About Cathay Tales

Cathay Tales is an independent translation project. I select short fiction from classical Chinese — strange tales, forensic case files, mythic epics, gothic horror, and fantasy travelogues — and render them into careful, readable English with cultural notes and the original text.

Why this site exists

These books shaped how I think about narrative, ethics, and the uncanny. Pu Songling's fox spirits, Ji Yun's laconic karmic puzzles, Song Ci's evidence-first reasoning, Li Ruzhen's satirical kingdoms — they are among the finest short fiction ever written in any language. And yet, for English-language readers, they remain almost entirely invisible.

A few scholarly translations exist — out of print, behind paywalls, or written for graduate seminars. Cathay Tales is a small attempt to change that: the source material made freely available, annotated for a general reader, and published a few tales at a time so each one gets the attention it deserves.

The translator

I write under the name Wang Cai. I came to these texts through years of reading classical Chinese for pleasure, and I translate the way I wish someone had translated them for me when I was starting out: literally where the original is precise, freely where the original is playful, and always with enough cultural context to enjoy the story without a PhD.

Every tale on this site is read, translated, annotated, and edited by me. There is no content farm, no syndication, no AI-generated filler. If a translation is wrong, that is my mistake; if it is alive, that is because the original was.

The eight series

Cathay Tales draws from eight classical Chinese sources, organized by thematic hub:

• Notes from the Thatched Study — Yuèwēi Cǎotáng Bǐjì 阅微草堂笔记 (Ji Yun, c. 1798). A Qing scholar's notebook of foxes, ghosts, and karmic puzzles — deliberate, understated, and often devastating.
• Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio — Liáozhāi Zhìyì 聊斋志异 (Pu Songling, c. 1740). The masterpiece of Chinese supernatural fiction: fox spirits, ghost brides, Taoist exorcists, and scholars who fall in love with things that are not human.
• What the Master Would Not Discuss — Zǐ Bù Yǔ 子不语 (Yuan Mei, c. 1788). Gothic horror, gender-bending hauntings, and forbidden tales from a Qing libertine who believed everything the orthodox Confucians denied.
• In Search of the Supernatural — Sōushén Jì 搜神记 (Gan Bao, c. 348). The oldest Chinese ghost-story collection:幽婚 (ghost marriages), resurrections, and encounters with the dead from the Eastern Jin dynasty.
• Tang Dynasty Chuanqi — 唐传奇 (various authors, 7th–9th c.). The first true short stories in Chinese literature: self-contained, cinematic, and astonishingly modern in their narrative economy.
• Collected Cases of Injustice Rectified — Xǐyuān Jílù 洗冤集录 (Song Ci, 1247). The world's first systematic forensic manual, told here as 13th-century true crime — evidence-based reasoning centuries before Sherlock Holmes.
• Flowers in the Mirror — Jìnghuā Yuán 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.
• Stories Old and New — Sān Yán Èr Pāi 三言二拍 (Feng Menglong & Ling Mengchu, c. 1620–1632). Vernacular novellas of merchants, scholars, clever wives, and cosmic justice — the Chinese Boccaccio.

Translation method

Each tale goes through the same process before publishing:

1. Source check. I work only from public-domain Chinese editions, cross-checking against more than one printing where possible to catch typesetter errors. No modern retellings, no secondary sources.
2. Close translation. A literal pass first, then a story pass. I keep proper names in pinyin and gloss titles, ranks, and place-names on first mention. The goal is fidelity to the original's register — spare where it is spare, ornate where it is ornate.
3. Cultural annotation. Footnotes appear inline as small numbers and on hover. They explain only what an English reader needs to enjoy the story — never to lecture, never to pad the word count.
4. Classical Chinese appendix. Every tale includes the original wényán text in a collapsible section, so readers with classical Chinese can check the translation against the source. This is non-negotiable: a translation without its source is a retelling, and I want to offer the real thing.
5. Editorial polish. A final read-aloud pass for rhythm. I write the way a friend telling you a strange story would — not the way a journal article would.

Editorial principles

I am not an academic journal. I do not claim philological authority. Where scholars disagree, I pick the reading that makes the story most alive and flag the disagreement in a footnote. If I am wrong, I would rather be corrected than be safe.

I am also not a content farm. I publish slowly — a small handful of tales per week — and never republish the same story under different titles or fabricate "tales" that don't exist in the source. Every story on this site comes from a real text by a real author who has been dead for at least a century.

All source texts are in the public domain. My translations, annotations, and editorial commentary are released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Support

Cathay Tales is reader-supported. The most useful things you can do:

• Subscribe to the email list — a couple of tales per week, no spam.
• Buy me a tea on Ko-fi — every cup funds the next translation.
• Tell one friend. Word of mouth is everything for a small project like this.

Contact

Editorial questions, source corrections, translation suggestions, or simply a hello — find my contact details here.

Story first, scholarship second. Welcome to Cathay.