Chinese · 1640–1715
Pu Songling passed the county examination at eighteen and stood first in his prefecture, then failed the provincial examination for the next forty years. He spent his working life as a private tutor in a rich family's household in Zichuan, Shandong, teaching other men's sons and collecting stories from travellers, servants and neighbours. He wrote nearly five hundred of them over three decades and circulated them in manuscript among friends; no printed edition appeared until 1766, fifty years after his death. The tales put fox spirits, ghosts, examination candidates and corrupt magistrates in the same rooms, and treat the supernatural as an ordinary hazard of provincial life. He wrote in terse classical Chinese, not the vernacular of the popular novels, and signed many stories with an ironic authorial comment in the manner of Sima Qian. He finally received an honorary senior licentiate degree at seventy-one. Liaozhai zhiyi became the most reprinted, illustrated and adapted collection of short fiction in Chinese, and the source of more films and operas than any other classical text.