The Young Man Who Sold a Ghost at the Market / 宋定伯捉鬼：夜路上谁背谁

The Six Dynasties road-meeting that taught Chinese folklore one of its oldest lessons — never tell a stranger what scares you.

From In Search of the Supernatural (搜神记), Book XVI — by Gan Bao (干宝, c. 286–336) · Retold by Cathay Tales

A young man walking the night road outside Wancheng met a ghost. The ghost asked him who he was. He said he was a ghost too. Then they spent the next ten miles taking turns carrying each other on their backs — and only one of them ever got home.

The Story

In the southern part of Nanyang commandery — what is now Nanyang prefecture in southern Henan province — there lived a young man named Song Dingbo (宋定伯, a Han-era commoner from the southern Yellow River basin, known to local memory only for the night he walked into Wancheng with money in his hand and a coat full of sweat).

He was the kind of young man who left home before dawn and came back after midnight. He had errands in the next town. He had a sister to visit. He had a market to reach by morning. He walked the country roads of late Eastern Han Henan the way young men have always walked country roads after dark — quickly, talking to himself, listening for footsteps that were not his own.

On one such night the footsteps were there.

He turned and saw a figure walking with him on the road. The figure had been keeping pace for some time. Song Dingbo had not heard him approach. There had been no rustle in the grass, no scrape of a sandal on a stone. The figure was simply, suddenly, there.

Song Dingbo: "Who are you?"

Figure: "I am a ghost.^{[1]The word the ghost uses — guǐ (鬼) — is the standard Chinese term for a returning dead, a spirit not yet reborn. In the Six Dynasties period when Gan Bao was compiling these stories, the guǐ was understood not as a horror-movie monster but as a kind of social category — a recently dead person who had not yet adjusted to incorporeality and who could be encountered, conversed with, and even cheated on a country road, much as a living traveler might be.} And who are you?"

Song Dingbo's mouth was, by the testimony of the Soushen Ji and three hundred subsequent retellings, faster than his fear. He answered without thinking.

Song Dingbo: "I am a ghost too."

Ghost: "Where are you going?"

Song Dingbo: "I am going to Wancheng market."^{[2]Wancheng (宛城) was the administrative seat of Nanyang commandery in the Han dynasty, in modern southern Henan province. Its market was one of the larger ones in the southern Yellow River basin and would, in the late Han period, have been busy from before dawn — explaining both the early-morning timing of the climax and the fact that a buyer for an unmarked sheep was available without questions.}

Ghost: "I am also going to Wancheng market."

So they walked together.

They walked several lǐ (里, the Han-dynasty road-mile, roughly five hundred meters — perhaps a mile and a half of modern road covered in silence between them) before the ghost spoke again.

Ghost: "Walking is too slow. Why don't we take turns carrying each other on our backs?"

Song Dingbo: "Excellent."

The ghost shouldered him first. They went several lǐ with the ghost moving easily, the man on its back. Then the ghost set him down and said something Song Dingbo had not expected.

Ghost: "You are very heavy. Are you sure you are a ghost?"

Here was the first test, and Song Dingbo passed it on his feet.

Song Dingbo: "I am a new ghost. I have not been dead long. My body is still heavy. That is all."

The ghost considered. The ghost accepted this. They traded places. Song Dingbo now carried the ghost on his back. The ghost weighed, by Song Dingbo's quiet astonishment, almost nothing — like carrying a coat full of air. They went on.

They traded turns two more times. The pattern held. The ghost weighed nothing. Song Dingbo weighed too much.

After the third exchange, Song Dingbo — walking now beside the ghost on the open road, with the moon up and the village dogs barking somewhere behind them — decided that, having survived three weighings without being unmasked, he might as well find out something useful.

He asked, in the most innocent voice a frightened young man can produce on a country road at midnight, the question his entire life would later turn on.

Song Dingbo: "I am a new ghost. I do not yet know what we are supposed to be afraid of. What is the one thing a ghost dislikes most?"

The ghost — who had taken him at his word three times already — answered.

Ghost: "The only thing we cannot stand is human saliva.^{[3]The specific Chinese term Gan Bao uses for human saliva is tuò (唾), which carries a slightly stronger connotation than the modern English "spit" — it implies deliberate, forceful expulsion of saliva, with the social meaning of contempt or aggression. The detail that ghosts cannot bear human saliva enters Chinese folklore as a permanent rule after this story. Later ghost tales will routinely have human protagonists spit at threatening apparitions; the gesture is sometimes called tuò guǐ (唾鬼), "to spit at a ghost," and it is one of the few defenses that costs the spitter nothing.} If a person spits on us, we cannot bear it."

Song Dingbo did not change his face. He thanked the ghost politely for the instruction. They walked on.

They came to a stream.

Song Dingbo, who had been thinking about the question of weight and water for the last lǐ, asked the ghost to cross first. The ghost stepped down into the water, and Song Dingbo listened. There was no sound. No splash. No drip. The ghost walked across the surface, and the river did not register him.

Then Song Dingbo crossed.

His sandals slapped. His robe dragged. The water made the loud, wet, uncomplicated noise of a living man wading through a country stream after midnight.

The ghost was waiting on the far bank.

Ghost: "Why are you so noisy in water?"

Song Dingbo had been thinking about this one too.

Song Dingbo: "I told you. I am newly dead. I have not yet learned how to cross a river quietly. Please do not be offended."

The ghost — and this is the part of the story that has always astonished me, and that Gan Bao does not bother to explain — accepted this. They walked on toward Wancheng.

They reached the outskirts of Wancheng market as the first carters were setting up before dawn. Song Dingbo could see the lamps. He could hear the bargaining starting. He could smell the early bread.

He had been turning the equation over in his head for the last several lǐ. A creature that weighed nothing. A creature that crossed water without a sound. A creature that had now told a stranger on the road, in the most explicit terms, what the one thing in the universe it could not survive was.

And the creature was walking, willingly, toward a Han-dynasty country market at first light, on the back of a young man with sweat and saliva in his mouth.

Song Dingbo set the ghost on his shoulders, gripped it tight with both hands, and broke into a run.

The ghost screamed. The scream was the kind of high, brittle, zǎzǎ (咋咋) creaking sound the Soushen Ji records very precisely — a sound, Gan Bao says, like a dry reed snapping — and the ghost demanded to be put down. Song Dingbo did not listen. He held on. He ran.

He carried the ghost straight into the middle of Wancheng market and set it on the ground. The instant its feet touched the dirt of the marketplace, the ghost transformed. It became a sheep. A live, bleating, ordinary-looking sheep, standing in the dust between the bread-seller and the cloth-seller, smelling of nothing in particular and looking confused.

Song Dingbo spat on it. Once, firmly, on the back of its neck. The sheep flinched but did not change. It stayed a sheep.

He sold the sheep, on the spot, to a buyer who did not ask where it had come from.

The price, the Soushen Ji records — and the line has been quoted in Chinese for sixteen hundred years — was fifteen hundred coins.^{[4]Fifteen hundred qián (钱) in late Eastern Han currency — the small bronze cash coin with a square hole — would have been roughly a month's wages for an ordinary laborer. Not a fortune, but not nothing either. The figure is precise enough in the original that it feels less like a folk number (which would have been "a thousand" or "ten thousand") and more like the actual price a sheep would fetch at Wancheng market in the early second or third century — which is part of why the story has the texture of a real anecdote that drifted into legend, rather than a legend that was invented whole.}

He took the money and went home.

The contemporary scholar Shi Chong (石崇, the famously wealthy Western Jin official who collected anecdotes about ordinary men with unusual fates) is said to have heard the story and remarked, in the dry single line that became the tale's epitaph:

"Dingbo sold a ghost. He got fifteen hundred coins."^{[5]Shi Chong (石崇, 249–300) was a notoriously wealthy Western Jin official whose recorded sayings included a number of dry one-liners about ordinary men who got the better of extraordinary situations. The attribution to him is part of the Soushen Ji's framing apparatus — Gan Bao often appended a contemporary or near-contemporary scholar's quoted remark to a story, both as a stamp of historical authenticity and as a kind of moral coda. Whether Shi Chong actually said it is impossible to verify; that he was the kind of figure to whom such a line could plausibly be attributed is part of the story's claim on its sixteen-hundred-year audience.}

Translator's Reflection

What I love about this story is that the young man is not a hero.

He is not brave. He is not virtuous. He is not pious. He does not have a Daoist master, a magical talisman, a learned uncle, or any of the standard tools that Chinese ghost stories usually hand to their protagonists. He has nothing but a fast tongue and an empty road, and he walks into the most dangerous social encounter of his life with the calm of a man who has decided, on the spot, to lie about who he is.

The story is sometimes taught in Chinese classrooms as a moral about cleverness defeating superstition. I think that reading misses what makes it strange. The ghost in this story is not stupid. The ghost weighs Song Dingbo three times. The ghost asks about the water. The ghost is suspicious. The ghost is just — and this is the part that has always unsettled me — polite. It accepts every explanation Song Dingbo offers, not because the explanations are good, but because the ghost has decided, somewhere on the early stretch of that road, to trust the stranger walking beside it.

That is the part I cannot stop thinking about. Two beings on a night road in late Eastern Han Henan, one of them a ghost and one of them a young man, and the dangerous one is the one with the heartbeat.

The detail Gan Bao puts at the end — that Song Dingbo, having sold the sheep, also spat on it to keep it from transforming — is the one I find most chilling. He has already won. He has the money in his hand. The sheep is already someone else's problem. And still he spits, because he knows, by now, exactly how the rules of this kind of encounter work. He has learned them from the ghost itself. The lesson the ghost gave him for free, walking down a country road, was the lesson he used to sell the ghost for fifteen hundred coins by sunrise.

The tale survives in modern Chinese partly because of the line attributed to Shi Chong — Dingbo sold a ghost, got fifteen hundred coins — which became proverbial. It is the line a Chinese grandmother says, even today, when a clever child has outsmarted a slow adult at the market. It is also, if you read it the other way, the line a more thoughtful adult might say in a quiet voice about a young man who has gone home with money in his hand from a road he should not have walked away from.

Next tale: The Drowned Monk Whose Fists Were Empty — a Southern Song forensic case where Song Ci reads a murder off the inside of a dead man's hands. → [Coming soon]