A Pig That Hated Only One Man: A Qing Dynasty Ghost Story / 老翁与猪
A village pig charged to bite one elderly neighbor on sight — and ignored everyone else. Then the old man figured out why.
Classical Chinese tales — strange, forgotten, alive again in English.
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.
Tales
The Fox Widow Who Raised Her In-Laws: A Qing Dynasty Ghost Story / 狐妻守墓
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.
About this project
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:
- Notes from the Thatched Study — Yuewei Caotang Biji 阅微草堂笔记 (Ji Yun, c. 1798). A Qing scholar's notebook of foxes, ghosts, and karmic puzzles.
- Investiture of the Gods — Fengshen Yanyi 封神演义 (Xu Zhonglin, c. 1605). The mythic war that toppled the Shang dynasty, fought by gods, immortals, and mortals with magic weapons.
- The Coroner's Notebook — Xiyuan Jilu 洗冤集录 (Song Ci, 1247). The world's first systematic forensic manual, told as 13th-century true crime.
- What the Master Would Not Discuss — Zibuyu 子不语 (Yuan Mei, c. 1788). Gothic horror, gender-bending hauntings, and forbidden tales from a Qing libertine.
- Flowers in the Mirror — Jinghua Yuan 镜花缘 (Li Ruzhen, 1827). A Chinese Gulliver's Travels — thirty impossible kingdoms visited by sea, including a Country of Women that ruled men in 1827.
- Quelling the Demons' Revolt — Sansui Pingyao Zhuan 三遂平妖传 (Luo Guanzhong, Ming). Dark fantasy: rebel sorcerers, talismanic magic, and a holy woman who summons soldiers from beans.
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.
Subscribe
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.
🍵 Buy me a tea on Ko-fi