The Sheep-Trader Who Slept Above a Green-Haired Corpse / 绿毛怪

In which a locked temple in Shanxi turns out to be locked from the wrong direction

From Zi Bu Yu (子不语 · What the Master Would Not Discuss), Volume 10 — Compiled by Yuan Mei (袁枚, 1716–1797)

Translated and annotated by Cathay Tales

[Hook] In the sixth year of the Qianlong reign, a Huzhou clerk named Dong Changʼan^{[1]董畅庵 was, by the internal logic of Yuan Mei's collection, a real person — a Zhejiang literatus who had taken a private-secretary (mù 幕) posting in a Shanxi county magistrate's office. In the Qing bureaucratic system, county magistrates arrived at their postings alone and hired their own confidential staff — legal secretaries, tax secretaries, and general clerks — out of pocket. These muyou (幕友) formed a professional class of educated men who never held official rank but who ran much of the actual administrative work of the empire. Yuan Mei's own father had served as such a muyou in Guangxi, and Yuan Mei used the muyou network as one of his richest sources for the material in Zi Bu Yu: they were literate, they traveled, they saw the courtroom filings, and they were happy to gossip.} took up a private-secretary posting under the magistrate of Ruicheng county in Shanxi. Ruicheng had a small temple whose front door had been chained shut for so long that no one in the district remembered why. Locals said there was something inside. Twice a year the chain was struck off for the seasonal sacrifices, and twice a year it went straight back on. Even the monk who was, on paper, in charge of the incense there did not dare sleep in the building. Then one evening a Shaanxi sheep-trader with a thousand head of livestock and nowhere to bed them down asked for the key. He had a heavy staff. He was, he said, not the kind of man who cared about local ghost stories. The villagers unlocked the door and stepped back. Six hours later he was in the top branches of a tree outside the town wall. Six hours after that, the county magistrate — a Manchu named Tong (佟公)^{[2]佟公 — Master Tong — is one of Yuan Mei's characteristic naming choices. Tong (佟) is a Manchu clan-name; in the early Qing, members of the Tong lineage held some of the highest offices in the empire, and by the Qianlong era the surname had entered the general Manchu-elite pool. By naming the magistrate only Master Tong, Yuan Mei signals two things: that the magistrate was a bannerman (a Manchu, or a Han bannerman), not a Han Chinese official, and that the informant chain — Dong Changʼan → the Ruicheng magistrate's office → Yuan Mei's circle in Nanjing — was intact enough to place the surname without needing to embarrass the family with a full given name.} — arrived with shovels.

The Story

In the sixth year of the Qianlong reign — that is, 1741 by the Western reckoning — a man named Dong Changʼan (董畅庵), a native of Huzhou^{[3]湖州 (Huzhou) is the district on the southern shore of Lake Tai (太湖), in northern Zhejiang. In the Qing it was one of the wealthiest districts in the empire, famous for its silk industry, its writing brushes (Hu bi, 湖笔), and its dense pipeline of literate men flowing into the imperial bureaucracy. A Huzhou man taking a muyou post fifteen hundred li northwest in Shanxi was following one of the most standard career paths of the mid-Qing educated class.} in the wet green rice country of northern Zhejiang, traveled some fifteen hundred li northwest across two mountain ranges to take up a mù (幕) position — a private confidential secretary — in the magistrate's office of Ruicheng county (芮城县) in southern Shanxi. Ruicheng sits at the corner where the Yellow River bends east and starts to gouge its way toward the sea, on a strip of terraced loess that had been continuously farmed since before the founding of the Han. It was, in Qing administrative terms, a mid-sized county — populous enough to warrant its own magistrate, remote enough that the magistrate got to run it more or less as his own small kingdom.

The county had, among its other institutions, a temple.

The temple was dedicated to the three heroes of the peach-garden oath — Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, and Liu Bei^{[4]三义庙 (sān yì miào, "temple of the three sworn brothers") is the vernacular name for a shrine jointly enshrining Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei — the three heroes of the peach-garden oath in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms cycle. By the mid-Qing these temples were extremely common in north China, especially in Shanxi, which claimed Guan Yu as a native son (he was born in Xiezhou, less than a hundred li from Ruicheng). The peach-garden oath itself is a Ming fictional invention — the historical Liu, Guan, and Zhang never swore any such oath — but the ritual weight of the shrine was, by Yuan Mei's time, entirely serious. Guan Yu especially had been enfeoffed by successive Ming and Qing emperors as a state god of war.} — enshrined together in the way that had become standard across late-Ming and Qing north China, three brotherhood-sworn generals of the third century AD receiving joint incense fifteen centuries later from a village that, on any given morning, could not remember the century they had died in.

The temple was locked.

The lock was not new. Nobody in the district could give a clean account of when it had first been fitted. What everyone agreed on was that the chain around the front door had been in place 历年 (lì nián) — "for years and years" — and that it was struck off only twice a year, for the spring and autumn sacrifices, when the caretakers dashed inside to burn incense and dashed back out again. Even the temple's assigned monk — the man whose official job description was to live there and tend the altar — refused to sleep on the premises. Something, the locals said, was in the building. They did not know what. They knew only that the correct way to handle it was to keep the door chained and to look away.

Into this equilibrium walked a Shaanxi sheep-trader.

He had come east across the Yellow River from the ranges around Xi'an with a thousand head of sheep. He had been on the road for weeks. He had reached Ruicheng at dusk and could find no yard, no stable, no fenced field large enough to hold the flock overnight. The temple courtyard, when he asked about it, seemed obvious: it had four walls, a gate, and a lot of empty stone paving. He asked the villagers to unlock it.

They tried, in the polite indirect way of Qing country people, to talk him out of it. They told him what everyone knew — that something inside was not right, that the monk himself would not stay, that this was not a matter of superstition but of practical observation. The sheep-trader was unimpressed. He was a large man. He had a strong arm — shì yǒu lǚlì (恃有膂力), literally relying on the strength of his back and arms. He had, one gathers, walked into similar rooms in similar towns and walked out again the next morning. He said: no problem.

They unlocked the door.

He drove his thousand sheep in, penned them in a rough ring along the covered walkways that ran under the temple eaves, and set himself up in the main hall. He kept his shepherd's staff at his side. He lit a candle. He lay down. And — his heart, he admitted afterward, refusing quite to settle — he did not fall asleep.

At the third watch of the night — the two hours between eleven at night and one in the morning, the dead center of the classical Chinese ghost hour^{[5]三鼓 (sān gǔ, "third drum") is the third of the five night-watches into which classical China divided the hours from dusk to dawn. The third watch runs, roughly, from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. — the pivot point of the night, the hour when yin energy is at its maximum and yang has not yet begun to return. In supernatural fiction, the third watch is the moment when ghosts, foxes, and jiangshi are most likely to become active. Yuan Mei's specification of 三鼓 here is a genre-signal to his readers: whatever is about to happen, it is happening on schedule.} — he heard a sound from underneath the platform of the statues. It was, he later said, a huòrán (豁然) sound, the classical Chinese onomatopoeia for something cracking or splitting sharply open. A thing came up out from under the altar.

In the candle's uncertain light, this is what he saw:

The creature was seven or eight feet tall. Its face and head had the shape of a human face and a human head. Its two eyes were sunk deep into their sockets and were the color of nothing — completely black — but they carried their own light inside them, like two black walnuts of solid darkness. From the neck downward its body was covered in green fur, thick and matted, like the woven straw of a peasant's rain cape. It had two hands. The nails on the hands were long and sharp.

The thing looked at him with a slow sideways glance — the classical text uses the character nì (睨), the exact word for a sidelong, appraising look — and then it sniffed him. Having satisfied itself about what he was, it lunged.

He struck at it with the shepherd's staff. The staff might as well not have existed. The green-furred thing seemed not to register the blow at all. It seized the staff in its own hand, brought it to its mouth, and bit through it as if tearing cloth — duàn rú liè bó (断如裂帛), snapped like torn silk.

He ran.

He ran out of the main hall, out of the courtyard, out of the temple gate, and did not stop. The thing came after him. He reached the wall of the town, found an old tree growing close beside it, and climbed. He climbed until he was in the highest fork of the highest branch, and there he flattened himself and held still and watched. The thing came to the foot of the tree and looked up. It stared at him. It did not climb.

They remained in this arrangement — the sheep-trader in the branches, the green-furred thing at the base of the trunk, staring up — until first light.

At dawn travelers began appearing on the road, and the thing was no longer there. The sheep-trader climbed down and searched. He could find no trace of it. He walked back to the temple. The thousand sheep were still in the courtyard, apparently untouched. He went to the main hall and, together with some of the villagers who had by then gathered, examined the platform under the three statues of Liu, Guan, and Zhang. Nothing seemed disturbed. But at one corner of the stone plinth there was a fine crack, and out of the crack, they saw, 腾腾有黑气 — a thin black vapor was rising.

Nobody wanted to be the person who opened it.

They filed a formal petition^{[6]具牒告官 (jù dié gào guān) — literally to prepare a written petition and report the matter to the officials. In the Qing county-level judicial system, private citizens could file a petition (dié 牒 or zhuàng 状) with the magistrate's office over almost anything that touched public order: a lost cow, a boundary dispute, a haunting. The magistrate had discretion over whether to take up the case, and if he did, he could order an on-site inspection (kàn yàn 勘验), a search, or an excavation. The villagers in this story are not asking for a ghost hunt. They are filing a routine administrative petition for what Qing law would categorize as a strange event requiring official inspection. Magistrate Tong is not exceeding his authority; he is exercising it in exactly the standard way.} with the magistrate's office.

Magistrate Tong, hearing the account, gave the practical, procedural, and — from the villagers' perspective — deeply alarming order that only a Qing official could give with any legal authority. He directed that the platform holding the three statues of the sworn brothers be moved aside, and the ground beneath it dug up.

They dug. About ten feet down (深丈许, roughly one zhàng deep, which in Qing measurement is close to ten Western feet), they struck a coffin. The coffin was rotten. Its wood had gone soft and crumbled apart as they lifted the lid. Inside there was a corpse. Its burial clothes had entirely disintegrated. The body itself, however, was intact — and from head to foot it was covered in the same green fur that the sheep-trader had described from the night before.

They stacked firewood over it and set it alight.

As the fire took, the corpse made a sound. There was a wet, sputtering, tongue-clicking noise coming from the burning body — the classical text renders it zézé yǒu shēng (啧啧有声). Blood boiled up out of it. The bones inside made a low crying sound. It burned for a long time.

After that, the green-furred thing was not seen again.

The temple gate was left unlocked.

Translator's Reflection

There is a whole tradition in Chinese supernatural fiction of the green-haired corpse, and it does not begin with Yuan Mei. To understand what the sheep-trader saw when he looked down from that tree — and what Magistrate Tong ordered dug up the next morning — it helps to know that the readers of Zi Bu Yu in the 1780s already had a specific and quite technical vocabulary for what a body looks like when it has been in the ground long enough to change.

The Qing term for what came out from under that altar is jiāngshī (僵尸), literally stiff corpse. The English translation "Chinese hopping vampire," familiar from 1980s Hong Kong horror films, is a modern coinage that does not quite fit what the tradition originally described. In classical Chinese demonology a jiangshi is not primarily a bloodsucker. It is a body that has failed to complete the process of dying. Specifically, it is a body in which the yin soul (魄, pò), which is supposed to stay with the corpse and sink into the ground with it, has neither dissipated nor departed. Trapped in the flesh, unable to leave, the pò keeps the corpse ambulatory — hostile, hungry, and unable to be reasoned with — while the hún (魂), the higher rational soul, is long gone.

The green fur is one of the classical signs. Traditional Chinese fangzhi — county gazetteers — and Ming and Qing miscellanies record it consistently: a body left buried in the wrong kind of ground, or a body from which the pò has not departed, will begin to grow hair — long, dense, and pale green or white — from every surface of its skin, until it is coated in a felted layer like the shag of a straw rain-cape. This is exactly the image Yuan Mei uses: 茸茸如蓑衣 (róngróng rú suōyī), fluffy like a straw cape. The peasants of Ruicheng, and every villager in the story, would have recognized the sign instantly. A body with green hair on it is not a body that is grieving or reproaching the living. It is a body that has stopped being a person and has become a thing that must be burned.

This is why the magistrate's response is so quick and so decisive. There is no inquest. There is no attempt to identify whose body it might have been. There is no discussion of proper burial. He orders the shrine platform moved, the ground opened, and the contents cremated. In the classical Chinese moral universe cremation was normally an insult to the dead: it prevented the hún from returning to the body during ancestral offerings and severed the family line's continuity with its founder. Ordering cremation of an unknown corpse was, in Confucian terms, a serious act. But a jiangshi was categorically outside the ordinary rules for the dead. It was, by its own nature, no longer eligible for descendant offerings — because whatever it had been, it was not a person anymore.

The magistrate is not exorcising a ghost. He is disposing of a public-safety problem.

There is a second thing worth noticing here, and it is a stranger detail than the green fur.

The corpse was found under the altar of the three sworn brothers. Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, and Liu Bei — the peach-garden oath — were, by the mid-Qing, three of the most heavily worshipped figures in north Chinese village religion. Guan Yu in particular had been elevated by successive imperial edicts to the status of state deity: he was a Ministry-of-War god, a merchant's god, a guanyu to whom the Qing court itself made sacrifice. To bury an anonymous corpse under his statue — to seat the three brothers on top of a coffin — is one of the most ritually catastrophic acts imaginable in the Qing folk-religious grammar. It is not just improper. It is a deliberate pollution of a state-sanctioned shrine.

Yuan Mei does not tell us who did it, or when, or why. His story ends with the fire going out. But the implication hangs there in the silence of the last line. Someone, at some point, had put a body under those statues on purpose, and had chained the door behind them.

This is one of the things I find most disturbing about Zi Bu Yu as a collection. Yuan Mei is often described in modern Chinese literary criticism as a rationalist, an Enlightenment figure, a skeptic of superstition. And he is — but he is a very specific kind of skeptic. He does not deny that strange things happen. He denies that they mean anything. His preferred narrative move is to give you a fully articulated supernatural event, with witnesses, dates, verifiable place names, and named officials — and then to stop writing, exactly at the point where a Ming chuanqi author or a Song biji writer would have delivered the moral. Ji Yun, over in the Notes from the Thatched Study, will always tell you what an anecdote is for. Pu Songling, in the Liaozhai, will tie every fox-spirit encounter to a Confucian or Daoist verdict. Yuan Mei just walks away.

The result is that his stories carry a much heavier residue of unresolved something than Ji Yun's or Pu Songling's do. You are told: a body was found under the altar. It was covered in green fur. It was burned. That is all. Whatever the previous owners of that temple were up to, whatever the chain on the door was actually protecting, whatever it was that the monk had refused for so long to sleep next to — Yuan Mei has no comment. The story is filed away and the volume moves on to the next entry.

The last detail, the one that stays with me, is the sheep-trader's staff. He hits the thing with it and the thing does not notice. The thing takes it from his hand and bites through it. Yuan Mei records this in five characters — duàn rú liè bó — snapped like torn silk. A shepherd's staff, in Qing Shanxi, was not a walking stick. It was a hardwood pole an inch and a half through, seasoned for years, used to move animals larger than a man. To bite through it like silk is a physical claim of grotesque specificity. The green-furred thing has jaws that go through hardwood without effort.

And it stares at him from the base of the tree for six hours without ever trying to climb. It could, presumably, have gone up. It chooses not to. It waits. It watches. And when the light comes, it goes back under the altar.

The sheep-trader was, by every measure, a lucky man. He was strong. He was awake. He ran the right direction. He climbed the right tree. The magistrate came the next morning and gave the right order. The chain came off the door for good.

But somewhere in Ruicheng county, in 1741, there was a house that had once been a family — a family whose burial arrangements had been so far off the standard track that they had ended up under a state-cult shrine. Yuan Mei knows this and does not ask. He simply tells you the temple was unlocked afterward. The dead were burned. The village went on with its work.

Next tale: The Boy Who Cheated His Own Sister Out of Her Wedding Silks — a Ming vernacular story in which a marriage of convenience turns, over one long evening, into a marriage of consequence. → [Coming soon]