Songling Pu
Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures
"Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures" by Pu Songling is a collection of Classical Chinese stories written over forty years from the late 1600s to early 1700s. This anthology contains nearly 500 tales blending the supernatural with everyday reality, exploring passionate emotional entanglements between humans and otherworldly beings. These marvel tales blur boundaries between realms through vivid detail, using ghosts, foxes, and demons to implicitly critique societal problems. The work circulated in manuscript form during the author's lifetime and became China's most acclaimed supernatural collection since the Ming dynasty.