The Lover Who Came Back for One Night / 李章武传

A Tang dynasty love story where the dead do not stay gone

From the Tang Tales of the Marvelous (唐传奇) — Li Zhangwu Zhuan (李章武传), "Account of Li Zhangwu"

By Li Jingliang (李景亮, fl. late 8th century) · Translated with annotations

In the year 787, a young Chang'an scholar named Li Zhangwu (李章武, a man so well-read his contemporaries called him a second Zhang Hua) traveled to Huazhou and fell in love with the young wife next door. They were together for a month. Then he left. Eight years went by. When he came back, the door was silent. A neighbor told him she had died of longing — two years earlier. That night, in the empty house, she came back through the wall.

The Story

Li Zhangwu (李章武, courtesy name Feiqing 飞卿, a young man whose ancestors came from Zhongshan 中山 in north China) was a quick mind and an effortless reader.^{[1]Zhang Hua (张华, 232–300 CE) — a famous polymath of the Western Jin who served as a senior court official and compiled the Bowuzhi (博物志, Records of Things Vast and Various), a foundational handbook of natural history, geography, and unusual phenomena. To call a Tang scholar "a second Zhang Hua" was the highest possible compliment for breadth of learning combined with skill in identifying unusual antiquities — exactly the skill that becomes important at the end of this tale, when Li Zhangwu must carry an object that no human jade-carver can recognize.} He worked through literature and antiquarian studies with equal ease, and although he kept himself plainly dressed and refused the fastidiousness expected of fashionable young scholars, his face was calm and beautiful, and people warmed to him on sight.

His closest friend was a man named Cui Xin (崔信, of the Qinghe Cui clan, a great northern aristocratic family). Cui Xin collected antiquities. Whenever he had a new piece, he would bring it to Li Zhangwu, and the two of them would spend hours arguing about provenance, period, and the meaning of obscure inscriptions. Their contemporaries — only half joking — said the young man had the makings of a second Zhang Hua (张华, the great third-century polymath whose Bowuzhi 博物志 had been the standard handbook of unusual phenomena for five hundred years).

In the year 787 CE — the third year of the Zhenyuan (贞元) reign of Emperor Dezong — Cui Xin took up an appointment as deputy administrator of Huazhou (华州别驾, a regional posting on the old road south of Chang'an).^{[2]Huazhou (华州) — a regional administrative seat about 130 km east of Chang'an, in what is now Hua County, Shaanxi province. The road from Chang'an to Huazhou ran through some of the most heavily-traveled territory of the Tang empire; an educated man visiting friends there was traveling no further than a senior administrator would commute today.} Li Zhangwu rode out from the capital to visit him.

A few days into the visit, Li Zhangwu went out alone to walk the markets of Huazhou. On the north market street he saw a beautiful young woman. He went home that evening and told Cui Xin a polite lie: I have an old family acquaintance outside the city, I had better stay near them for a few days. Then he rented a room in the woman's house.

The household was the Wang family (王氏). The woman who had caught his eye was the daughter-in-law of the house — married into the family, by the conventions of the time, while still a teenager.^{[3]Wang-shi (王氏, "the Wang woman") — the original text never gives her a personal name. This is normal Tang practice: a married woman in chuanqi is identified by her natal surname, her husband's surname, her birth-rank order among her sisters (e.g., liu-niang, "sixth daughter"), or some combination of these. The anonymity is not a sign of disrespect — Yang Liu-niang, the only character whose proper name we are given a piece of, gets only her birth-rank — it is an aesthetic and ethical convention. The reader was expected to imagine her as a specific person with a specific face, and to fill the absent name in for themselves.} Her husband, the texts say carefully, treated their home like a roadside inn: he came and went on his own business and paid little attention to what was left behind. Within a few days, Li Zhangwu and the young Wang wife had fallen in love.

They lived together quietly for over a month. He spent thirty thousand cash on the household; she — quietly, without telling him — spent twice that. Liǎng xīn kè xié, qíng hǎo mí qiè (两心克谐，情好弥切) — their two hearts in perfect harmony, their feeling for each other deepening every day.

Then word came from Chang'an that something needed his attention at home, and he had to leave.

The parting was hard. He gave her a length of jiāojǐng yuānyāng qǐ (交颈鸳鸯绮) — a fine silk patterned with two mandarin ducks crossing necks, the standard symbol of inseparable lovers. He wrote a poem on it:

Mandarin-duck silk — who knows how many threads its weaving holds. After we part, I will look for the necks-crossed pattern, and grieve for the moment before parting.

She gave him a white jade ring (bái yù zhǐ huán 白玉指环) and a poem of her own:

I turn the ring in my fingers and miss you. I see the ring and remember. Carry it always, and turn it always — a circle without end.

She also pressed a thousand cash into the hand of his servant, Yang Guo (杨果), as a thank-you for taking such good care of his master.

Li Zhangwu rode back to Chang'an.

Eight years passed.

He stayed in the capital. He had no way of contacting her — they were two households in different cities with no common kinship line, and writing a letter to a married woman would have endangered her in ways neither of them was willing to risk. The white jade ring stayed in a small lacquer box on his desk.

In the eleventh year of Zhenyuan (贞元十一年, 795 CE), an old friend named Zhang Yuanzong (张元宗, formerly of the imperial library) settled into the small county town of Xiaguī (下邽), about a hundred li east of Chang'an. Li Zhangwu rode out to see him. Three days into the visit, sitting in the inn's courtyard one evening, he found himself thinking again of the woman in Huazhou. The next morning he turned his carriage west, crossed the Wei River (渭水), and rode for Huazhou.

He arrived at dusk. The lane was silent. He went to the house where they had lived and knocked. There was no answer. The door was unlocked. He pushed it open. The courtyard was clean but empty. The only thing left in it was a guest-bench someone had set out and forgotten to bring back inside.

He stood in the gateway for a long time. Perhaps the family has gone out to relatives, he told himself. Perhaps they have moved temporarily into the country. He was preparing to leave and find lodging elsewhere when a woman from the house next door came up to him.

Forgive me asking, he said, — what has happened to the Wang family?

The elders of the house left long ago, the woman said. They are traveling somewhere — no one knows where. The young wife — the one who came in by marriage — she has been dead for two full years.

He could not answer her.

The woman looked at him more carefully. She told him her name: she was Yang Liu-niang (杨六娘, "sixth daughter of the Yang family"), the wife of the household to the east, in her own fifth year of marriage in this lane. And you, sir, she asked, — may I ask your name?

He gave it to her.

She thought for a moment. In the past, did you have a manservant called Yang Guo?

I did.

She began to cry.

She and I were close, Yang Liu-niang said. She used to tell me — my husband's house is like a roadside inn, all sorts of men have stayed in it. The ones who come around making advances are willing to spend everything they have, and they swear the most beautiful oaths, but I have never once been moved. There was only Li the Eighteenth — the one who lived with us a few years ago. The first time I saw him, I lost myself. I have never recovered. I think of him every day. Some days I cannot eat. Some nights I cannot sleep. If he ever comes back, I have no one in this household I can trust to send word — but the neighbor's wife will know what to do. If a man named Li ever comes through this lane and asks for me, his servant will be called Yang Guo. That is how you will know him. Tell him everything I have told you. Tell him I waited.

Within two or three years she fell ill, Yang Liu-niang continued. On her deathbed she said it again. She said: I came from a poor family. I owed Master Li nothing, and yet he treated me with deep regard. I have carried him in my heart for so long that the longing itself has made me sick. I am not going to recover. If he ever comes here, please tell him — I want him to know I went into the underworld with my grief unspoken. I want him to know how I missed him for a thousand ages. And ask him, if he can bear it, to stay one night in this house. I will try, in whatever fashion I can, to come to him.

Li Zhangwu sat down on the steps of the empty house. He did not move for a long time.

When he could speak again, he asked Yang Liu-niang to help him open the house. He sent his servant out to buy firewood, fodder, and food for offerings. He laid out the offering rites himself — wine, rice, a small dish of meat, the things one sets out for a returning spirit on the anniversary of a death.

While he was arranging the bedding, a woman appeared in the courtyard with a broom and began sweeping the steps. Yang Liu-niang did not recognize her. Li Zhangwu asked who she was; she said she was a member of the household. He pressed her, gently. She answered slowly:

The dead wife of this house has felt the depth of your feeling, and she will come to you tonight. She has sent me ahead so that you would not be frightened.

That is exactly why I came, he said. Living and dead are different roads, and people fear the crossing. But where the longing is true, I am not afraid.

The woman with the broom smiled at him — a small, grateful smile — and walked toward the gate. As she passed under the lintel, she vanished.

He finished the offering, ate a little himself, and went to bed.

At the second watch — about ten o'clock at night — the candle on the southeast corner of the bed dimmed, then steadied, then dimmed again. He understood. He got up, moved the candle to the back of the room behind the headboard, and lay down again to wait.

He heard a small sound in the northeast corner.

Something was moving in the room. He could see the shape of it before he could see her face — a figure forming, drifting forward, slowly resolving as it came closer. By the time she was five or six paces from the bed, he could see her clothes. Then her face.

It was Wang-shi. She was exactly as he remembered her, only — jǔzhǐ fú jí, yīndiào qīngqīng (举止浮急，音调轻清) — her movements were a little too quick, and her voice carried a thin, clear coldness that was not the cold of winter.

He got out of bed and took her into his arms.

She rested her forehead against his shoulder. Since I entered the registers of the dead, she said, I have forgotten everyone — my own kinsmen, my own husband, my own parents. The only thing I have kept is you.

They stayed together through the night. She asked him several times to look out the window for the morning star — if it rises, I have to go. In the quiet between, she kept asking him to thank Yang Liu-niang. No one else, she said, could have carried my grief across.

Toward the fifth watch — the hour before dawn — a voice that he could not see told her it was time to go back. She broke down crying. She got out of bed and walked with him, arms linked, to the door of the courtyard. They stood under the dim river of stars and she sobbed.

She went back inside. From the sash of her dress she untied a small brocade pouch. She took something out of the pouch and pressed it into his hand. It was the size and shape of a small leaf — cool to the touch, dense as jade but darker, a deep blue-green that seemed to shift in the candlelight.

This is what is called a móhè bǎo (靺鞨宝), she said. It comes from the Black-Jade Garden of Mount Kunlun, and even there it is not easily found. I was at Mount Hua a little while ago, playing with the Lady of the Jade Capital (玉京夫人, Yùjīng Fūrén, one of the senior goddesses of the Daoist heavens).^{[4]Yùjīng Fūrén (玉京夫人, "the Lady of the Jade Capital") — a senior goddess in the Daoist celestial bureaucracy, ranked among the female Perfected of the highest heaven of Yùjīng Shān (玉京山, "Jade Capital Mountain"), the cosmic center of the Daoist universe. The detail that Wang-shi's spirit, after death, has been playing with a goddess of this rank is the tale's quietest and most radical claim. It tells the reader, without spelling it out, that the woman the protagonist loved was not just a beautiful young wife in a provincial market town — she was, in the cosmological reckoning of Tang Daoism, a soul of unusual spiritual standing, who has been admitted into the sociable upper reaches of the immortal hierarchy. The móhè bǎo she gives him is the proof.} I saw this on the cluster of jewels at her ear, and I admired it, and she gave it to me. She said: any one of the immortals of the cavern-heavens who is given one of these takes it as the greatest honor. You have always followed the Daoist path, and you can recognize what this is. So I am giving it to you. Keep it always. It does not exist in the human world.

She gave him a parting poem:

The river of stars has tilted west. My spirit wants to go beyond. Hold me one more time — there will be no parting after this.

He gave her a white jade hairpin (bái yù bǎo zān 白玉宝簪) — the only thing of his own he had brought into the room — and a poem in answer:

We are divided between the bright world and the dark. Did we ever think we would meet again? I do not refuse parting after parting — I only grieve at where you have to go.

They held each other and wept for a long time. She gave him another poem, and another. She would not let go.

Finally she walked toward the northwest corner of the room. She took five or six steps, turned back, wiped her eyes with her sleeve, and said: Don't forget me, Li-lang. Think of the one beneath the springs. She stood there a moment more, choking. The sky beyond the window was beginning to gray. She ran to the corner — and was not there.

The room was suddenly empty. The candle had burned down to half its wick.

He packed his bags and left for the capital.

The county officials at Xiaguī had laid on a farewell banquet for him with Zhang Yuanzong. Halfway through the wine he wrote a poem on the table:

Water never returns west; the moon is round only briefly. I sit by the old city wall and grieve. In the desolation of tomorrow's branching road, who knows in what year I will see her again?

He bowed to the officials and left. A few miles down the road, walking beside his carriage, he was reciting the poem to himself when he heard a voice in the air above him — a voice of yīndiào qī cè (音调凄恻), of a tone so sorrowful it cut. He listened. It was her.

In the underworld, she said, each soul is bound to its own region. There is no day on which we can meet again. But I knew you were thinking of me, so I broke the rules of the underworld bureaucracy and came this far to see you off. Take care of yourself. Take very good care of yourself.

He stood in the road and could not move.

When he reached Chang'an, he told the whole story to a Daoist friend, Li Zhu of Longxi (陇西李助). Li Zhu was so moved he wrote a poem of his own:

The stone has sunk in the wide eastern sea. The sword has parted from the long Chu sky. We will not meet again — the parting heart fills the evening light.

Years later, when Li Zhangwu was serving in the office of the Prime Minister of Dongping (东平丞相, the regional viceroy of what is now western Shandong), he had a quiet afternoon and called for the móhè bǎo. He summoned a jade-carver to look at it. The carver turned the stone in his hands, studied it from every angle, and said: I do not know what this is. I dare not cut it.

Later, on official business in Daliang (大梁, modern Kaifeng), he tried again with another carver. This one studied it for several days and said: I can recognize the family of stone. Roughly. I can shape it. Following the natural form of the leaf already in the stone, the carver cut it into the precise shape of a jiè yè (檞叶) — an oak leaf — the kind that hangs from doorposts in old north China to ward off ill luck.

Li Zhangwu carried it from then on inside the breast of his robe.

On a later mission to the capital, he was riding through the eastern market street when a foreign monk in yellow robes — a húsēng (胡僧, a Buddhist monk from the western lands beyond the Pamirs) — came running across the street and threw himself down before his horse.

Good sir, the monk said, you have a piece of heavenly jade hidden in your robe. I beg you, let me see it once.

Li Zhangwu drew the monk into a quiet courtyard and took the leaf out. The monk held it on his palm for a long time. He turned it in the morning light. He pressed it to his forehead. Finally he looked up.

This is a thing of the heavens, the monk said. It is not supposed to exist in the human world.

He handed it back, bowed, and walked away.

For the rest of his life, Li Zhangwu kept finding excuses to go back to Huazhou. He always went to see Yang Liu-niang. He always brought her gifts. He never stopped.

Translator's Reflection

This story almost broke me twice while I was translating it. Once when I realized it goes on for ten more pages after she comes back through the wall — and once when I realized why.

I was expecting the ghost reunion to be the whole point. In most short ghost-lover tales, that's where it ends: she appears, they reconcile, dawn comes, she vanishes, the end. Li Zhangwu Zhuan keeps going. There's a long road home, a farewell banquet, a voice in the air on a country road, then years of mission travel and quiet jade-carving in different cities, and at the end of all of it the line that wrecked me a little: he never stopped going back to Huazhou to see Yang Liu-niang. The friend. Not the lover. The neighbor who carried the message.

That is the move that made me understand what kind of writer Li Jingliang was. He does not end on the supernatural climax. He ends on the only relationship the protagonist can keep walking back to — and it isn't the romantic one.

I had to do real homework on the móhè bǎo. The transliteration is from Mòhé (the Tungusic ancestors of the Manchu), so in everyday Tang usage the term meant something like "a precious stone from the far north." The story upgrades that, gently, from human geographical periphery to cosmic geographical periphery — Mount Kunlun, the Daoist heavens, a goddess's ear-ornament. That kind of casual upgrading is very Tang. The line between the edge of the empire and the edge of the universe was always a soft one.

Two pieces of jade pass through this story years apart. A ring while she lived. A hairpin after she died. A married woman's hairpin. He gives her, in death, the ornament he could not give her in life. That detail isn't in the English titles or in any summary I read. It almost slipped past me. I had to read the parting scene three times before I caught what he was actually putting in her hand.

Next tale: To be announced — drawn from one of six classical Chinese collections in rotation. → Coming next week.