The Consort Behind the Curtain / 李少翁招魂李夫人

The emperor who ruled everything except his own grief — and the one night a wizard let him see her again, at the exact distance that made longing worse

From In Search of the Supernatural (搜神记), Book II — by Gan Bao (干宝, c. 286–336) · Retold by Cathay Tales

An emperor who owned the world mourned one woman who was no longer in it. A man from the coast came to the capital and said he could call her back — not her body, which was under the earth, but her shen, her spirit-presence, which the men of Qi knew how to move with lamps and silk. That night the curtains went up in a dark hall, the candles were lit, wine and meat were set out for a guest who ate nothing, and the Son of Heaven was told where to sit: in another tent, far off, and on no account to stand, to speak, or to approach. What he saw made him write eleven characters that the Chinese have been quoting ever since — and made a question out of what should have been a reunion. Is it she? Or is it not?

The Song That Brought Her to the Palace

She had no name that history kept — only a surname. She is Lady Li (李夫人, Lǐ Fūrén), and she came into the story the way most things entered the Han palace: through music.^{[1]The chief sources for Lady Li's life are the Memoir of External Relatives in Ban Gu's Han Shu (《汉书·外戚传上·孝武李夫人》, Hàn Shū, ch. 97A) and — for the séance's alternate version — Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, Treatise on the Feng and Shan Sacrifices (《史记·封禅书》, Shǐjì, ch. 28). Gan Bao's retelling is Soushen Ji Book II (《搜神记·卷二·少翁》). Modern standard edition: 干宝《搜神记》, 中华书局点校本; the tale appears in nearly all modern editions (李剑国《新辑搜神记》 places it in 卷二).}

Her brother was Li Yannian (李延年), a man who had been sentenced to castration for a crime in his family and now served in the palace as a musician and singer. Han justice was efficient that way: it took a man's future and handed him, in compensation, the emperor's ear. Li Yannian had a gift the Book of Han describes carefully — he understood sound (知音), he could dance, and whenever he composed a new tune and sang it, "there was no one who heard it who was not moved."^{[2]The Han Shu wording: "李夫人少而蚤卒……上怜悯焉" and "初，夫人兄延年性知音，善歌舞，武帝爱之。每为新声变曲，闻者莫不感动。" Lady Li bore Liu Bo (刘髆), King Ai of Changyi (昌邑哀王); her grandson Liu He (刘贺) was briefly emperor in 74 BCE (the "27-day emperor," later Marquis of Haihun). After Emperor Wu's death, Huo Guang had Lady Li enshrined as empress consort in the ancestral temple with the posthumous title Empress Xiaowu (孝武皇后), following the emperor's known wishes.}

At a banquet before the emperor, Li Yannian rose and danced. He sang a new song:

In the north there is a beauty, peerless in her age, standing alone. One glance from her topples a city, a second glance topples a kingdom. Ah, but rather than not know that city-toppling, kingdom-falling beauty — a beauty like that is hard to find twice.^{[3]"一顾倾人城，再顾倾人国" — "One glance topples a city, a second topples a kingdom." The song, attributed to Li Yannian and recorded in Han Shu 97A, gave Chinese two idioms at once: qīng guó qīng chéng (倾国倾城, "kingdom-toppling, city-toppling"), still the highest praise for a woman's beauty, and the trope of the "northern beauty" (北方有佳人). The irony is structural: the beauty genuinely did topple nothing — but her brother Li Guangli's later military failures and her grandson's 27-day reign would, in historians' hindsight, give the phrase an unintended edge.}

It is the most successful audition in Chinese literary history. Emperor Wu (汉武帝, Hàn Wǔdì, r. 141–87 BCE) sighed and said: "Good. But is there really such a person in the world?" The emperor's elder sister, Princess Pingyang, who knew exactly what the banquet had been arranged for, said: Li Yannian has a younger sister.

The emperor summoned her. She was beautiful. She could dance. She became his favorite, and she bore him a son, Liu Bo (刘髆), later enfeoffed as the King of Changyi. Her grandson — a detail that belongs to the darker history books — would sit on the Han throne for twenty-seven days before being deposed as unfit, remembered now as the Marquis of Haihun.

The Woman Who Refused Her Last Audience

Lady Li did not live long. When she fell gravely ill, the emperor came to her bedside. She covered her face with her blanket.

"I have been ill so long," she said, "that my looks are ruined. I cannot see Your Majesty. I entrust to you my son and my brothers."

The emperor, who was not a man accustomed to being denied anything, said: "You are very sick. You may not recover. Would it not give you comfort to see me once more and entrust your brothers to me face to face?"

"A woman who has not adorned herself," she answered, "does not dare to see her sovereign. I cannot appear before Your Majesty in disarray."

He pressed her. He offered a thousand catties of gold and high office for her brothers — for one look. She turned her face to the wall and wept and said no more. He left angry.

Her sisters — when the emperor was gone — scolded her. Could she not have shown herself once, to secure the family? Why offend him at the very end? Her answer is the coldest, clearest piece of political wisdom in the entire Book of Han:^{[4]The deathbed scene — "夫人蒙被谢曰：'妾久寝病，形貌毁坏，不可以见帝。愿以王及兄弟为托。'" and the sisters' subsequent scolding, answered by "所以不欲见帝者，乃欲以深托兄弟也。我以容貌之好，得从微贱爱幸于上。夫以色事人者，色衰而爱弛，爱弛则恩绝……" — is one of the most quoted passages in the Han Shu, a rare first-person exposition of the economics of imperial favor. It is also, arguably, the story's real ghost: the woman manages her own image from her deathbed with more political skill than the wizard manages his illusion.}

"The reason I will not see him is precisely to secure my brothers. I rose from nothing by my looks. He who serves a man with his face — when the face fades, the love slackens; when the love slackens, the favor ends. The emperor still thinks of me fondly and grieved because of how I used to look. If he sees me now, ruined and hideous, he will recoil in disgust — and then what chance would my brothers have?"

She understood something her emperor had not yet understood himself: that he was in love not exactly with her, but with an image, and that the image was more powerful than the woman. She spent her last strength protecting the image. She died without letting him see her dead face.

She was buried with the rites of an empress. Her brother Li Guangli was made General of the Ershi and Marquis of Haixi; Li Yannian was made Commandant of Harmony, in charge of all palace music. The emperor had her portrait painted and hung in the Ganquan Palace (甘泉宫), his summer retreat in the hills beyond the capital.^{[5]The Ganquan Palace (甘泉宫), northwest of Chang'an in modern Chunhua county, Shaanxi, was Emperor Wu's principal ritual center — built up over the site of a Qin palace, expanded with the Tongtian terrace for spirit reception. The portrait hanging there (图画其形于甘泉宫) is recorded in Han Shu 97A. It is the same complex where Shaoweng had his spirit-painted audience hall built after the séance — meaning the emperor's two consolations, the painting and the summoning apparatus, occupied the same ritual space.}

And then he could not stop mourning.

The Man from Qi

Word of an emperor's grief travels faster than an emperor's edicts. It reached a man from the eastern coastal state of Qi — Shaoweng (少翁, "the Young Old Man," the name itself half title, half joke), a practitioner of the arts of spirits and gods (鬼神方). He came to Chang'an and said he could zhi qi shen — cause her spirit to arrive, to present itself.^{[6]"少翁" (Shǎowēng) means literally "the Young Elder" — likely a generic term of address for an itinerant practitioner rather than a personal name; Gan Bao is the first to write him as "李少翁" ("Shaoweng Li"), giving him the surname of his home region's clients. Sima Qian and Ban Gu refer to him simply as 齐人少翁, "Shaoweng, a man of Qi." He should not be confused with Li Shaojun (李少君), an earlier and more successful Han wizard whose death the emperor interpreted as "transformation" rather than demise (《史记·封禅书》).}

This was not, in the second century BCE, an absurd claim. The Han world was dense with techniques for moving between the seen and the unseen: the dead could be summoned, gods could descend into mediums, the barrier between yin and yang was real but permeable, and the men of Qi and Yan on the eastern seaboard were the empire's specialists in it. What Shaoweng promised was not resurrection. Nobody promised that. He promised sight — a glimpse, across the proper distance, of the person who was gone.

Gan Bao's account, three and a half centuries later in the Soushen Ji, gives the arrangement in four sentences. That night, Shaoweng set up curtains of silk — shi wei zhang — and lit the lamps bright — ming deng zhu. The emperor was placed in another tent and told to look from afar. And then, in the lamplight on the far side of the curtain, he saw it:

A beautiful woman within the tent, with the appearance of Lady Li — returning to the curtain, sitting, and rising to walk. But he could not draw near to look.^{[7]Gan Bao's text (《搜神记·卷二》): "汉武帝时，幸李夫人，夫人卒后，帝思念不已。方士齐人李少翁，言能致其神。乃夜施帷帐，明灯烛，而令帝居他帐遥望之。见美女居帐中，如李夫人之状，还幄坐而步，又不得就视。帝愈益悲感，为作诗曰：'是耶？非耶？立而望之，偏娜娜，何冉冉其来迟！'令乐府诸音家弦歌之。" The Han Shu version of the séance runs: "上思念李夫人不已，方士齐人少翁言能致其神。乃夜张灯烛，设帷帐，陈酒肉，而令上居他帐，遥望见好女如李夫人之貌，还幄坐而步。又不得就视，上愈益相思悲感，为作诗曰：'是邪，非邪？立而望之，偏何姗姗其来迟！'令乐府诸音家弦歌之。"}

The Book of Han adds the props the scene required: wine and meat laid out as for a guest, the lamps lit, the curtains raised, the emperor seated in another tent, and the figure — hao nü ru Li Furen zhi mao, "a fine woman with the likeness of Lady Li" — now seated in the curtained chamber, now pacing slowly. He could only watch from the distance. He could not go to her. He could not speak to her and hear her answer. The protocol of the summoning forbade exactly the thing grief most wants: proximity.

What did the emperor actually see? Later ages, more skeptical or more knowing, would say a shadow — a figure cut from leather or paper, held between lamp and silk, made to sit and pace by a hand the emperor could not see. Later ages would call it, with admiration, the first shadow play in China.^{[8]The shadow-puppetry attribution is first explicit in Gao Cheng (高承), Shìwù Jìyuán (《事物纪原》), Song dynasty, juan 9, entry 影戏: "故老相承，言影戏之原出于汉武帝李夫人之亡，齐人少翁言能致其魂……少翁夜为方帷，张灯烛，帝坐他帐，自帷中望见之，仿佛夫人像也，盖不得就视之。由是世间有影戏。" The Han Wu Neizhuan (《汉武内传》, probably Six Dynasties) already has the figure made of stone and shown "inside a gauze curtain" (置于轻纱幕里，宛若生时); Wang Jia's Shíyí Jì (《拾遗记》, 4th c.) has the dream-stone sailors version. Modern Chinese shadow theatre (皮影戏) is inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (2011); its practitioner genealogy traditionally cites the Shaoweng séance as the founding scene.} The Records of the Grand Historian and the Book of Han neither confirm nor explain it; they record only that the figure appeared, and that the emperor — the most skeptical, most powerful, and arguably most intelligent man of his century — accepted what he saw enough to be broken by it.

The Poem

The sight did not console him. Gan Bao says he was yu yi bei gan — the more affected, the more sorrowful. The Han Shu says he grew yu yi xiang si bei gan — "all the more sick with longing and grief." The distance had done its work. The woman in the curtain was close enough to recognize and far enough to be untouchable, which is the precise condition under which longing becomes unendurable. A ghost you cannot reach is not a remedy for grief. It is grief with a witness.

He wrote a poem. In the Han Shu's version — the version that entered every later anthology and the modern Chinese language itself — it runs:

是邪，非邪？ 立而望之， 偏何姗姗其来迟！

Shì xié, fēi xié? Lì ér wàng zhī, piān hé shānshān qí lái chí!

"Is it she? Or is it not? I stand and gaze — why must she come so slowly, so late?"^{[9]Two recensions of the poem exist. The Han Shu reads "是邪，非邪？立而望之，偏何姗姗其来迟！" The Soushen Ji standard text reads "是耶？非耶？立而望之，偏娜娜，何冉冉其来迟！" — with 娜娜/婀娜 (ē'nuó, "gracefully swaying") for 姗姗 and 冉冉 (rǎnrǎn, "slowly") for 姗姗. Huan Tan's Xin Lun (《新论》, early 1st c. CE) already paraphrases the séance; the Taiping Yulan (《太平御览》, 983 CE, ch. 700 及卷八百六十九 灯一) preserves the Han Shu wording under its entries for lamps and curtains.}

He ordered the musicians of the Music Bureau (乐府, Yuèfǔ) to set it to strings and sing it. The same office that had once performed her brother's city-toppling song now performed the emperor's eleven characters of doubt.

Notice what the poem does not say. It does not say she has come back. It does not say I saw her. It asks a question, and the question is addressed not to the woman or the wizard but to the universe, or to his own eyes: is it she, or is it not? The most famous love story of the Han court ends with the lover unable to verify the one thing his wizard had promised him. The word 姗姗 (shānshān) — the slow, swaying, graceful gait of a woman — walked out of this poem into everyday Chinese, where 姗姗来迟 ("she comes so gracefully, and so late") is still, two thousand years on, the polite way to say you are late.^{[10]The idiom 姗姗来迟 (shānshān láichí) is entered in every modern Chinese dictionary with this poem — Han Shu 97A — as its citation source. 姗姗 describes the slow, graceful, swaying walk of a woman. Modern usage is light and apologetic ("sorry I'm late, 姗姗来迟~"); the original usage is a lover's agony: she walks beautifully, and her very grace is what makes her lateness unbearable.}

The poem was not enough for him either. He then wrote, in the Han Shu's account, a full fu rhapsody of mourning — the Li Furen Fu (李夫人赋) — one of the earliest surviving poems by a named Chinese author grieving a named dead person, with its long cry of "my spirit flies alone in distant longing, my essence drifts beyond the borders." It is a strange, luminous, overwritten piece, and it matters because of who wrote it: the iron emperor who had spent his reign conquering everything from Korea to the Tarim Basin, establishing the imperial academy and the apparatus of state Confucianism, exhausting the treasury on immortality elixirs and wars — sitting up at night, writing rhapsodies for a singer girl.

The Wizard's End

The story does not end at the curtain. Because Shaoweng, having produced the figure, was rewarded the way men who produce the impossible are rewarded at Han courts: he was made General Wencheng (文成将军) — a general who led no army — showered with gifts, and received with the rites due to a guest rather than a subject.

He then did what frauds do: he sold more. To keep the emperor's confidence, he explained that if the emperor truly wished to commune with the gods, the palace buildings and robes would have to resemble those of the gods, or the divine would not descend. Cloud-painted chariots were built. A new temple hall was raised at Ganquan, painted with Heaven, Earth, and the Great Unity deity, fitted with sacrificial vessels to attract the gods.

The gods did not come. More than a year passed; the techniques "grew ever weaker," in Sima Qian's dry phrase, shen bu zhi — the spirits arrived not at all. Desperate, Shaoweng wrote a message on silk, fed it to an ox, and then announced, as though the thought had just occurred to him, that there was something strange in this ox's belly. The ox was slaughtered and cut open. The silk letter was found, full of bizarre words. The emperor recognized the handwriting. He asked the man. It was indeed a forgery.

Shaoweng was executed. Sima Qian adds two words: yin zhi — it was covered up. The emperor, who had been fooled by a shadow and a cow, was ashamed enough to hide that he had made a ghost-general and then killed him.^{[11]Sima Qian's account (《史记·封禅书》/《史记·孝武本纪》): "齐人少翁以鬼神方见上。上有所幸王夫人，夫人卒，少翁以方盖夜致王夫人及灶鬼之貌云，天子自帷中望见焉。于是乃拜少翁为文成将军，赏赐甚多，以客礼礼之……居岁余，其方益衰，神不至。乃为帛书以饭牛，详不知，言曰此牛腹中有奇。杀视得书，书言甚怪。天子识其手书，问其人，果是伪书，于是诛文成将军，隐之。" Note "及灶鬼" — the figure of the Stove God was reportedly summoned in the same rite. Sima Qian, who was born c. 145 BCE and had personal access to court ritual records, is the eyewitness-class source; his identification of the consort as Lady Wang is followed by Sima Guang's Zizhi Tongjian (《资治通鉴》卷十九).}

Even this has its pathetic footnote. Years later, when another wizard, Luan Da — who had studied under the same teacher as Shaoweng — was presented at court, the emperor's first private confession was that he regretted having killed Wencheng, that he had done it too early, before learning all the man's techniques. When Luan Da hesitated to speak freely, lest he end the same way, the emperor reassured him: "Wencheng just ate horse-liver and died [of that], that's all."^{[12]Luan Da (栾大), the next great Han charlatan, was Shaoweng's fellow disciple (尝与文成将军同师). The emperor's cover line — "文成食马肝死耳" (《史记·封禅书》: "'Wencheng died of eating horse liver, that's all'") — became a byword for imperial face-saving; horse liver was popularly believed poisonous, giving the execution a medical explanation. Luan Da was himself executed around 112 BCE after his sea voyages to find the immortals produced nothing.} The court euphemism for the execution of the imperial ghost was indigestion.

One Séance, Two Consorts — The Historian's Problem

Here the careful reader, in the company of two thousand years of Chinese commentators, must pause. Because the two greatest Han historians do not tell the same story.

Sima Qian (司马迁), who lived through these events and whose Records of the Grand Historian (史记, c. 94 BCE) is the founding text of Chinese history, names the consort in the curtain as Lady Wang (王夫人) — another of Emperor Wu's favorites, who died around 121 BCE, mother of the King of Qi. In the Treatise on the Feng and Shan Sacrifices (封禅书), Sima Qian writes: Shaoweng, "by his arts, at night caused the appearance of Lady Wang and the stove-spirit's form; the Son of Heaven gazed at her from within the curtain." The Zizhi Tongjian later follows Sima Qian: the summoning, and General Wencheng's whole career, happened around 119 BCE — and Lady Li had not yet even entered the palace.^{[13]Lady Wang (王夫人), of Zhao, was Emperor Wu's favorite after Empress Wei Zifu's beauty faded; she died c. 121 BCE, mother of Liu Hong (刘闳), King of Qi. Her deathbed audience is recorded in Chu Shaosun's supplement to Shiji 60 (三王世家). The chronological crux: Shaoweng's execution is fixed c. 119 BCE (the year before the emperor's grave illness at Dinghu), while Lady Li entered the palace after the Nanyue campaign of 111 BCE at the earliest. She therefore could not have been the consort Shaoweng summoned. Modern scholarship (e.g., the editors' notes in 中华书局点校本《汉书》 and 《通鉴考异》) concludes Ban Gu transferred the séance to Lady Li's memoir for dramatic and structural reasons — and possibly to explain the poem, which was by Ban Gu's time inseparable from Lady Li's legend.}

Ban Gu (班固), writing the Book of Han (汉书) two centuries later, moves the entire séance into the Memoir of External Relatives (外戚传), the biographical chapter on Lady Li herself — curtains, lamps, wine, the poem, the fu, the Music Bureau, all of it — as the emotional center of her life. Gan Bao, compiling the Soushen Ji around 300 CE, follows Ban Gu. So does every later storyteller, poet, and painter. The woman in the curtain became Lady Li and stayed Lady Li.

Modern textual historians, with the chronology laid out, largely believe Ban Gu conflated two moments: the historical Shaoweng almost certainly summoned the ghost of Lady Wang for an emperor grieving Lady Wang; but Lady Li — whose brother's song, whose deathbed refusal, whose grandson's reign, and whose posthumous elevation to Empress Xiaowu made her the great romantic heroine of the Wu court — was the better story, and grief of that size needed a technique that powerful attached to it. Ban Gu, who admired the Records, quietly transplanted the séance.^{[14]Sima Guang's Tongjian Kaoyi (《通鉴考异》) flagged the discrepancy in the 11th century; modern standard commentaries resolve it as above. For the textual mechanics of how the Soushen Ji adapted the Han Shu passage — dropping "令上居他帐" framing detail and compressing the emotional commentary — see the studies collected in 李剑国《新辑搜神记 新辑搜神后记》 and the journal literature on 《搜神记》引《汉书》 (the Soushen Ji draws on the Han Shu for roughly 28 of its tales, its single most-cited source).}

It is, honestly, a transposition any storyteller understands. The history of emotion sometimes corrects the history of events. The Soushen Ji — which is a book of strange things, not a court chronicle — keeps the version that the Chinese people themselves kept: the emperor who mourned the city-toppling beauty, and the curtain where she almost came back.

The Afterlife of the Curtain

The story never stopped being retold. In the fourth century, the Records of the Ten Continents and the Han Wu Neizhuan (汉武内传) amplified it: a wizard named Dongfang Shuo (or Li Shaojun, in some recensions) sails to a dark sea of night-shining stones, returns after ten years with stone from which a carved figure of Lady Li is made and placed inside a gauze curtain, "as though alive" — then ground into pills the emperor swallows so he will dream of her no more, with a Terrace of Spirit-Dreams raised to mark the spot.^{[15]Wang Jia (王嘉, d. c. 386), Shíyí Jì (《拾遗记》) juan 5: the wizard (named there as 李少君) sails to the "dark sea" (暗海), returns with stone that "glows at night," carves a figure of the consort, places it within thin silk (轻纱幕里), and later pulverizes it into pills so the emperor ceases dreaming of her; the 灵梦台 (Terrace of Spirit-Dreams) is raised and seasonally worshipped. The Han Wu Neizhuan version: "李夫人既死，帝思之。命工人作夫人形状，置于轻纱幕中，宛然如生。帝大悦。" (as quoted in Taiping Yulan ch. 700, 服用部·帘幕). These recensions show the legend migrating from "lamps and a curtain" toward "an image inside a screen" — the archeological ancestor, perhaps, of later devotional portraiture.} In the fifth century, the History of the Southern Dynasties records a near-identical séance performed for Emperor Xiaowu of Song mourning his consort Yin — curtains, lamps, the dead woman's form — the protocol now a recognized art of court grief.

Most consequentially, the story acquired a technical afterlife. In the Northern Song, Gao Cheng's Shìwù Jìyuán (事物纪原, Origins of Things, c. 1080s), under the entry for shadow play (影戏), states plainly: "Old men have handed it down that the origin of shadow theatre lies in the death of Emperor Wu's Lady Li... Shaoweng at night made the square curtain, lit the lamps, and the emperor sat in another tent and saw within the curtain something like the lady's image — he could not approach it. From this, the world had shadow play."^{[8]The shadow-puppetry attribution is first explicit in Gao Cheng (高承), Shìwù Jìyuán (《事物纪原》), Song dynasty, juan 9, entry 影戏: "故老相承，言影戏之原出于汉武帝李夫人之亡，齐人少翁言能致其魂……少翁夜为方帷，张灯烛，帝坐他帐，自帷中望见之，仿佛夫人像也，盖不得就视之。由是世间有影戏。" The Han Wu Neizhuan (《汉武内传》, probably Six Dynasties) already has the figure made of stone and shown "inside a gauze curtain" (置于轻纱幕里，宛若生时); Wang Jia's Shíyí Jì (《拾遗记》, 4th c.) has the dream-stone sailors version. Modern Chinese shadow theatre (皮影戏) is inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (2011); its practitioner genealogy traditionally cites the Shaoweng séance as the founding scene.} Whether or not a real folk practice descends from a real Han séance, Chinese shadow puppeteers themselves accepted the origin myth: light, a screen of thin silk or paper, a figure that moves but cannot be touched — the grammar of the lamplit curtain is exactly the grammar of the píyǐng (皮影) stage, and that stage would grow into one of the great popular arts of the Song, Ming, and Qing. The emperor's hallucination became the village theater.

And the poem kept working. Tang poets wrote responses to it. Bai Juyi, in his Song of Everlasting Sorrow (长恨歌), mourning Yang Guifei for a later emperor, would stage a Taoist summoning of the dead consort's soul across the seas and heavens — the Han curtain rewritten as cosmic quest. When the painter had to depict a ghost woman, the convention for a thousand years was a figure half-visible through silk, because that was what seeing a ghost meant: never the ghost, always the curtain between.

Translator's Note

The thing I love about this tale — and the reason it sits so naturally in Gan Bao's collection rather than only in Ban Gu's — is that the magic is the least important thing in it. The wonder is not that a ghost appeared. The wonder is the distance. Shaoweng's entire technique, whatever it physically was, consisted of arranging a scene in which a grieving man was forced to experience the central fact of bereavement as spectacle: the person you love is visible in memory, moving, sitting, walking, turning — and you cannot cross to her. Every mourner knows that curtain. The emperor met it on the night the lamps were lit, and his eleven characters say what every mourner has thought since: I can see her. Why can I not reach her? And is it even she?

That the woman in question spent her dying days refusing to let her lover see her ruined face, and that the summoning then presented him — at the same enforced distance — with the image of her unruined beauty, makes the story almost unbearably designed. She protected her image in life. The wizard sold him her image in death. The emperor, who could have anything, could have nothing but the image, twice. Gan Bao, who had seen his dynasty collapse and knew exactly what images survived and what did not, put the tale in his book of the strange without comment — except, perhaps, for his choice of the variant text of the poem, where she comes not just late but nunu — 婀娜 — swaying, graceful, walking beautifully away from him forever.

— Wang Cai