Written in the final decades of the Qing dynasty by the itinerant painter and writer Xuan Ding (1832–1879), Tales by Lamplight on a Rainy Autumn Night is one of the last great works in the Chinese tradition of strange tales – the zhiguai and chuanqi lineage that stretches from Gan Bao’s Soushen Ji through Pu Songling’s celebrated Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio.
Where Pu Songling built an entire world of fox spirits and ghostly lovers, Xuan Ding wrote from the margins – a low-ranking literatus drifting between cities, recording encounters with the uncanny alongside sharp observations of wealth and poverty, loyalty and betrayal, desire and loss. His tales blur the line between the supernatural and the autobiographical. Ghosts return to repay debts of kindness. Courtesans outwit their keepers. Scholars chase treasure only to find emptiness. Beneath the strange events lies a melancholy portrait of late imperial China in a period of profound upheaval.
This is the first complete English translation of the Yeyu qiudeng lu – a work that has never before been available to non-Chinese readers. Over five hundred pages of tales, rendered in full for the first time, preserving the atmosphere and literary texture of Xuan Ding’s classical prose.
A landmark addition to the literature of the strange, and essential reading for anyone drawn to classical Chinese fiction, ghost stories, and the twilight world between the living and the dead.
