Censored by Confucius (22 page)

"I've really caused you a lot of trouble and I have no way of repaying your generosity. But I do have an extremely beautiful young sister whom I could give to you as a concubine, if you like," he continued.

Mr. Hu asked to see the sister in question and sure enough when they went out into the hall, there stood a young girl of exceptional beauty.

Hu asked hastily how long it would take to arrange the wedding and the monster replied, "Although I am quite happy to have you as my brother-in-law, my sister doesn't want to marry you because you are old and ugly. However, if you shaved your beard she would consider marrying you."

Mr. Hu was indeed a corpulent, full-bearded man of more than fifty. He believed the monster and dutifully shaved off his beard, but after he had done so the monster merely laughed coarsely at him, leaped into the air, and flew off.

Of course, the beautiful sister never did come back.

Yang Er

Yang Er of Hangzhou was skilled in the martial arts and particularly adept with his fists and his staff. One summer night while he was sitting in the cool of a rocky outcrop on a small seat carved out of the stone, he saw a tiny head emerging from a crack in a nearby rock. The hair appeared first and the face quietly followed.

The terrified Yang Er grabbed his staff and struck the protruding head, which quickly popped back into its little crevice.

While Yang Er was in his room the next day, he heard the click clack of clogs from the floor below. He was pretty sure that this was no thief, since thieves would not be so foolish as to wear clogs. It wasn't long before the click-clack noise came up the staircase towards Yang Er's room.

At the doorway there appeared a man dressed from head to toe in white. He wore a tall hat and in his hand he held a box lantern. When the man in white saw Yang Er, he burst into a raucous cackle.

Confronted with this creature, Yang Er promptly struck him with an iron ruler, causing him to topple backwards down the staircase.

The man in white shouted angrily back up the stairs, "You call that a good thrashing! Well, wait till I get my gang onto you. Then I'll show you a thing or two!"

Yang Er called his disciples together and told them of the threats made against him by the ghost.

These rascally disciples roared with indignation and bravado. "So what if they've formed a gang? So have we! We'll defend out master! We'll go up there and beat the living daylights out of them!" they cried.

The men first had themselves a feast, eating and drinking until they were satisfied. Finally they grabbed their weapons and headed upstairs to Yang Er's room. The ghosts, however, were nowhere to be seen.

By the time the cock crowed to herald the new day, these scoundrels had all tired of their mission and fallen asleep. When they finally awoke it was too late. They found Yang Er dead on the bamboo matting in the room below.

Helping a Ghost Get Revenge

The express postman in the Bureau of Salt Transport was a man by the name of Ma Jixian. In the course of his employment he had become quite wealthy, so he purchased for his son, Huanzhang, a position as a minor official.

Now the son himself became a very talented bureaucrat, and he soon grew even wealthier than his father. It wasn't long before the Ma family were millionaires.

Years passed and Jixian, now an old man, bought a concubine whose surname was also Ma. The two of them developed a deep and trusting bond. Jixian was so appreciative of his concubine's efforts that he said to her one day, in reference to his accumulated wealth of several thousand caddies of gold, "You have been such a loyal and attentive assistant in my old age that I have decided to leave you all my property when I die. I don't mind whether you stay on with my family or remarry after my death. It is up to you."

Five or six years later Ma Jixian became gravely ill and called his son to his side. "This woman has been a devoted concubine. I want all my savings passed to her when I die."

However, after his father's death Huanzhang did nothing of the sort.

He and his uncle, Mr. Wu, a former prefect in Quanzhou, plotted to ensure that the money stayed with them.

Huanzhang explained his problem to Wu, concluding, "Who would have thought that my father would want to leave all his wealth to this woman? What a dreadful waste!"

"This shouldn't be too difficult to sort out. I'll come and help you chase her out of the house," Wu responded.

Several days later Huanzhang told the concubine to leave the house where she and Jixian had lived, using the excuse that she should sit with the coffin and wait until the soul had left the body. As soon as she was out of the house, Huanzhang and his wife transferred all the dead
man's possessions, including all his treasures, into their own room. They then locked the door of the old man's house.

Naturally, the concubine remained oblivious to the theft.

When the seven days of mourning were over and Ma Jixian's soul had left his body, the concubine returned to the house planning to go back to her rooms in the inner chambers and begin her life as a widow.

Mr. Wu then suddenly shouted harshly at her, "Aunty Concubine! Don't go back in there! You're too young to remain a chaste widow all your life. Why don't you pack up your things and go home to your mother? She'll find you another man! I'll make sure the young master gives you some money."

Wu then asked Huanzhang to take fifty caddies of silver to the concubine.

Huanzhang hurried out saying, "Look, I've got it all ready for you!"

But the concubine insisted that she wanted to return to her rooms.

"I'm sorry," Huanzhang said, "but this is what our uncle, Prefect Wu, has instructed. I'm sure he's not mistaken in this regard. We've packed all your belongings into boxes, so there is no need for you to go back into the house."

The concubine, accustomed to obeying the orders of her husband and stepson, was also afraid of the power of Prefect Wu. She had no option but to order a carriage and leave, barely able to suppress her tears.

Huanzhang, needless to say, was extremely grateful to Wu for devising such a scheme.

Several months later, during the preparations for the Ghost Festival of July fifteenth, the concubine decided to return to the Ma residence to make some offerings in honor of her dead husband's spirit. By this time, the money she had taken home had been squandered by her brothers and parents. On the twelfth of July, she took some incense and other paraphernalia for worship and set off for the Ma residence.

Huanzhang's wife saw her approaching and hurried out shouting abusively, "You're a shameless hussy! Coming back after you've left the family!"

Her entry to the main rooms thus blocked, the concubine was ordered to remain in the corridors that ran through the outer sections of the residence and instructed to spend the night there before making her offerings.

"You must leave as soon as you complete the worship. I won't allow
you to stay a minute longer," she was told.

The concubine cried and sobbed all night long, the noise ceasing only around the fifth watch. The next day, her body was discovered hanging from a roof beam. Huanzhang bought a coffin for the body and performed the appropriate funeral rituals for her.

The concubine's family made no complaints, nor did they call for any investigation of the death, since they too were frightened of Wu's authority. For his part, Huanzhang felt uncomfortable remaining in a house where a ghost might be living, so he sold it to a Mr. Zhang and bought an even more luxurious mansion.

Mr. Zhang had been a devout Buddhist from a very young age. During his nightly prayers he often encountered the spirit of the sobbing concubine. He eventually found out what had happened. In addition to being angry at having been sold a haunted house, he was quite indignant at the injustice of the concubine's treatment.

He said to the ghost, "Mistress Ma, my family and I paid a lot of money for this house. It wasn't as if we took it by force or anything like that. The hatred you have for Mr. Wu and Huanzhang, moreover, has nothing to do with my family. How would it be if I delivered you to Huanzhang's new house myself, tomorrow night, around the second watch?"

The ghost smiled her assent and disappeared.

The next night, Zhang made a tablet for the ghost, burned incense in preparation, then delivered her to the gate of Huanzhang's new residence.

"Wait here. I'll go knock on the door," he whispered to the tablet.

He then walked over, knocked on the door, and addressed the doorman. "Has your master returned for the night?"

"Not yet, sir," came the reply.

Zhang turned to the ghost and said, "You might as well go in now and prepare to take your revenge."

The doorman laughed, thinking Zhang some sort of lunatic talking nonsense to himself, and thought nothing more of it. For his part, Zhang returned home and spent an anxious night without sleep. Even before the sun had risen the next morning he had rushed back to the Ma residence to find out what had happened.

The same doorman was standing at the entrance. Zhang asked him, "Why are you working so early?"

"You know, as soon as the master returned last night he became
gravely ill. His situation is quite critical now," replied the doorman.

Zhang was terrified at this news and hurried back home. Late that afternoon he made his way back to the Ma's mansion and discovered that Huanzhang had already died. Several days later Mr. Wu also passed away.

Huanzhang had died without sons, so his property was claimed by relatives. Wu also had no descendants, so the fortunes of this line of his family also went into an immediate decline.

A Donkey Helps Solve a Strange Case

This strange tale occurred in 1788 during the reign of the Qianlong emperor.

In Baoding Prefecture, Qingwan County, the Li and Zhang families were joined by the marriage of the Zhangs' son to one of the Li family's daughters.

The distance between the Li family home and the Zhangs' village was more than a hundred miles, and so the customary visit of the bride to her parents after a month of marriage was not a simple matter.

However, the new Madam Zhang made the journey, and when it came time to return she was picked up by her husband. He brought a donkey for her to ride while he walked behind.

About twenty miles from the Zhangs' village they passed through a village where the husband had a number of good friends. They got caught up in conversation and eventually Zhang suggested to his wife that she start off for home before him. The donkey knew the road so there was supposedly little danger that she would get lost.

She had gone only six or seven miles when she came to an intersection. The western path led to the Zhangs' village and the eastern path to Renqiu County.

Just as the donkey was about to cross to the western path, a carriage owned by a wealthy young Renqiu man by the name of Liu came hurtling past. It pushed the donkey off the road leaving the poor animal quite disoriented. The donkey then resumed its steady pace, but this time on the eastern path towards Renqiu, away from the Zhangs' village.

Towards dusk, the young bride began to suspect something had gone terribly wrong. Coming across the wealthy young Renqiu man, whose carriage had stopped, she nervously asked how far she was from Zhang Village.

"You're going the wrong way for Zhang Village. You should have gone west," the young man replied.

"This road goes to Renqiu. You're only a couple of dozen miles away! It's too late to stay on the road, though.

"Come with me and I'll find you lodgings for the night. In the morning I'll send someone over to see you home. How does that sound?"

There was little that Madam Zhang could do, so she muttered her tentative assent to the stranger's plan. He led her to one of his nearby properties. The tenant of the estate was a Mr. Kong and he agreed to provide a bed for Madam Zhang.

By coincidence, Kong's newly married daughter was also back visiting her parents for the first time since her marriage. Faced with a shortage of suitable beds, Kong asked his daughter if she could go back to her husband's, for the night.

"Our landlord's here and we can't offend him, so why don't you head back to your husband's, and when Liu has gone I'll come and fetch you back again."

The daughter saw the predicament her father was in, so she returned to her new husband's house. The room where she had planned to stay was then prepared for Madam Zhang and Landlord Liu. Liu's carriage driver slept outside and Madam Zhang's donkey was tied under the eaves at the eastern end of the house.

The next day at noon, when the two guests had still not emerged from behind their locked door, Kong peeked through a crack in the window to see what was going on. There lying on the bed were two headless corpses; the heads lay on the floor. The young woman's donkey had also disappeared during the night.

Kong and Liu's driver were terrified. Both men trembled helplessly in the face of this disaster.

After some time, when they had calmed down, Kong said secretively to the driver, "You're from Henan, aren't you? Why don't you grab your gear and head back home straightaway? Once the police hear about this I think we'll be lucky to get away with our lives. If you escape now to faraway Henan, you should be all right."

The driver agreed. Later that night before he packed up the carriage, he and Kong buried the bodies.

Now when her son failed to appear as expected, Liu's anxious mother promptly went to Renqiu and filed a lawsuit against the carriage driver.

Similarly, when Zhang discovered that his wife had not reached
home, he suspected foul play and filed an official complaint in Qingwan against his wife's parents.

The magistrate suspected the deceased had been murdered by bandits, so instead of rushing out to arrest the accused persons he decided to do a little investigating in secret.

It turned out that a local hoodlum by the name of Guo San had been seen in the markets trying to sell a donkey that fitted the description of the missing Zhang donkey. The magistrate quickly pulled Guo in for questioning and it turned out that he and Kong's daughter had been lovers. When Guo heard that his lover was to spend a few days back at her parents' house he decided to try to see her.

When he sneaked into her bedroom he saw a man and a woman together on the bed. This sight made him wildly jealous and in a fit of rage he murdered the two while they slept before fleeing on the donkey.

The magistrate then asked Kong about the corpses and was dutifully shown the gravesites. Exhumation began, but strangely enough, only three feet below the surface there appeared the body of a bald monk. Only after further digging were the two bodies in question found.

So, with one investigation both the Liu and Zhang families' cases were solved. However, a new mystery, that of the dead monk, had emerged.

Just as the investigating party was pondering this new case the sky suddenly clouded over and it began to rain. They all hurried for shelter to an old, deserted temple not far from the gravesite.

Conversation with a few of the villagers revealed that the temple had been maintained by two monks, one the master and the other a disciple. But recently the locals had heard that the master had decided to go traveling. Strangely enough, the disciple had also disappeared around this time. On examining the corpse the villagers confirmed that this was the body of the senior monk, who was supposed to be traveling.

An arrest warrant was immediately issued for the disciple, and when they located him in Henan's Guide region he had grown his hair back and taken a wife. The two of them were running a bean curd shop.

On interrogation it emerged that the wife had been the long-time lover of the senior monk. As the disciple grew to be a man she had also taken him as her lover. Eventually she found the older man to be quite unsatisfactory, so she and the disciple jointly resolved to kill him. This achieved, they abandoned the temple and ran off to be officially married.

These two were dealt with according to the law.