The Teacher Whose Entire Wedding Party Was Dead / 一窟鬼癞道人除怪：吴洪的妻、媒婆、岳母全是鬼

Volume 14 of Feng Menglong's Stories to Caution the World, drawn from a lost Southern Song Hangzhou street-tale

From Stories to Caution the World (警世通言, 1624), Volume 14 — collected by Feng Menglong (冯梦龙, 1574–1646) from an older Southern Song huaben of the same name · Retold by Cathay Tales

A failed examination candidate, stranded in Hangzhou as a private tutor, lets the neighborhood matchmaker arrange a wedding to a quiet young woman with a small dowry. A year later, walking home alone in the rain from a spring holiday in the western hills, he begins to discover — door by door, neighbor by neighbor — that every single person at his own wedding has been dead for over a year.

A Failed Candidate, a Soft-Hearted Matchmaker, and a Convenient Bride

The story opens in Lin'an (临安) — modern Hangzhou — in the Southern Song. The capital had moved south after the fall of the Northern Song to the Jurchen Jin in 1127, and by the time this tale was first told as a Hangzhou street huaben a century or so later, the city was the wealthiest, most crowded, most ghost-ridden urban concentration in the world. Every quarter had its temple. Every temple had its resident matchmaker. Every matchmaker had a small back-room book of arranged marriages for the steady supply of failed examination candidates who washed up in Lin'an each spring on their way back south from another disappointment at the capital exams.

Wu Hong (吴洪, thirty-one years old, twice failed at the metropolitan examination, originally from the Min commandery in coastal Fujian, currently scraping by as a private tutor to merchant-family children in the Qiantang Gate district) was one such failed candidate. He had a small set of rented rooms above a sesame-cake shop near the Zhouqiao (州桥) — the central state-bridge of Lin'an — a single old chest of clothes, a regular handful of pupils, and a quiet middle-aged household servant named Jin'er (锦儿) who came in mornings to cook and clean.

He had no wife. He had not gone home to Fujian in eight years. His parents had died during his second try at the metropolitan exam and there had been no one to write to about it.

The neighborhood matchmaker — Old Wang (王婆, the senior matchmaker for the Qiantang Gate ward, in business for over thirty years, known as the woman who could place any decent-tempered scholar with any decent-tempered widow within a fortnight) — had taken an interest in Wu Hong about a month into his second year in the rented rooms. She came to the sesame-cake shop downstairs on a winter morning, waited until he came down for his breakfast, and proposed a young woman named Li Yueniang (李乐娘, the only daughter of a recently deceased prefectural assistant, with a small inheritance of about two hundred strings of cash, currently in mourning at her widowed mother's house behind the Baiyan Pool).

The young woman was, Old Wang said, quiet, well-mannered, literate, and slightly older than was ideal — twenty-six — which was why the family was willing to overlook Wu Hong's lack of an examination degree.

The mother-in-law — Old Chen (陈干娘, the deceased prefectural assistant's widow, in her early fifties, living in modest reduced circumstances behind the Baiyan Pool) — invited Wu Hong to a brief tea-visit a week later. The visit was decorous. The young woman, Li Yueniang, came in for exactly the polite quarter-hour the etiquette required, sat exactly where the etiquette required, and answered exactly the three questions the etiquette required. She was, as Old Wang had said, quiet. She was also, Wu Hong noticed in spite of himself, very beautiful.

The wedding was arranged for the following month. Old Wang took her standard matchmaker's fee. Old Chen provided a small dowry from the deceased prefectural assistant's savings — about two hundred strings of cash, as advertised, plus a modest selection of household linens. Li Yueniang came to the rented rooms above the sesame-cake shop with one chest of clothes and one young servant girl named Xiu'er (秀儿) — a quiet teenage maid the dowry had included.

The marriage, by Wu Hong's account, was quiet and reasonably contented. Li Yueniang did her embroidery in the afternoons. Xiu'er ran the small household errands. Jin'er continued to come in the mornings. Wu Hong taught his merchant-family pupils in the front room and read in the back room. The neighbors agreed it was the kind of small, modest, scholar-and-wife household that the Qiantang Gate ward produced by the dozen.

A year passed.

The Holiday Walk into the Western Hills

The story turns on a single spring outing.

In the Qingming festival of the following year — the early-April grave-sweeping holiday when every Lin'an family with the means to do so packed a small basket of cold food and walked into the western hills for the afternoon — Wu Hong agreed to join an acquaintance named Wang Qisan (王七三, a junior clerk in the Lin'an municipal records office, a friend of Wu Hong's from the failed-examination community, single, cheerful, easily talked into a walk) for a day-trip out to the Lingyin Temple (灵隐寺) area west of the city.

They walked out through the city wall in the morning, climbed the hill behind the temple, sat on a rock and ate their cold dumplings, and started back toward the city in the late afternoon. The weather, which had been pleasant on the way out, turned. Spring rain came down over the hills. By the time they reached the foot of the Driven-Offering Ridge (驼献岭) — a small wooded saddle between the western hills and the Lin'an plain — both men were soaked, the path was slick with mud, and the daylight was failing faster than either had budgeted for.

Wang Qisan suggested an inn for the night. Wu Hong, who could not afford an inn, suggested pushing on. They compromised on stopping at the first place that looked open.

A small wineshop appeared at the side of the path. Two old wine-pots in the front window. A bench under the eaves. A bored-looking middle-aged man inside.

They went in. They sat. They asked for hot wine. The proprietor said the kitchen was cold — only cold wine available. They asked for cold wine. The proprietor said nothing. They asked again. The proprietor said nothing.

Wang Qisan, who was the more observant of the two, looked at Wu Hong and said, very quietly: This wineshop man is strange. He may be a ghost.

A gust of wind came in through the open door. The lamps flickered. The wineshop vanished. Wu Hong and Wang Qisan found themselves standing in the rain on a small earthen mound — what they could now see, in the failing light, was a low ancient grave-mound — with their feet in wet grass and no wineshop, no proprietor, no wine-pots anywhere in sight.

They ran.

They ran the rest of the way down the ridge, hailed a passing boat at the Jiu Li Pine (九里松) ferry, took it across the canal to the Qiantang Gate of the city, and parted ways outside the city wall at sundown. Wang Qisan went home to his own quarters. Wu Hong, sodden and shivering, took the longer route across the western half of the city — because it ran past the houses of three people he urgently wanted to talk to.

Door by Door, the Wedding Party Disappears

The first door he came to was Old Wang's — the matchmaker who had arranged his marriage.

The door was locked. There was a single iron padlock on it, the kind a household uses when it is closed for an extended absence. Wu Hong knocked on the neighbor's door instead.

The neighbor opened, recognized him, took in the dripping clothes, and asked him to come in to dry off. Wu Hong did not come in. He asked whether Old Wang was traveling. The neighbor looked at him strangely and said: Old Wang has been dead for over five months.

Wu Hong stood in the rain for a long moment.

He thanked the neighbor. He walked on.

The second door he came to was Old Chen's — his mother-in-law's, behind the Baiyan Pool.

The door was crossed with a pair of bamboo poles in an X — the traditional Lin'an municipal seal for a house in which someone has died by misadventure within the past year. A small paper municipal lantern hung on the door-post. The lantern bore the eight-character official inscription that every Lin'an child knew by heart: 人心似铁，官法如炉. Human hearts may be iron, but the law is the furnace.

Wu Hong knocked on the neighbor's door.

The neighbor opened, took one look at his face in the lantern light, and said, before Wu Hong could speak: Old Chen has been dead for over a year. Did you not know?

Wu Hong did not answer. He walked on.

The third door he came to was his own — the rented rooms above the sesame-cake shop near the Zhouqiao.

The door was locked. From the outside. A padlock he himself did not own. He knocked on the sesame-cake shop downstairs.

The shop-keeper came out, recognized him, and said: Master Wu, when you went out this morning your wife told my boy that she and Xiu'er were going to her mother's house for a few days. They locked the door behind them and left around midmorning. They have not come back.

Wu Hong stood at the foot of the stairs in the rain. He stood there for a long time.

He went, finally, to the only person left whose door he had not yet tried — his morning servant Jin'er, who lived in a small back room behind a noodle shop two streets over.

Jin'er's room was open. Jin'er herself was not there. The shopkeeper at the noodle shop said Jin'er had not been in for three days. The shopkeeper added — because he was a curious man and had been waiting to ask Wu Hong this for months — that the woman Wu Hong had married the previous spring had been seen by exactly nobody in the Qiantang Gate ward during the daylight hours of the past year. Master Wu, your wife only ever goes out at dusk and dawn. The neighbors have been saying it for months.

Wu Hong went back to his locked rented rooms above the sesame-cake shop, sat down on the threshold, and waited.

The Mangy Daoist

He was still sitting on the threshold at midnight when a thin, ragged figure walked up out of the rain.

The figure was a Daoist priest (道人) of the wandering exorcist kind — the kind who travels the southern Yangtze prefectures alone, sleeping in temple porches, carrying a peach-wood sword and a small bundle of yellow paper charms. His robes were torn. His scalp, visible under the rain-soaked hood, was covered in patches of ringworm and dried mange.^{[1]A dàoshì (道士) in the Southern Song urban context was not necessarily a temple-resident priest. The wandering exorcist Daoist — the kind who slept in temple porches, carried a peach-wood sword and a small bundle of yellow-paper charms, and offered to clear hauntings, possessions, and gu-poisoning cases for whatever the householder could afford to pay — was a recognized urban occupation in Lin'an and Lin'an's sister cities throughout the Southern Song. The "mangy" or "scabby" Daoist (癞道人) is a particular sub-type in Southern Song popular fiction: ragged, ringworm-scarred, almost always despised by passers-by, and almost always revealed in the course of the story to be a master exorcist whose unkempt appearance is itself a deliberate concealment. The trope recurs across the huaben literature and reappears in late Ming and early Qing fiction including the Liaozhai Zhiyi of Pu Songling.}

He stopped in front of Wu Hong. He looked at him for a long moment in the lamplight from the sesame-cake shop.

He said: Master, you carry a heavy weight of unclean qi. I think it is best we resolve this tonight.

Wu Hong let him in.

The Daoist set down his bundle. He took out a small bowl, a paper packet of ash, a length of yellow charm-paper, and a small bottle of consecrated water. He set the charm-paper on the table. He set the bowl beside it. He took out the peach-wood sword. He drew a single character — 疾 (haste, the standard ritual command for a summoned spirit-officer to act immediately) — in the air with the tip of the sword.

He spoke a long incantation. A small wind rose through the rented rooms, although the door was closed and the window was shuttered. The lamps flickered, steadied, brightened.

A figure appeared in the air above the table — armored, helmeted, with a banded waist and embroidered sleeves, holding a curved blade. The Daoist's summoned spirit-officer.^{[2]The summoned spirit-officer in the original huaben is identified as a member of the Six Ding and Six Jia (六丁六甲) — the twelve celestial generals of Daoist liturgy who serve as enforcement agents for higher-rank exorcist rituals. The Six Ding (六丁) are the six female martial-aspect spirit-officers of the celestial bureaucracy; the Six Jia (六甲) are their six male martial-aspect counterparts. They are summoned by name in formal Daoist rituals to perform tasks of capture, transport, and binding. The figure who appears in this story is one of the Six Ding — "Spirit-officer of the Six Ding" is the Daoist's formal address — and her job is to round up the den of ghosts and bring them to the ritual circle for dispersal.}

The Daoist said, in the formal court Mandarin of a man addressing a higher rank: Spirit-officer of the Six Ding, bring me the troublemakers from this scholar's household, and the wineshop ghost from the Driven-Offering Ridge.

The spirit-officer bowed.

The wind rose again. The wind, the huaben records, took the form of two lines of verse that the storyteller of the original Southern Song street-tale was very proud of:

无形无影透人怀， 二月桃花被绰开。 就地撮将黄叶去， 入山推出白云来。

Formless and shadowless, it passes through the breast; Like the second-month wind it sweeps the peach blossoms wide. On the ground it gathers the yellow leaves and carries them off; In the mountains it drives the white clouds out from their caves.

The wind passed through the rented rooms above the sesame-cake shop. When it passed, it brought back, deposited on the floor in front of the Daoist's table, the entire wedding party of Wu Hong's marriage.

Old Wang, the matchmaker, dead five months. Old Chen, the mother-in-law, dead over a year. Li Yueniang, the wife, dead by suicide a year and a half ago at the Baiyan Pool when her widowed mother's debts had become unbearable. Xiu'er, the servant girl, dead the same night by the same method. Jin'er, the morning servant, dead three days ago in a back alley behind the noodle shop, never reported. The wineshop proprietor on the Driven-Offering Ridge, dead twenty years, the resident hungry-ghost of a small unmaintained grave on the path.

The Daoist looked at them all. The spirit-officer questioned each one in turn, and the Daoist's brush copied down the answer in his ledger.

Li Yueniang — the wife — had been a junior wife to the Third Vice-Commissioner of the household of Grand Councillor Qin (秦太师, Qin Hui, the chief minister of the Southern Song court for two decades, infamous for the judicial murder of the loyalist general Yue Fei). She had died in childbirth, the unborn child still inside her. She was a birth-death ghost (产亡的鬼).

Xiu'er — the servant — had been the same household's youngest maid. The First Wife of the Third Vice-Commissioner had discovered her pregnancy and beaten her so severely that, that same night, she had cut her own throat in the women's quarters. She was a self-cut ghost (割杀的鬼).

Old Wang — the matchmaker — had died of water gu dropsy disease five months ago. Old Chen — the mother-in-law — had drowned a year and a half ago in the Baiyan Pool behind her own house while washing clothes; her body had been recovered the next morning, and the bamboo X on the door was the municipal seal for accidental water-death. Jin'er — the morning servant — had died of consumption (劳病) in a back alley behind the noodle shop three days ago; her body had not yet been collected. The wineshop man on the Driven-Offering Ridge — Zhu the Fourth (朱小四) — had been the temple groundskeeper of a small unmaintained grave-park nearby; he had died of typhoid two decades ago.

The Daoist took a small dried gourd from his belt. To Wu Hong's eyes it was a gourd; to the ghosts' eyes, the huaben records, it was the Iron Gate of the underworld city of Fengdu (酆都). The Daoist drew the character 疾 a second time. The ghosts, one by one, were pulled into the gourd. The Daoist stoppered it with a small piece of yellow paper.

He handed the gourd to Wu Hong. He said: Bury this at the foot of the Driven-Offering Ridge tomorrow morning. The road is clear from there.

Then he tossed his walking-stick into the air. The stick, halfway up, turned into a white crane (鹤). The Daoist stepped onto its back.

Wu Hong went down on his knees on the rented-room floor.

The figure on the crane looked down at him and said, in a voice that was no longer the voice of a wandering exorcist: I am Master Gan (甘真人) of the celestial bureau. You were once my apprentice on the medicine-gathering road of the Heavenly Mountain. You grew tired of the road and turned back. You were sent down into the world to be a poor scholar — to feel, through this small false marriage, the full taste of mortal entanglement, so that the desire to turn back would burn itself out. You have felt enough. Twelve years from now, when you are ready, find me on Mount Zhongnan.

The crane rose. The Daoist was gone.

Wu Hong, the huaben records, abandoned the rented rooms above the sesame-cake shop the next morning, buried the gourd at the foot of the Driven-Offering Ridge as instructed, walked back to Fujian to bury his parents properly, and then took the road out of the world. Twelve years later he found Master Gan on Mount Zhongnan and was taken back into the celestial apprenticeship he had once abandoned.

Feng Menglong closes the chapter with a four-line verse:

A mind set wholly on the Way leaves the mortal dust behind — what swarm of phantoms could ever dare touch such a man? Good and evil are dissected only by the heart; and so the Den of Ghosts in the Western Hills had already turned itself over, long before the Daoist arrived.

Translator's Reflection

What I love about The Mangy Daoist Who Cleared the Den of Ghosts — which is the literal translation of the chapter title that Feng Menglong gave the story when he collected it in 1624 — is how patiently the betrayal builds.

It is not a single supernatural shock. It is not a sudden reveal. It is a slow walk across the Qiantang Gate ward of a thirteenth-century Hangzhou neighborhood in the rain, in which Wu Hong knocks on door after door of every single person who attended his own wedding, and discovers, each time, that they have been dead for months or years. The matchmaker. The mother-in-law. The wife. The servant. The wineshop man on the way home.

There is a particular cruelty in the order in which he finds out. The matchmaker — five months dead. Five months. He had seen Old Wang in the street, he could have sworn, two months ago. The mother-in-law — over a year dead. He had visited her twice this past spring. The wife — a year and a half dead. He had been married to her for over a year. He had eaten with her, slept with her, watched her do her afternoon embroidery in the back room, listened to her say goodnight in the dark.

Feng Menglong is doing something specific with this structure. He is not making a horror story (although it is a horror story). He is making a parable about displacement — about what happens when a man uproots himself from his proper place in the world and lets himself drift in a city that is not his home. Wu Hong is from coastal Fujian. He has been in Lin'an for eight years. His parents have died and he has not gone home. He has no family in the capital. He has no clan in the capital. He has no village kin to vouch for him.

The huaben version of the story is, by the standards of Southern Song popular fiction, surprisingly explicit about the moral. The ghosts in the story are not random; they have not chosen Wu Hong by accident. They have been drawn to him because of the eight years of unburied homesickness — the parents he did not go home to bury, the village he did not return to, the small unclosed wounds that hang around a man like an aura when he has been pretending too long that the capital is his home.

The matchmaker, the mother-in-law, the wife, and the servant are not a coincidence. They are the precise simulacrum of the small, stable, anchoring household that Wu Hong has spent eight years not building for himself. A wife. A mother-in-law. A matchmaker. A servant. The ghosts have given him, exactly, the family he had not allowed himself to grow back home, and they have done it because the absence of that family had hollowed a space inside him that hungry things could move into.

The Mangy Daoist's parting line is the part of the story I think about most often. Go home to Fujian. Bury your parents properly. Do not come back to the capital for the examinations. The examinations had failed Wu Hong twice. The capital had failed him for eight years. The ghosts had been the price of his refusal to admit it. The Daoist is not telling him to give up on his career; he is telling him that the career he has been chasing was the wrong career to begin with, and that the right life — the one in which a man buries his parents and marries an actual living woman from his own village — was waiting for him in Fujian the whole time.

And the last detail, the one I keep returning to: the door of his own house, locked from the outside.

When Wu Hong gets home from the western hills that night, his own front door is locked. From the outside. By a padlock he himself does not own. His wife has gone to her dead mother's house for a few days, the sesame-cake shop keeper says, and locked the door behind her.

She had told the shopkeeper this the same morning Wu Hong went out walking with Wang Qisan. Which means: while Wu Hong was sitting on a rock in the western hills eating cold dumplings, his ghost-wife was, very calmly, telling the neighbors a perfectly plausible cover story for her own permanent departure — and locking the door of his rented rooms with a padlock that did not belong to him.

The ghosts of the Lin'an Qiantang Gate ward were, in their own quiet way, more competent householders than Wu Hong was. They had even thought, on the way out, to lock the door behind them.

Next tale: The Country Where Your Soul Showed Beneath Your Feet — Tang Ao, Lin Zhiyang, and old Duo Jiugong reach a kingdom where every citizen walks on a small cloud that turns black, gold, or rainbow according to the state of their heart. → [Coming soon]