The Old Man Who Slept in His Own Coffin / 棺床

A scholar, a thunderstorm, and the worst guest-room arrangement in Qing literature

From Zibuyu (子不语, "What the Master Would Not Discuss"), Volume XII — by Yuan Mei (袁枚, 1716–1798) · Translated by Cathay Tales

A scholar took shelter from a storm in a stranger's house. They put him in a side room — with a coffin in the corner. At the second watch, the lid lifted. A white-bearded old man climbed out, walked over to the candle, and lit a pipe.

The Story

There was a xiùcái (秀才, the lowest of the three Qing imperial degrees — a scholar who had passed the county exam but not yet the provincial) named Lu Xialing (陆遐龄, given name meaning "long life"). He was on his way to Min (闽 — old name for Fujian province) to take a position as a private secretary in some official's mùguǎn (幕馆 — the legal-and-paperwork bureau that every Qing magistrate kept in his yamen).

His route took him through Jiangshan county (江山县, in the southwest corner of what is now Zhejiang province, on the old post-road into Fujian). The day he passed through, a heavy rain came down. He had not made it to the next coaching inn, and the sky was already getting dark.

Through the trees ahead he saw a small village — a few tile-roofed houses set close together. He ran up to the nearest door and knocked, asking to be put up for the night.

The man who came out was a qīngyǎ (清雅 — refined and elegant) gentleman who introduced himself as Master Shen (沈先生), also a xiùcái, also of Jiangshan county. Shen apologized: the household has no spare room for a guest.

Lu pleaded. Shen reluctantly relented. He pointed to the eastern wing — cǎo tà (草榻, "a rough straw bed") — and lit a candle to lead the way.

When Lu walked in, his stomach turned over.

To the left, against the wall, was a coffin.

He thought about it for a long minute. He was traveling in the rain. There were no other houses for miles. He liked to think of himself as a man with steady nerves. He swallowed it down and made polite acknowledgments. There was, in fact, a wooden bed in the room. He laid out his bedroll on it, said good night to his host, and closed the door.

Then he sat with his back against the headboard, opened the Yìjīng (易经, the Book of Changes) he was carrying with him, and began to read by candlelight.^{[1]Yìjīng (易经, the Book of Changes) — one of the oldest texts in the Chinese canon, dated to roughly the early Zhou dynasty (c. 1000 BCE), used both as a divination manual and as a foundational philosophical work on the patterns of change. By the late Ming and Qing, it was widely believed among Confucian scholars to have apotropaic power against malevolent spirits — simply having a copy nearby, or reading it aloud, was thought to drive ghosts away. This belief is central to several stories in Zibuyu (see also Tale 22, The Three Tricks Every Ghost Has, where the Yijing also fails to do its job).}

He did not blow the candle out. By the second watch — about ten o'clock at night — he was still fully dressed, still gripping the book, lying on top of the covers.

That was when he heard it.

A small dry rustling, from the coffin. Then a louder sound, like something being pushed.

He turned his head and saw the lid of the coffin sliding open.

An old man sat up out of it. White beard. Red shoes. He swung his legs over the side and stood up.

Lu went stiff with terror. He yanked the bed-curtains shut around himself and pressed an eye to the gap.

The old man walked across the room — directly to the desk where Lu had been sitting. He picked up the Yìjīng. He flipped through it, with no fear at all. He set it back down.

Then — and this was the part that destroyed Lu — the old man took a tobacco pipe out of his sleeve, leaned in, and lit it from the candle.

He stood there smoking.

This is a real evil ghost, Lu thought. It is not afraid of the Yìjīng. It can light a pipe.

The classical Chinese tradition was firm on this point. A ghost was supposed to flinch at the Yìjīng — the book was thought to channel the cosmological order itself — and ghosts certainly were not supposed to use fire. Lu was watching a ghost casually break two of the rules everyone agreed on.

He started shaking. The bed shook with him.

The old man heard the bed creak. He turned his head, looked at the bed, and smiled — a small, friendly smile, with the pipe in his teeth. He did not move toward Lu. He stood there a moment longer, finishing his smoke. Then he tucked the pipe back in his sleeve, climbed back into the coffin, and pulled the lid closed over himself.

Lu did not sleep at all.

In the morning, Master Shen came in to ask how the guest had rested.

"Well," Lu said, with what he hoped was a steady voice. "But — forgive my asking — the coffin in the room. May I ask whose remains are inside?"

"My father's," Shen said.

Lu took this in.

"If it is your honored father," he asked, picking his words carefully, "why has he not yet been buried?"

"My father is alive," Shen said. "He is in excellent health. He has not died at all."

Shen explained.

His father, he said, was a man of unusual disposition — dáguān (达观, "of broad and accepting view," the Daoist-tinged Confucian term for someone who has made peace with mortality). The old man's view was: everyone must die eventually, so why not rehearse it. So at his seventieth birthday celebration, the old man had commissioned his own shòuguān (寿棺) — a "longevity coffin," prepared while one is still alive, in the Chinese custom of treating death as a stage of life one should be physically and spiritually ready for. He had it lined thickly with cotton padding. He had a quilt and pillow placed inside. And every night, he climbed in and slept in it.

It was, in his father's view, a perfectly comfortable bed.

Shen took Lu by the elbow and led him to the coffin. He knocked on the lid. The lid lifted. The white-bearded old man climbed back out — the same old man Lu had seen by candlelight.

Master Shen, Master Shen's father, and Lu Xialing all bowed to each other with the appropriate rites of host and guest. The old man looked at Lu's face and started laughing.

"Did I startle the guest?" he asked.

The three of them stood there in the gray morning light and laughed until their sides hurt.

When their laughter died down, they looked properly at the coffin Lu had been afraid of all night. It was made of shāmù (沙木 — Chinese cedar, a light wood), four planks for the sides, hollowed out clean. The lid, instead of solid wood, was a frame covered in hēi qī mián shā (黑漆绵纱 — black-lacquered cotton gauze), so that air could circulate freely. The whole thing was very light. From a distance, in candlelight, it had looked like a coffin. Up close, in daylight, it was — the old man cheerfully agreed — a perfectly ordinary canopy bed.

That was what Yuan Mei thought worth recording.

Translator's Reflection

The first thing that struck me on re-reading this is how completely Yuan Mei sets up a horror story before pulling the rug out. The rain. The lone traveler. The reluctant host. The coffin. The Yijing in candlelight. The lid scraping open at the second watch. By the time the old man stands up out of the box, every Qing reader knew exactly what kind of story they were in.

Then the old man lights a pipe.

That is the first signal that something has gone wrong with the genre. A ghost smoking is funny in a way that is unique to the eighteenth century — tobacco only entered China in the late Ming, around 1600, and was still a relatively new pleasure for educated Qing men. The image of an evil ancient revenant puffing on a pipe like an off-duty gentleman would have read, to Yuan Mei's audience, as both anachronistic and absurd.

Lu Xialing's panic in the bed-curtains is the funniest line in the story. He is doing the precise calculation a Confucian scholar is supposed to do — the ghost is not afraid of the Yijing, the ghost can manipulate fire, therefore this is a category of ghost that is beyond the standard apotropaic protections — and he is doing it while a perfectly polite seventy-year-old man is enjoying a smoke six feet away. It is the original I have read enough horror novels to know exactly how doomed I am moment, three hundred years before that mood became a tic of internet writing.

What I love most is the quiet philosophical move underneath the joke. The old man's coffin is not a morbid prop. It is a piece of practiced equipment for a practiced relationship with death. In China, shòuguān (寿棺) — the coffin commissioned in good health, often kept in the house for years before it is needed — was a real custom, and survived in some rural areas into the late twentieth century. The point of it was the opposite of denial. You bought your coffin while you could afford it, treated it as part of the household, and made sure that when the time came there would be no last-minute scramble. Old Master Shen has just taken the custom to its logical extreme: if the coffin is going to be in the house anyway, why not sleep in it.

Lu spends a sleepless night being terrified of a man taking a nap.

Yuan Mei does not editorialize. He gives us the joke and walks away. But the joke is doing real work: it's a quiet rebuke to scholars who think the Yijing and the rules of ghost-decorum protect them from the things that actually frighten them. The thing in the coffin is not death. It is an old man, smoking, smiling at the bed when it shakes. He is not coming for you. He is just going to bed.

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