The Son Who Would Not Stop Appealing / 席方平

In which a son carries his father's murder case down through four levels of the underworld, survives flogging, a red-hot iron bed, and a two-man saw, and brings back a written verdict that strips a King of Hell of his throne

From Liaozhai Zhiyi (聊斋志异 · Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio), Volume X

After Pu Songling (蒲松龄, 1640–1715) · Retold in English with annotations

There was an honest, slow-tongued old man in Dong'an whose only recorded mistake was to have quarrelled with the richest man in the village. The rich man, Yang, died first, and being dead did not make him less rich or less angry — it merely moved his bribes to a different address. The old man's body swelled red where ghostly constables were beating him, and he screamed out Yang's name with his last breath. His son, a young man called Xi Fangping, did the arithmetic of an empire in which every court, including the ones underground, was owned by the highest bidder, and then did the only thing in the equation he could control. He stopped eating. He stopped speaking. And when his soul had walked far enough out of his body to be useful, he set off for the city of the dead to file the case himself. The City God had been bought. The Prefectural God had been bought. The King of Hell had been bought. Xi Fangping appealed to all three of them in turn, was tortured by all three of them in turn, and kept appealing — even after they had cut him in half, and even after they had made him an infant to kill the appeal at its source.

The Quarrel in Dong'an

The story gives itself no date; Pu Songling rarely does when the subject is not an event but a system. In Dong'an (东安)^{[1]Dong'an (东安) is uncertain: the best-known Qing county of that name was in Shuntian Prefecture (present Anci/Langfang, Hebei); editors also note one in Yishui, Shandong, Pu's home province. The text gives no evidence to settle it. : Zhuàngzhuō (戆拙): the bluntness of a man who cannot bend his speech to his own interest, plus social clumsiness — the classic wrong-litigant profile: honest enough to be wronged, inarticulate enough to have no protective connections. His son's fearless fluency in every court is the deliberate generational reversal.} lived a man called Xi Lian (席廉), blunt and clumsy by nature (性戆拙) — the kind who says the true thing first and the useful thing never.

Xi Lian had once quarrelled with the rich Yang family of the ward (里中富室羊姓). The antagonist gets no given name: he is "a certain Yang" (羊某) throughout, a wallet with a surname. The surname itself was a gift — Yáng (羊), sheep or goat; the verdict at the end puns on it with yáng hěn láng tān, "ruthless as a sheep, greedy as a wolf" (羊狠狼贪), twisting a phrase Sima Qian used in the Records of the Grand Historian for men savage enough to be worth executing.^{[2]The verdict's 羊狠狼贪 puns on Yang 羊 (sheep); the pattern comes from the Shiji (项羽本纪), where men "fierce as tiger, stubborn as sheep, greedy as wolf" are the type to be executed for indiscipline. : Hún yǐ lí shè (魂已离舍) treats the body as the soul's rented dwelling (cf. the idiom 魂不守舍). Extreme grief or fixed concentration could loosen the soul so it walked while the body sat like an idiot — exactly the 状类痴 state Pu describes.}

Yang died first (羊先死), and death merely relocated his shopping to a jurisdiction where the shops never close. Several years later Xi Lian fell ill.

The Beating No Living Hand Could See

As Xi Lian lay on his deathbed, he told the people around him, quite clearly, what was happening:

"That man Yang has now bribed the underworld bailiffs to flog me (贿嘱冥使搒我矣)."

A moment later his body was red and swollen all over (身赤肿). He cried out, and died.

The whole 4,000-character odyssey that follows works out this one premise: the dead are not released from government by dying, only transferred to an older, worse-paid branch of it, with bailiffs (冥使), prisons, magistrates, prefects, a king — and the same payroll corruption as the office above. A man rich enough to buy his enemies a beating in the county court could buy them one in the dungeon beneath it. Pu Songling spent much of his life as a private secretary to county magistrates; he knew what bailiffs cost, and simply moved the bill of particulars one floor down.

Xi Lian's son Xi Fangping (席方平) heard his father's last words. He was wretched beyond food (惨怛不食):

"My father was plain and inarticulate (朴讷)," he said. "Now he is being bullied by a strong ghost. I shall go down to the underworld and plead his grievance for him (代伸冤气耳)."

From that moment he stopped speaking. Sometimes he sat, sometimes he stood; he looked like a man gone simple (状类痴). His soul had already left its dwelling (魂已离舍).

The City of the Dead

When Xi Fangping's soul stepped out of his own gate he did not know the way. He simply asked everyone he met for the walled town (城邑), the way a lost farmer on a real road would, and in a little while he entered it.

His father was already in prison. At the prison gate Xi Fangping saw him from a distance, lying under the eaves, looking utterly broken. When Xi Lian lifted his eyes and saw his son, the tears came:

"The jailers have all taken bribes on Yang's instructions (悉受赇嘱).^{[3]Qiú (赇) is the classical legal word for a bribe; the Shuowen Jiezi (说文解字, ca. 100 CE) glosses it as giving property to bend the law — the Tang and Qing codes' crime of 受财枉法.} They beat me day and night. My shins and thighs are ruined."

Xi Fangping turned on the jailers and shouted at them — the first of many times in this story he will shout at men who are about to hurt him:

"If my father is guilty, there is the law of the king to judge him (自有王章)! Since when is it for dead goblins like you to decide it?"

He walked out, drew up a plaint (抽笔为词), and at the City God's morning court (早衙)^{[4]The morning court (早衙) mirrors the Qing magistrate's twice-daily sessions, when plaints were cried aloud at the gate and thrown into court (喊冤); a plaintiff acted for himself, with no prosecutor.} shouted his grievance and submitted it.

The City God (城隍)^{[5]The City God (城隍) was the divine magistrate of a walled town, otherworldly counterpart of the county magistrate; the Ming systematized the cult by edict. Zhao Yi traces it in Gaiyu Congkao (juan 35). : The Prefectural God (郡司) sits one level above the City God, as the prefect (知府) sat above the county magistrate; jùn (郡) is an older unit name retained for the archaic dead bureaucracy. : Pū (扑) is the rod; the Shujing lists "the whip for official offences, the rod for teaching offences." The prefecture's flogging marks him a vexatious appellant before sending the case back down.} is the first rung of a ladder the story maps exactly onto the Qing state — county god, prefectural god, King of Hell — every reader in 1700 understanding that the dead kept the living's table of organization, including the prices. Yang spent until the money ran inside and out of the court (内外贿通), then appeared for the hearing. The City God ruled the accusation unsupported by evidence (所告无据) and found against Xi.

It is the first verdict, and it sets the grammar of the whole story: the court never says the rich man is innocent, never addresses the father's body. It says the victim's paperwork lacks proof — in a court it has just been paid to keep proof away from.

A Hundred Li of Dark Road

Xi Fangping's anger had nowhere left to go. He walked more than a hundred li through the dark (冥行百余里) up to the prefecture (郡), and filed again, this time against the local officers' private corruption (官役私状), before the Prefectural God (郡司).

The prefecture sat on the case half a month (迟之半月) — delay being cheaper than violence and often just as final — then flogged him and sent the case back to the City God for retrial (仍批城隍覆案): the appellant the higher court cannot rule against is returned, beating on the record, to the very official he accused. Back at the county court Xi was given the full catalogue of fetters (备受械梏).

The City God, now alarmed that this particular corpse would simply keep walking back up the road, had him escorted home by bailiffs (遣役押送归家). The bailiffs saw him to his door and left.

Xi Fangping refused to go inside (席不肯入).

He slipped away instead and went straight to the capital of the underworld, to lodge against both the prefectural and county gods for cruelty and greed (诉郡邑之酷贪) before the King of Hell (冥王) himself.^{[6]The King of Hell (阎王) descends from Indian Yama-rāja, sinicized into chief magistrate of the dead; the ten-kings system is documented in the Dunhuang Ten Kings Sutra (9th–10th c.).}

The King of Hell

The King immediately summoned the two gods for confrontation. The two gods, before the hearing, secretly sent trusted men to open negotiations (关说) with Xi Fangping: they would give him a thousand pieces of gold (千金)^{[7]千金, "a thousand pieces of gold," is the stock classical figure for a life-changing sum. The two gods offer the victim a cut before the hearing, converting crime into settlement; refusing it forces the torture.} to drop it. He refused.

The innkeeper (逆旅主人), Pu's small chorus for what the powerful already know, took him aside: "You carry this temper too far. The offices ask to settle and you refuse; I hear sealed letters and gifts have gone in before the King from each of them (于王前各有函进). Your case is in danger." Xi took it for roadside talk (道路之口). A black-robed runner (皂衣人) soon proved him wrong. On the bench the King wore an angry face, allowed him not a single word of defence (不容置词), and ordered him twenty strokes.

Xi Fangping shouted over the blows:

"What is this petty man's crime?"

The King looked straight through him, as if he had heard nothing.

So Xi Fangping changed tactics, and the line he shouted next is the most quoted sentence in the tale:

"The flogging is richly deserved (受笞允当) — who told me to have no money (谁教我无钱耶)!"

The King grew angrier and ordered out the fire bed (火床).^{[8]The red-hot iron bed (火床) belongs to the standard Chinese Buddhist hell inventory shown in Tang hell tableaux and the Dunhuang Mulian text; Pu's touch is the ghosts turning him like bread and clock-watching. : Dōng chí (东墀) is the sunlit ceremonial eastern step of a yamen court; installing a glowing torture bed on the official front steps, in open view, makes the torture court furniture rather than a back-room secret.}

The Iron Bed

Two ghosts dragged him down the hall. On the eastern step (东墀) stood an iron bed, fire stoked beneath it until the whole surface glowed red. The ghosts stripped him, scooped him up onto it, and kneaded and pressed him back and forth (反复揉捺之).

The torture is deliberately culinary — a man cooked on a griddle by impatient kitchen staff, which is how the story wants the underworld read: not theology but a service. His flesh and bones charred black, and his bitterest thought was that he could not manage to die (苦不得死). After an hour a ghost said "that will do"; by a bitter mercy he could still walk, lame.

Back before the bench, the King asked:

"Do you dare appeal again?"

"The great grievance is not redressed. This heart of mine will not die. If I said I would stop, I would be lying to Your Majesty. I will certainly appeal (必讼)."

"What will your plaint say?"

"Everything this body has suffered (身所受者) — every bit of it."

The Saw

The King ordered him sawn in two (锯解其体).^{[9]Sawing the body (锯解) is attested in the same Tang–Dunhuang hell iconography as the iron bed and the cauldron: the damned clamped between boards and sawn lengthwise. Pu converts the tableau into a legal examination — the King calls the prisoner back mid-torture to repeat the same question, agony as interrogation with retries.} Two ghosts hauled him to a post eight or nine feet tall with two planks beneath, above and below blurred with old clotted blood (上下凝血模糊). As he was being tied the hall shouted his name and dragged him back; the King asked once more whether he would appeal, and once more he said he would.

The ghosts clamped him between the planks. As the saw came down he felt his skull begin to split; the pain was beyond holding, but he endured and did not cry out (忍而不号).

He heard one ghost say: "What a magnificent man this is (壮哉此汉)!"

The saw rumbled on down to his chest. Then he heard the other ghost say:

"This man is guilty of nothing, and a great filial son (大孝无辜). Angle the saw a little to the side — do not damage his heart (勿损其心)."^{[10]勿损其心 works twice over: the heart is the organ that kills him if the saw runs straight, and throughout the tale the xīn is the heart that keeps the appeal alive ("this heart of mine will not die," 寸心不死). : Yù (阈) is the threshold; the Analects (乡党) records Confucius never treading on a threshold (行不履阈). A threshold is a boundary, which is why the ghosts seat Xi on one — crossing it means birth into the house. : To die young is shāng (殇); the Yili (丧服) grades early deaths, and death under eight carried no formal mourning at all — the one punishment that legally erases the person, answered by his accepting erasure.}

Even the execution staff, it turns out, has a conscience; the torture is administered in a moral universe, and the men holding the saw can read the case. Xi felt the blade angle and travel crooked, which hurt twice as badly. In a short while half his body was split. The planks were loosened and his two halves fell. A ghost reported up to the hall in a loud voice; the hall called back that he should be joined together and brought in (令合身来见). The two ghosts pushed the halves shut again and hauled him along. The saw-line down him felt ready to re-split; after half a step he fell.

One ghost drew a silk sash from his waist (丝带一条) and handed it over: "Take this — in return for your filial piety (赠此以报汝孝)." Xi bound it around his waist, and his whole body was at once sound, without the least pain.

He climbed to the hall and prostrated himself. The King asked the same question again; Xi, afraid of another round, answered: "I will not appeal." The King at once ordered him returned to the living.

The King Who Changed His Mind

The runners led him out the north gate, pointed out the road home, and turned away.

Xi Fangping, standing free on the road, did the calculation again. The underworld was darker than the living world (阴曹之昧暗尤甚于阳间), and he had no road by which to reach the ear of the Emperor on High (帝). But the world said that Erlang of Guankou (灌口二郎)^{[11]Erlang of Guankou (灌口二郎神), a Sichuan god linked to Li Bing's son, is discussed in Zhuzi Yulei (juan 3) and appears in Journey to the West (ch. 6) as the Jade Emperor's kinsman who captured Sun Wukong. : A lǔbù (卤簿) is the full ceremonial guard of a ruler's progress; the feather canopy (羽葆), banners and halberds across the road prove imperial blood before anyone speaks, which is why merely crossing its path is an arrestable offence. The term is defined in Cai Yong's Du Duan (独断, late Han).} was a kinsman and a meritorious minister of that Emperor, and that the god was intelligent and upright; an appeal to him might actually do something. Glad that the two runners had gone, he turned and headed south.

He had been running only a little while when two men caught him up: "The King suspected you would not go home — and here you are, sure enough." They dragged him back.

He braced for worse. Instead the King tried bribery with a smile:

"Your purpose is truly filial. But your father's grievance — I have already redressed it for you. He has now been reborn into a rich and noble house (往生富贵家). Why should you go shouting about it? I will send you home now, and grant you an estate of a thousand pieces of gold and a lifespan of a full hundred years (千金之产、期颐之寿).^{[12]期颐 is a full hundred years (the Liji, 曲礼上, says "a hundred years is qi"), paired with a fortune to make the bribe the worldly maximum: complete wealth and complete longevity in exchange for silence. : The Western River waters (西江之水) allude to the Zhuangzi (外物), where a stranded carp is grandly promised a river when he needed a cupful; here the grand classicist rhetoric is turned into a sentence to be gutted and washed.} Will that satisfy you?"

He wrote it into the register (注籍中), stamped it with a huge seal, and made Xi look at it himself. Xi thanked him and came down.

Outside, the ghosts drove him on cursing: "Treacherous thief! One more offence and into the great millstone (大磨) you go!" Xi turned on them: "My nature endures the blade and the saw, not the lash (性耐刀锯，不耐挞楚). If the King means me home, why should you escort me?" and he ran back. Frightened, the ghosts coaxed him gently while he deliberately limped and dawdled, resting every few steps.

Three Days as an Infant

After about half a day they reached a village. A gate stood half-open; the ghosts sat him down with them, and Xi sat himself firmly on the threshold (门阈). While he was off his guard the two ghosts pushed him through the doorway.

When he recovered from the shock and looked at himself, he had been born an infant (身已生为婴儿).

They cannot kill the appeal without creating another grievance, but a reborn appellant is a baby, and babies do not litigate. Xi solved it the only way he could: he wept in rage, refused the breast (愤啼不乳), and after three days died (遂殇). His drifting soul did not forget Guankou (魂摇摇不忘灌口).

The Procession

He had drifted on for a few dozen li when he saw a feather-canopied cavalcade coming toward him (羽葆来，幡戟横路), banners and halberds across the whole road. He crossed the road to get out of its way, but had nonetheless violated the guard of honour (卤簿), and the outriders seized him and bound him and dragged him before the carriage.

In the carriage sat a young man of magnificent bearing (丰仪瑰玮), the Ninth Prince (九王), son of the Emperor on High; the officer to whom Xi's grievance was handed was Erlang. Xi, his rage with nowhere else to spend, told the whole poisonous history (缅诉毒痛), and the Prince said only: "This man from below is on his way to plead to you — judge it at once (宜即为之剖决)." Erlang was tall and heavily bearded, nothing like the way the world painted him.

The Verdict

When the Ninth Prince had gone, Xi followed Erlang to a court. His father, Yang, and the underworld runners were already there. A moment later men came out of a prison cart (槛车): the King of Hell, the Prefectural God, and the City God. In open confrontation on the bench (当堂对勘), everything Xi Fangping had said was found true. The three officials trembled like rats crouching before a cat (状若伏鼠).

Erlang took up his brush and gave judgment on the spot. The verdict (判) is the heart of the tale, a long, furious, parallel-prose indictment of the entire chain of command, and Pu Songling reads it aloud in the text at full length. Against the King of Hell, he wrote that a prince who bore the Emperor's own warrant should have been clean to set an example to his officers, and had instead been greedy and lawless (贪墨):

"With axe they chop, and the chop goes into the wood, until the skin and bones of wives and children are scraped empty; the whale swallows the fish, the fish swallows the shrimp, and the lives of the smallest things are pitiable. Scoop up the waters of the Western River to wash your entrails out, and heat up the bed by the eastern wall — pray, step into the vat yourself (请君入瓮)."^{[13]"Pray step into the vat" (请君入瓮), from the Zizhi Tongjian (juan 204, 691 CE): asked by fellow-torturer Zhou Xing how to break a stubborn suspect, Lai Junchen described heating a great vat and then invited Zhou Xing — newly charged himself — to enter it. Erlang serves the King of Hell his own iron bed in the same four characters. : 剔髓伐毛 inverts the immortality phrase 伐毛洗髓, in which an adept sheds mortal hair and marrow toward transcendence (traced to Dongming Ji via Taiping Guangji, juan 6). Here the purging is punitive: the officials are flensed of their human grade. : 胎生, womb-birth, is one of the four Buddhist forms of birth — womb, egg, moisture, transformation (as in the Diamond Sutra). Rebirth in animal hide (脱皮换革) demotes the judging gods into the animal realm of the six paths: livestock.}

The last clause is a legal insult a Tang reader would have caught instantly: when the cruel investigating judge Lai Junchen was ordered to trap his own fellow-torturer Zhou Xing in 691, he asked him, over dinner, how to make a stubborn suspect confess, and Zhou Xing advised him to heat a great vat and put the man inside it. Lai bowed and said: "There is an imperial charge against you, brother — please step into the vat." Erlang's sentence on the King of Hell is literally your own torture, served back to you, in your own words.

Against the City God and the Prefectural God, the verdict named them for running the people of God like so many cattle, for working eagle-and-hawk hands up and down the chain, for not minding even how thin the ghost was before they fleeced it, and for wearing human faces over beast hearts (人面兽心). They were to be pared to the marrow and stripped of their hair (剔髓伐毛) for a term of death in the underworld, and reborn in animal hides (脱皮换革，仍令胎生) — demoted out of the human grade in the six paths.

Against the runners, who as ghosts had no excuse of being human and should have been earning their way back to a birth-mat (落蓐之身) rather than raising waves in the sea of suffering: their dog-faces wore the frost of the sixth month (六月之霜),^{[14]六月之霜 invokes Zou Yan, falsely imprisoned by Yan: his sigh to heaven in summer brought frost, heaven's attestation of injustice (preserved in Wang Chong's Lunheng, 感虚). The insult is pointed — the runners' cold is only their own dog-faces, not a vindicated victim's.} the legendary snow that fell in summer to protest a wrongful conviction; they were to be chopped limb from limb in the execution ground and fished for their sinews and bones in the boiling cauldron (汤镬),^{[15]汤镬, the ancient death by boiling in a cauldron (a Han official in the Shiji, Lian Po–Lin Xiangru chapter, offers himself to it), is applied here to mere runners — Erlang punishing the hands that actually touched Xi as severely as the bench that ordered it.} the ancient death by boiling that Han officials had once named as the worst a state could do.

And against Yang himself, the verdict named the engine of the whole case:

"Wealthy and inhumane, cunning and full of fraud. His golden glare covered the ground, so that the halls of King Yama were nothing but murk and haze; the stink of his coin smoked to Heaven, so that in the City of Unjust Deaths (枉死城)^{[16]The City of Unjust Deaths (枉死城), where the wrongly killed accumulate, is a fixture of Qing afterlife tracts such as the Yuli Baochao (玉历宝钞) and the Ten Kings tradition. Yang's money has even put out the sun and moon in the refuge of his victims.} not even sun or moon could be seen. The leftover smell of his money could still put ghosts to work; the sheer weight of it could traffic with the gods. Confiscate the Yang household's estate, to reward the filial piety of this student Xi. Remove them at once to Mount Tai's eastern peak (东岳)^{[17]The Eastern Peak (东岳, Mount Tai) is the oldest Chinese jurisdiction of the dead: the Hou Hanshu (Wuhuan account) already says souls return to 岱宗, and Gu Yanwu traces the complex in Rizhi Lu (juan 30). Yang is removed from Yama's bribable court to an older one the King cannot buy. : Three jì (三纪) is thirty-six years: a jì is twelve years, one circuit of Jupiter, as Wei Zhao's commentary to the Guoyu (晋语) defines it; the tale later reports his death past ninety, arithmetically exact.} for execution of sentence."

To Xi Lian he said only: "Mindful of your son's filial devotion, and of your own honest and timid nature, I grant you three more ji of life (再赐阳寿三纪)." A ji is twelve years, the full circuit of Jupiter; the father was given thirty-six years.

The Father Returns

Xi Fangping copied the verdict down by hand, and father and son read it together on the road. At home Xi woke first and told the family to open his father's coffin. The corpse was as cold as ice. They waited through a full day; it slowly warmed, and lived. When they looked for the copied verdict, it was already gone.

From that day the family grew richer. In three years good fertile land stretched around them in every direction. The Yang descendants dwindled away, and their towers, fields, and property all passed to the Xi. Any man of the ward who bought Yang land dreamed at night of a god shouting at him: "That is the Xi family's property — what makes you think you can hold it?" At first no one quite believed it; then they planted it and reaped not a peck or a pint all year, and sold it back to Xi. Xi Lian died at over ninety.

Afterword — Four Levels of Court, and One Too Many

Pu Songling appends his own comment under the historian's mask he always wore, the Recorder of the Strange (异史氏曰),^{[18]异史氏曰 is Pu Songling's authorial signature, modelled on the Shiji's "the Grand Astrologer says" (太史公曰) — a private historian of what official history refused to record. The collection circulated in manuscript and was first printed in the Qingke Pavilion edition (青柯亭本) of 1766.} — a device borrowed straight from Sima Qian's "the Grand Astrologer says":

"Everyone talks of the Pure Land, not knowing that life and death are different worlds and that thought and memory are both confounded in them — a man does not even know where he came from, so how can he know where he is going? Still less the man who dies and dies again, or is born and born once more. But let loyalty and filial piety once be fixed in the will, and ten thousand kalpas cannot move it. Strange, this Xi Fangping — how magnificent he is!"

The story is often read as the angriest thing Pu wrote about the law, and its anger has an architecture: he walks the plaintiff through the whole chain of appeal — county god, prefectural god, King of Hell — and shows every rung corrupt in the same direction, because the money rises from one rich man at the bottom. An institution that fully bought cannot be repaired from inside the chain; it needs a power that does not sit on it, a Ninth Prince passing on the road, an Erlang answering to a higher sovereign. The afterlife here is the Qing county office where Pu worked for decades, with the ceiling removed so the money can be seen climbing all the way up.

Against that machine stands one man with no asset but the refusal to stop — flogged, grilled, sawn in half, bribed with a century of life, reborn as a three-day-old infant, and at every station asked the same question, do you dare appeal again? Even the prudence fails, even the cradle fails; the appeal walks out of it and keeps going south. In a world owned by the highest bidder, the one currency the bidding cannot buy is a man who has decided that being cut in half is an acceptable price for the next paragraph of his complaint.

Translator's Note

This retelling follows the standard modern base text of Liaozhai Zhiyi, the Zhang Youhe 张友鹤 critical edition (《聊斋志异会校会注会评本》, first compiled in the twentieth century and reprinted in the 中国古典文学丛书 series by Shanghai Guji Chubanshe), in which "Xi Fangping" is the second tale of Volume X (卷十). The story is one of the most widely anthologized in the collection and was among those translated early in the West; Herbert A. Giles included it in Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (1880). All quoted Chinese phrases and the full classical text in the appendix below follow the Zhang edition. Footnotes give the historical and textual background an English reader needs; the verdict is rendered in paraphrase rather than line-by-line translation, with its famous clauses quoted directly. The textual basis summarized here follows the Zhang recension throughout; full bibliographic particulars are given in the source note.^{[19]Base text: 蒲松龄《聊斋志异》卷十《席方平》, in Zhang Youhe 张友鹤 (ed.), Liaozhai Zhiyi huijiao huizhu huiping ben 会校会注会评本 (Shanghai Guji Chubanshe 中国古典文学丛书). Public domain. The tale reached English early through Herbert A. Giles, Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (London, 1880).}