes.

Source: Yuan Mei (袁枚), Zi Bu Yu (子不语 · What the Master Would Not Discuss), c. 1780s. Volume 6.