Cathay Tales is an independent editorial project translating short fiction from late imperial China — fox spirits and rural ghosts, forensic case files from the 13th century, mythic wars between gods, gothic horror from a Qing libertine, and a fantasy voyage to thirty impossible kingdoms.
Six parallel series. One project. All from the public domain. All annotated so a reader who has never opened a Chinese book can still feel the story land.
Six themed hubs gather tales across centuries — pick one to follow a single thread of Chinese folklore.
In Chinese folklore, the fox is the most famous shapeshifter — sometimes a seductress, sometimes a faithful wife, sometimes a Daoist apprentice on the road to immortality. These translated tales collect fox stories across centuries, from the cunning trickster of the Tang to the loyal fox widow of the Qing.
No love story in classical China ends at the grave. Lovers return as ghosts to keep promises. Husbands and wives meet again across realms. The lines between the living and the dead were never the border Western readers might expect.
In Chinese folk Buddhism, karma is not metaphor — it is a debt with interest. These tales trace what happens when the debt comes due across lifetimes: animals that remember past insults, neighbors who recognize old enemies, and the strange patience of moral arithmetic.
The Chinese underworld is not a place of pure punishment — it is a bureaucracy. Courts, ledgers, registers, magistrates. Souls queue. Officials file paperwork. These tales follow what happens when the world below behaves exactly like the world above.
Not every Chinese ghost wants revenge. Some just want a candle, a chat, or to be left alone. These translated tales collect the country's long catalogue of strange encounters — and the scholars, monks, and ordinary householders who learned to live next door to the dead.
Long before xianxia, classical China was full of Taoist marvels — apprentices who learned to walk through walls, hermits who flew swords across mountains, alchemists who paid for immortality in years of their own lives. These tales translate the originals.
Cathay Tales collects centuries of Chinese strange-stories, ghost stories, and karma tales — translated with the original on the page and a short reflection from the translator. With six hubs and a growing archive, the question most newcomers ask is the same: where do I begin? Here are three honest paths in, depending on what you came for.
Start with the foxes. They're the most beloved figures in the entire tradition — half spirit, half woman, sometimes scholar's lover, sometimes deadly trickster. Pu Songling's fox stories from Liaozhai Zhiyi read almost like Borges or Kafka written 250 years earlier: short, strange, and quietly devastating.
→ Begin at the Fox Spirits hub.
The Chinese ghost story is older and stranger than its Western cousin. Spirits keep account books, drown bridegrooms in mirrors, and argue with magistrates. Try the haunting tales first, then descend into the bureaucratic underworld where every soul is filed and every karmic debt eventually called in.
Two hubs read like meditations: karma stories where every cruelty returns and every kindness is repaid across lifetimes; and love-across-death tales where devotion outlasts the grave. These are the tales scholars and monks copied for centuries — moral fiction with no easy moral.
Every tale is presented with the original Chinese alongside the English translation and a brief Translator's Reflection — what the story meant in its own time, what it might mean now, and the small choices we made in turning one century's voice into another's. No prior knowledge of Chinese is needed; footnotes appear only where they help, never where they show off.
A young scholar lodged in a temple near Mount Lao and fell in love with a girl who visited him every evening. She was beautiful, eloquent, and gone before dawn each morning without fail. He did not know she was the spirit of a white peony that had grown in the temple garden for a hundred years. When the peony was dug up and died, he dug the stump out of the ground and wept over it every day. Then her ghost came to him and said: you can bring me back. But first you must do something no one has ever done for a flower.
Tang Ao, Lin Zhiyang, and old Duo Jiugong land at a coast so dazzlingly white it hurts the eyes. Every man on the street is elegant, every wall is a couplet, every doorway is a school. Inside the most impressive schoolroom sits a beautiful scholar in tortoiseshell glasses who tests them with mock-condescension and refuses to be impressed. Then the students begin reciting behind his back. And the Mencius text they are chanting — 'cut me, cut me, and turn against the cutting of others' — is not, exactly, a text that exists.
A young merchant's wife was found dead in her chamber. The husband said she had died in a hidden childbirth. The local officer was ready to sign the certificate. The regional inquest commissioner looked at the body once and asked one question — where was the child, and where were the breasts of a woman who had just given birth?
A twenty-year-old hunter in Fanyang chased a wounded deer until he came to a manor that had never been there before. Inside, an official showed him a marriage letter written by Lu Chong's own dead father, arranging a match with a girl he had never met. He married her over three days. Four years later, on the waterside, she came back — with a child, a poem, and a golden bowl.
A young man of good family drank his inheritance to nothing and stood one winter afternoon at the east gate of Chang'an, cursing the sky. A stranger in white listened, then handed him three million cash and walked away. Two years later, the money was gone. The stranger came back. He handed him ten million more. Two years later, that was gone too. The third time, the young man understood there was a test being run on him — but not what the test was.
A ministry official's son could not dress himself at sixteen. The doctors called it hopeless. Then a stranger arrived at the gate with her teenage daughter and asked, calmly, if the boy would marry her — no dowry required, no questions answered. Within a week the girl was dressing the son in imperial robes for fun, kicking a ball at a visiting official's face, and drowning her husband in a tub of scalding water. Every prank was a piece of magic. And the whole marriage, it turned out, was a debt being paid for something that had happened one afternoon thirty years earlier, in a rainstorm, by a young man with a raincoat.
A traveling sheep-trader in Shanxi asks to spend the night in a temple no one has entered for years. The villagers unlock it, warn him, and hand him the key. At the third watch, something seven or eight feet tall, green-furred from the neck down, climbs out of the platform under the statues and comes for him. By morning he is up a tree. By noon the county magistrate has arrived with shovels.
A middle-aged clerk sleeping alone in a provincial garrison dreamed of a woman who called herself a Jade Maiden from Heaven. She said the Heavenly Emperor had pitied her orphaned state and sent her down to be his wife. Three nights later she came, in the flesh, with eight attendants and a curtained carriage. She stayed seven years. Then one of his colleagues saw her. And Heaven took her back.
Two bandit brothers in Xianxian county had been robbing for years without ever being caught. Then one night the older brother dreamed of his dead father, who was carrying what looked like a very careful ledger. The father explained, quietly, which kinds of money were safe to steal and which one kind was not. Twelve months later both brothers were hanged.
A merchant's daughter teased a clumsy scholar: cut off your sixth finger and I'll marry you. He did it with an axe. She teased again: cure your foolishness. He couldn't. Then one spring afternoon his soul walked out of his body and followed her home — and stayed three days in her bedroom as a ghost no one could see. That was only the first time he gave up his body to be near her.
A failed examination candidate, stranded in Hangzhou as a private tutor, lets the neighborhood matchmaker arrange a wedding to a quiet young woman. A year later, walking home alone after a holiday in the western hills, he begins to discover that every single person at the wedding has been dead for over a year.
Tang Ao, Lin Zhiyang, and old Duo Jiugong land at a country where every citizen walks half a foot above the ground on a small private cloud — and the cloud is colored. Five-color rainbow clouds for the morally luminous. Yellow for the merely decent. Black for the secretly rotten. A beggar walks past on a rainbow. A pious-looking official passes by with his feet wrapped in red silk.
A merchant's wife was found in the burned wreckage of her own bedroom. The brother-in-law said she had knocked over an oil lamp in her sleep. The local officer was ready to write it up as a household accident. Song Ci asked one question — was there any soot in her windpipe?
A Qing fox-hunter is out at the graveyard with his torch and his net when something else comes out of the grave instead. A figure in scholar's robes climbs out of the top of a tomb, gives a long whistle, and the foxes arrive. The hunter scrambles up the nearest tall tree. The ghost in the square cap nods to the foxes and tells them to saw it down.
A Tang knight-errant seduces another man's wife, then — caught in her bedroom by the returning husband — picks up his rival's own sword and uses it. The husband, drunk and asleep, wakes to find his wife dead and is dragged off to be executed for a murder he did not commit. The killer watches the crowd gather at the execution ground, then steps out from among the onlookers and asks the bailiffs to switch prisoners.
A Qing general settles down for an evening of reading and finds a small fox spirit folding itself in through the window-crack. The fox introduces himself as a licensed scholar, explains he has tenure on the upper floor, and — when the general scoffs — produces his credentials. He has, he says, passed the annual examination administered by the Goddess of Mount Tai. Then he tries to recruit the general into the immortality track.
A late-Ming storyteller took the line from Zhuangzi about the philosopher drumming on a basin after his wife's death and built a longer, crueler story underneath it: Zhuangzi sees a young widow fanning her husband's grave dry so she can remarry, comes home, picks a fight with his own wife about whether she would do the same, then fakes his death to find out. The test runs exactly the way he feared. The basin he drums on at the end is not his wife's coffin.
A young scholar in Shandong took a bet to spend the night alone in a derelict mansion that everyone said was haunted. At midnight a fox clan came up the stairs to throw a wedding banquet around his sleeping body. He pretended to be asleep — then quietly slipped one of their golden cups into his sleeve. Ten years later, an old official took out a matching set of seven cups, baffled that the eighth had vanished from a sealed chest.
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.
An old monk was found face-down in the lotus pond behind his temple. The novice who found him was already weeping. The local officer was already writing up a suicide. Song Ci took one look at the dead man's hands — closed, but empty — and asked who had been alone with him the night before.
Tang Ao, Lin Zhiyang, and old Duo Jiugong sail past the Country of No Descendants and land at a coast where the people are thin, anxious, and have no intestines. Food passes through them unchanged in minutes. They are not embarrassed about this. They are, the locals proudly explain, the most economical eaters in the world — because in a rich household, what the master eats once, the servants eat again.
A scholar failed his exams, went home through the mountains, and met a woman tending sheep by the road, looking miserable. He asked what was wrong. She said she was a dragon princess, married to a cruel husband, and asked him to carry a letter to her father, the Dragon King at the bottom of a lake. He said yes. Her uncle found out, flooded a city, ate the husband — and then offered the scholar the princess as a bride.
A young scholar fell in love with a girl at a lantern festival who laughed at him and walked away. Months later, half-dead from longing, he found her in a mountain valley where she laughed at everything — funerals, weddings, intimacy, scoldings. He married her anyway. Then one day she stopped laughing — and told him she had been raised by a ghost.
A three-year-old boy raised on a mountain in total seclusion from the world finally came down at sixteen. His master pointed out the cow, the horse, the rooster, the dog. Then a young woman walked past, and the master had to think fast.
A swordsmith forged the king a pair of legendary blades, then hid the better one in the wall and died for it. Years later his son went looking for revenge with the wrong head — and a stranger on the road offered to carry it for him.
A peasant hid himself in a pile of corpses to escape passing soldiers. When the army marched off, the dead sat up around him — and started crying. They were not crying about the army. They were crying about what was coming next.
A scholar fell in love with a beautiful woman who appeared at his window. She only came every seven or eight days. He thought it was because her husband watched her closely. The truth was she was rationing him.
A merchant's daughter in the Northern Song capital fell in love with a tavern keeper's son across a teahouse. Her father said no. She died of grief. A grave robber dug her up that night and accidentally woke her. By the time the story was over, she had died for the same man twice — and did not blame him for it once.
A widow in a Southern Song village said her husband had hanged himself in the granary. The rope was still around his neck when the magistrate arrived. Song Ci looked at the angle the rope was pointing — and asked her to step outside.
Tang Ao, Lin Zhiyang, and old Duo Jiugong walk into a country where the customs officers wear scholars' robes, the children quote the Classic of Poetry on the street corner, and even the tavern waiter answers a drink order in the elaborate parallel-particles of literary Chinese. The wine turns out to be vinegar. A hunchbacked old pedant at the next table delivers a monologue with eighty 'zhi' in it. And nobody in the country seems to think any of this is strange.
On a hot summer afternoon in 1727, a Hangzhou weiqi master excused himself from a friendly tournament to take a nap. A few minutes later he was face-down on the floor, foaming at the mouth, with a story about something blowing cold air up through the mat from beneath the bed.
He read an ancient war manual for a year and was sure he could command a hundred thousand troops. He read an old water-engineering book for a year and was sure he could turn a thousand miles of land into farmland. Both times, the ancients did not seem to have lied to him — and yet.
He had not seen her in eight years. When he came back to Huazhou to find her, the door was silent and a neighbor told him she had died of longing — two years before. That night, in the empty house, she came back through the wall.
A seventy-year-old man spent his whole life talking to his flowers. A rich bully tore the garden down in one afternoon. The flowers came back that night — and the rich man's troubles were just beginning.
A young scholar takes a desk into an abandoned temple. A girl in a red gown shows up at his window. He turns her away. She comes back to confess what she actually is — and what she wants from him.
A prince of the Liang dynasty grew up suspecting that his real father was the dead emperor his stepfather had overthrown. He stole into a sealed tomb at midnight and tested the bones with a drop of his own blood. What he did next, to be sure, is the part the historians could not unwrite.
A forty-year-old bachelor scholar marries a woman who walks in out of the dark. She gives him one rule: do not look at me by lamplight for three years. He breaks the rule at year two — and learns what part of her was already gone.
Tang Ao and his old shipmate Duo Jiugong walk into a country where everyone — men, women, children — has black teeth and black skin. They expect ignorant savages. They find a city of schools, where two teenage girls in a single afternoon ask questions about the Book of Songs and Tang phonology that the old scholar from the imperial capital cannot answer.
A Tang spendthrift wasted two enormous fortunes given to him by the same old man on the same street corner. The third time, given thirty million strings of cash, he finally settled his debts of gratitude. Then the old man brought him to a mountain altar and asked one thing in return — stay silent through whatever you see. Demons could not break him. Hell could not break him. His own infant son, dashed against a stone, broke him with a single sound.
On a dare, a slow-witted scholar carried the temple's statue of a Hell Judge home for drinks. That night the statue knocked at his door. They became friends. Some months later, after enough wine, the scholar asked his green-faced friend whether anything could be done about his dull mind — and his ugly wife. The judge had answers for both.
A king refused to let his daughter marry a young scholar. She died of grief. Three years later he came back from his studies and went to weep at her grave — and she walked out of it to meet him.
A scholar took shelter from a storm in a stranger's house, found a coffin in his guest room, and watched a white-bearded corpse climb out of it at midnight to light a pipe from his bedside candle.
A scholar in Taiyuan picked up a beautiful runaway girl on the road and hid her in his study. Then a Daoist warned him that something was wrong. He climbed the broken wall to peek through the window — and saw what was actually painting her face.
A respectable magistrate came to drive a fox spirit out of a haunted study with all the proper rhetoric. The fox heard him out, then read his motives back to him from the rafters. The illiterate kitchen maid, on the other hand, didn't even have to speak.
A peasant lies dead in a country lane with a dozen sickle-cuts on his body and his coin-purse untouched. The local coroner orders every household within a li to bring out their sickles. He lays seventy of them in a row in the summer sun — and waits for the flies to choose.
A small businessman in Lin'an comes home drunk one evening, finds his teenaged second wife waiting up for him, and tells her — as a joke — that he has just sold her to another man for fifteen strings of cash. He falls asleep. Before morning, four people are dead, and a young woman and a stranger she met on the road are walking to the execution ground for a murder neither of them committed.
The travelers reach a country where the women rule and the men wear skirts and bind their feet. The merchant brother-in-law, Lin Zhiyang, goes ashore alone to sell cosmetics. The female king takes one look at his eyebrows, declares him a candidate for the royal harem, and orders the palace staff to pierce his ears and break his feet by sundown. Li Ruzhen has a Qing dynasty man experience footbinding firsthand — and writes the most direct attack on the practice in nineteenth-century Chinese fiction.
A self-styled "Mr. Open-Hearted" met a hanged ghost on a country road. He named her three tricks one by one and then sang her a parody mantra so cheerful it set her free.
When her father broke off the engagement, the girl took to her bed and stopped speaking. Her cousin sailed away alone in despair. Then, at midnight on a riverbank, she ran barefoot up to his boat — and she had been bedridden for days.
When a Qing dynasty pedant met his dead friend on a country road, the ghost casually mentioned that he could see books glowing inside scholars' chests at night. Then the pedant asked what his own light was like. The ghost stalled for a long time.
A skilled carver and an embroideress who loved him were torn apart by a powerful lord. She died. She kept coming back. And she wouldn't leave him alone.
Every night a fisherman in Shandong poured a cup of wine for the river's drowning ghosts. One night, one of them came up to drink with him — and stayed.
A magistrate exhumes a year-old skeleton, washes it, steams it over hot earth, then holds a red oilpaper umbrella over it in full sunlight. The bruises and fractures the killer thought were lost forever bloom across the bone in a faint, smoky red. The same optical trick is used by modern forensic labs.
A king stole another man's wife. The husband killed himself. The wife jumped from a tower. The king ordered them buried in separate graves — so they would never touch again. Within ten days, two trees grew up out of the mounds and tied themselves together.
Tang Ao and Lin Zhiyang walk into a coastal kingdom where every citizen wears a hood that covers the back of his head. The faces in front are warm, attentive, deferential. When Lin Zhiyang lifts a hood from behind, he finds a second face — fanged, snake-eyed, and grinning. The first face only smiles at people in silk. The second face is what's waiting for everyone else.
A penniless scholar gripes to an old Daoist in a roadside inn about his wretched life. The Daoist lends him a porcelain pillow. The innkeeper is still cooking the millet when the scholar wakes up — fifty years later.
A spoiled young scholar climbs Mount Lao to learn Daoist magic. The master gives him an axe and tells him to gather firewood. Two months later, he begs for one party trick — and goes home thinking he can walk through walls.
Every year the people of a Sichuan county threw three thousand pieces of silver paper down a well, to pay the dead. When the new magistrate forbade it, the elders said: then go down the well and tell them yourself.
Nine girls had already been fed to the serpent in the mountain. In the tenth year, a thirteen-year-old named Li Ji walked up to the cave with a sword, a dog, and a plan.
A young man tracked a fox spirit to an old grave, hoping for a tryst. The fox — two hundred years old, sworn never to seduce a human — told him exactly what fox sex actually does to a man.
A scholar lies dying — and a messenger arrives on a white horse to escort him to an examination hall. The examiners are ghosts. The test question: one line about intention.
In 1247, a Chinese coroner wrote down how to catch a poisoner with a silver hairpin. The chemistry he didn't know he was doing wouldn't be explained in the West for another six hundred years.
A celebrated Beijing courtesan saved her own ransom in secret. When her lover sold her to a salt merchant for a thousand taels, she opened the box she had carried south — and threw a fortune into the Yangtze, one drawer at a time.
On the way home from a failed civil-service career, the Tang scholar Tang Ao steps ashore in a place where every buyer insists on paying more than the asking price, and no merchant will accept it. The market grinds to a halt — but it is not a parable about generosity. It is the most savage piece of satire in nineteenth-century Chinese fiction, and the joke is on you.
A bleeding ghost knelt at the high commissioner's steps and named its murderer. The verdict was overturned. Then one old clerk asked: how exactly did the ghost leave?
Two young scholars studying in a quiet temple. Then one dies, and the other doesn't know — until midnight, when the door creaks open and his friend walks back in.
A penniless strategist, a runaway concubine with a red whisk, and a wild man with a curly red beard who carries a severed head in his bag. The night the three of them meet, the future of the Tang dynasty quietly changes hands.
Two giant glowing eyes appeared in the wall while he was studying. His friend nearly died of fright. He just said: 'Great, I needed light to read.'
A Ming dynasty magistrate quit office because the infighting sickened him. Then he died, refused reincarnation, became an underworld official — and quit again.
A village pig charged to bite one elderly neighbor on sight — and ignored everyone else. Then the old man figured out why.
A famine drove an old couple north to look for their missing son. They never found him. What they found instead was his widow — waiting at his grave for six years, and not quite human.
Most of these books exist in English only as scholarly translations — out of print, behind paywalls, or written for graduate seminars. Meanwhile, English-language readers have an enormous appetite for Chinese ghost stories, wuxia, xianxia, donghua, and folk-horror — but very little of the original source material is easy to find.
Cathay Tales is a small attempt to close that gap. One annotated tale at a time, drawn from six parallel series:
Source texts are in the public domain. Our translations and annotations are released under CC BY-NC 4.0.
Story first, scholarship second. We write the way a friend telling you a strange story would — not the way a journal article would.
Several annotated tales per week — fox spirits, forensic case files, demon hunts — free, by email.
Or support the translations directly — every cup of tea funds the next tale.
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