The Cult of the Fox: Power, Gender, and Popular Religion in Late Imperial and Modern China

By Xiaofei Kang

For more than five centuries the shamanistic fox cult has attracted large portions of the Chinese population and appealed to a wide range of social classes. Deemed illicit by imperial rulers and clerics and officially banned by republican and communist leaders, the fox cult has managed to survive and flourish in individual homes and community shrines throughout northern China. In this new work, the first to examine the fox cult as a vibrant popular religion, Xiaofei Kang explores the manifold meanings of the fox spirit in Chinese society. Kang describes various cult practices, activities of worship, and the exorcising of fox spirits to reveal how the Chinese people constructed their cultural and social values outside the gaze of offical power and morality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 2006
• ISBN: 9780231508223

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The Cult of the Fox

Xiaofei Kang

The Cult of the Fox

Power, Gender, and Popular Religion in Late Imperial and Modern China

Columbia University Press

New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2006 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-50822-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kang, Xiaofei.

The cult of the fox : power, gender, and popular religion in late imperial and modern China / Xiaofei Kang.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-231-13338-3—ISBN 0-231-50822-0

1. Foxes—China—Religious aspects. 2. Cults—China. II. Title: Power, gender, and popular religion in late imperial and modern China. II. Title.

BL2211.I5K36   2005

299.5’11212—dc22    2005041377

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

To Wang Wei and Alex

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Map: The Chinese Empire in the Early Twentieth Century

Introduction

1. Foxes in Early Chinese Tradition

2. Huxian and the Spread of the Fox Cult

3. Foxes and Domestic Worship

4. Foxes and Spirit Mediums

5. Foxes and Local Cults

6. Fox Spirits and Officials

Conclusion

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Map   The Chinese Empire in the Early Twentieth Century

Figure 1.1   The Queen Mother of the West, the nine-tailed fox, and other attendants on a tomb brick from Sichuan, first–second century a.d.

Figure 1.2   A Daoist talisman for summoning fox spirits.

Figure 1.3   Daoist talismans for the expulsion of fox demons.

Figure 3.1   Portrait of the fox, Hu Santaiye (Grandpa/Master Hu the Third), and his retainers dressed as Qing mandarins.

Figure 3.2   Portrait of the Five Animal Spirits in the early twentieth century.

Figure 4.1   Daoist exorcistic ritual performed for a family haunted by a fox spirit.

Figure 4.2   A literati visit to a fox shrine hosted by a female medium.

Figure 5.1   Bixia Yuanjun (The Perfected of the Azure Clouds), also known as Taishan niangniang (Mother Taishan), in the temple of the Mountain of the Marvelous Peak, Beijing.

Figure 5.2   Wang Sannainai (Granny Wang the Third) in the temple of the Mountain of the Marvelous Peak, Beijing.

Figure 5.3   The Stone Buddha, with its vague features, in the Jieyin temple, Boluo, Shaanxi province.

Figure 5.4   The fox as a Diamond King beside Buddha in the Jieyin temple, Boluo, Shaanxi province.

Acknowledgments

I am greatly indebted to Bob Hymes, a most inspiring scholar, stimulating teacher, and supportive friend. I am also very grateful to my other teachers at Columbia and to the readers on my dissertation committee: William de Bary, Paul Rouzer, Michael Tsin, Pei-yi Wu, Shang Wei, Myron Cohen, and Valerie Hansen. I also wish to express my special gratitude to Paul Katz, who has been a constant source of encouragement and support and whose comments on various versions of the manuscript were immensely helpful in my final revisions.

The following people have read the whole or parts of my work and offered invaluable criticism from historical and literary perspectives: Robert Campany, Christian de Pee, Liu Jianmei, Donald Sutton, Michael Szonyi, Tian Xiaofei, Zhang Dongming, and an anonymous reviewer for Columbia University Press. Sarah Schneewind read the manuscript more than once with enthusiasm and insightful comments. She and Rachel Schneewind also provided editorial help at different stages of my writing. My work also benefited from scholarly exchanges with Shin-yi Chao, Thomas Dubois, Qitao Guo, David Johnson, and Terry Kleeman at AAS panels. Rania Huntington and Li Jianguo generously shared their works and sources with me. James Flath and Chen Xia kindly provided leads to visual materials. Wendy Lochner, Leslie Kriesel, and Christine Mortlock at Columbia University Press shepherded the manuscript into print with great patience.

I would also like to thank my wonderful colleagues at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Christine Adams, Linda Hall, Chuck Holden, and Tom Barrett offered advice when I sought publishers. Jingqi Fu helped me make academic connections in Beijing. In addition to providing much valuable professional advice during our long commute together, Gail Savage read the introduction and offered valuable insights as a non-China specialist. Pam Hicks, Sandy Robbins, Lucy Myers, and Jeff Krissoff are the best administrative and technical backup one could ever find.

My research and ethnographic work in China during the academic year 1997–1998 was made possible by the Columbia Traveling Fellowship. My subsequent trips to China in 2001 and 2002 were sponsored by faculty development grants from St. Mary’s College. While I was in China, Professors Sun Qinshan, Wang Lan, Zhang Yufan, and Zhang Honghong afforded me a friendly intellectual home at Beijing University. Gu Qing, Liu Xinming, Zhang Wei, and Zhan Yiping helped me locate rare materials. My cousin Li Guangxin arranged my trip to Miaofengshan, and my informants in Yulin treated me with incredible hospitality.

When I first came to the United States, I was fortunate to study with Professors Josh Fogel, Alan P. L. Liu, Kenneth Hsien-yung Pai, William Powell, Kuo-Ch’ing Tu, and Mayfair Yang at the University of California at Santa Barbara. They taught me and, in Professor Pai’s case, brainwashed me, with refreshing ideas and personal warmth, each in their own way. Above all, I owe a great debt of gratitude to Professor Ron Egan, who ushered me into the academic field with kindness, patience, and rigorous standards. He has been a role model for me as a teacher and a scholar. I am also grateful to Susan Egan, who has been equally supportive all these years and whose noble personality and incredible talents have won my deepest respect and admiration.

My life in America would not be possible without Bob Orr and Bonnie and Jack Orr, who helped me out of China in the aftermath of 1989 and have welcomed my family into the wonderful Orr family with so much love and support. I also deeply appreciate Carol Huang’s encouragement and support during and beyond my Columbia years. In China, my in-laws, Wang Kezhu and Yang Suzhuang, devoted so much time to babysitting through several hot summers in Beijing so that I could travel and write at ease. My sister-in-law, Wang Xiaoqing, and her husband, Liu Tongpeng, scanned visual materials for me. My sisters, Kang Yanfei and Kang Zhanfei, have done so much to lessen the family burdens on my shoulders so that I could focus on my work. Most of all, my parents, Kang Jidong and Li Zhaoxia, have always answered whenever and wherever I asked for help and stood by me through ups and downs. To them, and especially to my father, who did not live to see the book in print, nothing I say can repay their love and kindness. I also thank my grandmother, my dear Laolao, who showered my childhood with abundant love, care, and fun folk stories. My initial interest in foxes and spirits can be traced to her. In memory of her, I open the book with a story about her.

Finally, my husband Wang Wei has sustained me through all these years with his confidence, humor, intelligent conversations, and unconditional support. My son Alex was born the same year I finished my dissertation and has grown up with the book. He has been a constant source of inspiration with his bright smiles, surprising ideas, and so many little books he has drawn. To them this book is dedicated.

A section of chapter 1 was previously published as "The Fox (hu) and the Barbarian (hu): Unraveling Representations of the Other in Late Tang Tales" in Journal of Chinese Religions 27 (1999): 35–67. A section of chapter 5 appeared in a slightly different form in Minsu quyi (Journal of Chinese Ritual, Theater, and Folklore) 138 (2002): 67–110 under the title, In the Name of Buddha: The Cult of the Fox at a Sacred Site in Contemporary Shaanxi.

The Chinese Empire in the Early Twentieth Century

Introduction

My mother recalls that the backyard of her childhood home in a suburb of Beijing during the 1940s contained a small shrine. It was dedicated to a "xianjia," the respectful term for fox spirits in the local language. Throughout her childhood, she tried to avoid it, and whenever she had to pass by, she ran as fast as she could without daring to look at it. She was afraid that if she came in close contact with the shrine she would invoke the spirits inside, causing them to haunt her and visit disasters upon her. As frightening as the fox spirits might be, however, it was common, if unspoken knowledge in the family that maintaining the shrine would ensure good fortune and well-being. When my uncle, my mother’s only brother, fell seriously ill and had a high fever at age fourteen, my grandmother made offerings at the fox shrine and prayed. That night, my mother told me, my grandmother dreamed of a gray-haired, white-bearded man who descended to my uncle’s bedside and wiped his face once with his long sleeves. Next morning the fever subsided, and the boy soon recovered. The family believed that the white-bearded man was a fox spirit.

I would never have heard this anecdote had I not asked my family about any knowledge of the fox cult during a research trip back to China in 1997. For my mother, as well as for many other ordinary people in north China, things like that were too trivial or too improper to mention in family history. After all, the fox cult had been branded as feudal superstition and banned during both the Republican and the Communist eras. When corroborated by the numerous fox stories in anecdotal literature produced during the Ming (1368–1644), Qing (1644–1911), and Republican (1911–1949) times, however, the family story about the ambiguous fox spirit reflects a tradition that has been deeply entrenched in the local life of north China for centuries.

MARGINAL FOXES, ILLICIT CULTS, AND CULTURAL DIVERSITY

For the Chinese, the fox has long been betwixt and between: it roams in the wild and remains untamable for domestic uses, yet it preys on domestic fowl, builds dens in human settlements, and demonstrates quasi-human intelligence. No clear line divides natural and supernatural foxes in popular imagination. Ji Yun (1724–1805), a famous scholar and an enthusiastic compiler of fox stories, summarizes the creature’s marginality:

Humans and things are different species, and foxes lie in between humans and things; darkness and lightness take different paths, and foxes lie in between darkness and lightness; divine transcendents and demons follow different ways, and foxes lie in between divine transcendents and demons.¹

The marginality of the fox has generated manifold interpretations over the course of history. For example, "huli jing (fox essence), a colloquial expression, connotes a dualism recognized by all: the enchantment of a female beauty and her power of lustful destruction. Another general term for fox spirits, huxian" (literally, fox transcendent, fox genie, or fox fairy), is not merely an honorific for benign foxes, as its literal translation suggests. It also carries an ingratiating undertone by which people propitiate baneful foxes. Sources about fox spirits and fox cults paint even more complex and often self-contradictory pictures. An encounter with a fox spirit could turn into deadly intercourse with a vampire, or a pleasant romance and even marriage. Fox spirits might appear as women or men and transform themselves into youths or elders; they are just as variable as human beings themselves. At certain times they act like ghosts, haunting and bewitching people, causing sickness or death; at others they assume the role of ancestors, granting wealth and prosperity. They sometimes appear as female deities, ensuring fertility or performing healing services; or they turn out to be white-bearded, gray-haired men, lecturing on the Dao or providing moral guidance. As deities of demonic origins, they are worshipped on some occasions and exorcised on others.

The marginality of the fox spirit is expressed both locally and nationally. Although modern zoological research finds that foxes populate almost every region of the Chinese mainland, the Chinese since medieval times have believed that these animals, being innately spiritual, were unique to north China, and that their appearance south of the Yangzi River was rare.² Almost all of the surviving medieval fox tales are set in north China, and a tenth-century proverb stated: There are no wild foxes south of the [Yangzi] River and no partridges north of the [Yangzi] River.³ This view persisted into the Ming and Qing periods, when fox worship was still regarded as a phenomenon particular to the north, even though it had expanded to many other parts of China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Families and villages in north China and Manchuria (today’s Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning provinces and eastern Inner Mongolia) worshipped foxes of different identities and under different titles. Worship of the fox was a personal, familial, local, and regional practice. It varied from person to person, village to village, and region to region. But the fox spirit was also well known nationwide, for its spiritual capability and enchanting power are amply demonstrated in literati anecdotal writings, dramas, and vernacular novels that have circulated all over China since medieval times.

Foxes have been a familiar topic in Chinese literary studies, and much attention has been devoted to them as spellbinding beauties, whose female charm exemplifies the perpetual struggle for human control of unbridled desires.⁴ Little is known, however, about fox spirits as a religious phenomenon that has lasted for more than a thousand years, or about the connection between local religious practices and literary writings about them.⁵ This book, therefore, focuses on the cult of the fox in north China from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Traditionally, cults dedicated to such capricious deities were labeled by Chinese officials and elites as yin, which can be translated as illicit, excessive, licentious, lewd, profligate, or improper.⁶ For centuries they have been the targets of state and clerical proscription and suppression, yet their repeated appearances in historical records testify to the ultimate failure of such control. Using the example of the fox cult, I examine how the illicit cults reveal the nature of Chinese religion, with special interest in the ways in which gender was used to construct religious power. Through the theme of illicit cults and gender, I explore the broader subject of the role of a multivocal religious symbol in expressing Chinese cultural unity and diversity.

As an object of both worship and exorcism, the fox spirit shares features with many spirits and deities with illicit qualities in Chinese religion. From the Song on, for example, the fox was considered a northern parallel of the Wutong spirit in the south. The two haunted, bewitched, and granted wealth in much the same ways.⁷ The fox was also associated with the dangerous power of female sexuality, which it wielded through spirit mediums. In this respect it was cast as a subordinate of Bixia Yuanjun (The Perfected of the Azure Cloud, hereafter also referred to as Bixia), a prominent female deity in north China, and often functioned as her alter ego.⁸ In addition, the fox spirit in rural north China was sometimes comparable with plague spirits bearing names such as Five Commissioners of Epidemics in Zhejiang, Five Fury Spirits (wuchang) in Anhui, or Five Emperors (wudi) in Fujian, for it specialized in inflicting as well as curing diseases. In fact, during the late Qing and the early Republic, the fox was often worshipped together with four other animals—another local cult that was formed by a group of five and called Five Great Families (wudajia).⁹

Despite these similarities with other cults, the fox cult was unique. Based primarily in north China, it never encountered large-scale official suppression during late imperial times, as did the Wutong in Jiangnan. Also, images of fox spirits ranged from male to female and from young to old. They were much more diversified than the Wutong, which only appeared as a young man. In addition, the Wutong wielded its capricious power mainly in the domestic arena, whereas the fox thrived in nooks and crannies everywhere and harassed people in homes, travelers’ lodges, and government offices. The fox’s wider range of activities in the specific economic and cultural conditions of north China also had a different impact on the cult’s development and dissemination. First, the fox cult’s popularity in north China seems to lack the strong support of lineage organizations and commercial gentry-elite demonstrated in the cases of the Five Emperors cult in Fujian and the Five Fury Spirits cult in southern Anhui. Second, in many parts of north China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fox as a god of wealth shows little of the association with urban bourgeois ethics that marked the transformation of the Wutong in the highly commercialized Jiangnan region. Instead, the fox’s frequent invasions of government offices seem to echo various forms of local resistance in north China. They posed a constant threat to state officials, who by the late Qing made offerings to foxes as the Great Guardians of the Official Seal (Shouyin daxian).

Many historians and anthropologists have argued that late imperial China witnessed an increasingly high degree of social integration and cultural homogenization and that the imperial state, officials, educated elite, and ordained clergy were the major agents who promoted and disseminated official standards and interpretations.¹⁰ The history of the fox cult, however, not only demonstrates the limited role of these agents in assuming control of local cults but, more important, also questions the assumption of an underlying cultural unity. Some scholars have challenged this assumption with studies of celebrated elite cults and/or of areas of south China and Taiwan, where sources are much richer than for the marginal cult of the fox in north China. Instead of looking at individual social groups or institutions as the embodiment of a standardizing power, they call for a shift of our attention to the actual processes through which beliefs and practices are produced and to the role of human beings as cultural actors who make different choices from a repertoire of religious models and systems according to differences in their places in society, the situations in which they find themselves, and their views of religious and secular authority.¹¹

The study of the fox cult joins with these theoretical efforts to seek a new understanding of Chinese religion and culture. It shows that the process of cultural integration is inseparable from the production of variations. Fox cult practices, to borrow Robert Weller’s words, nourish a rich surfeit of multivocalic meaning which opens up many interpretative possibilities.¹² By examining the fox cult as a local as well as national phenomenon, I distinguish the different roles played by ordinary folks, spirit mediums, officials, and elite scholars in its practices. On the one hand, people used official language and public standards to aggrandize and legitimize the power of local cults with illicit content, like the fox, in order to promote the efficacy of the cults and to justify their pursuits. On the other hand, people found it difficult to evoke the powers of prominent deities through personal capacities and for personal purposes. They consistently resisted standardizing the deities, by ascribing to them personal, local and imperfect characters and by creating new subcults, so as to always keep the power of the illicit cults within reach. People from all walks of life consciously manipulated gendered images of the fox to negotiate the moral and political order in the family and local community and to construct the relationship between state and society.

THE POWER OF THE BETWIXT AND BETWEEN

Both anthropologists and historians have emphasized the significance of the betwixt and between for the study of culture. Mary Douglas, for example, gives special importance to boundary-crossing animals and spirits in assuring social and moral order. She argues that in a given society, what is perceived to be ambiguous and marginal tends to be regarded as ritually unclean, hence defiling established principles. The marginality of such beings discharges both danger and power to the dominant patterns of the existing social structure.¹³ Victor Turner further elaborates the symbolism of marginality and ritual. He contends that rituals are organized around certain key symbols that simultaneously encompass many different meanings. Only by relating the ritual symbols to social experience can one decipher their multivocality.¹⁴ Turner also develops the concept of liminality:

Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. As such, their ambiguous and indeterminate attributes are expressed by a rich variety of symbols in the many societies that ritualize social and cultural transitions. Thus, liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon.¹⁵

In other words, the betwixt and between represents a liminal phase, an ambiguous and paradoxical stage of being neither this nor that—or being both. It is a ritual stage that allows people to change from one state to another, and thereby to reorder the world and to gain new power to deal with life. Liminal situations and roles tend to be conceived as dangerous, inauspicious, or polluting to persons, objects, events, and relationships that have not been incorporated into the liminal context. In popular culture and folk literature, they are likened to marginal groups, such as shamans, mediums, magicians, and jesters, who usually come from the bottom of society yet are endowed with the ritual power of the weak to reverse established social structures and express cultural oppositions.¹⁶

Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu also shed light on the ways in which power is wielded in social practices. For Foucault, power does not rest in an individual, a social group, the laws, or the state. Rather, it is omnipresent, permeating every single aspect of life. It must be understood as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization.¹⁷ Resistances are embedded in the dense web of power relations and take many different forms: violent, spontaneous, or compromised. Just as this web cuts across apparatus and institutions, so too the swarm of points of resistance traverses social stratifications and individual unities.¹⁸ In his study of the Kabyle (a Berber people living east of Algiers), Bourdieu identifies two types of power at work in society. Official power is attributed to men. It is derived from the formal structure of the kinship hierarchy and associated with disinterested, collective, publicly avowable, legitimate interests. But in reality, unofficial power, which is attributed to women and represents the egoistic, private, particular interests, is also exercised, often under the cover of an official authority. People can use officializing strategies to make the largest possible group conform to collective interests, or deploy unofficial power to adapt to private situations. Applying his findings to human social organization in general, Bourdieu concludes that these powers are generated and conditioned by the habitus, which serves as a cultural repertoire from which human agents develop endless strategies to cope with life and maintain coherence and structure. Sexual and gender relationships, according to Bourdieu, have social and political meanings and are reflected in temporal and spatial arrangements of the domestic and public space.¹⁹

Echoing Foucault and Bourdieu, Joan Scott highlights the importance of gender as an analytical category. She defines it as a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power.²⁰ The construction of gender relationships, in other words, is implicated in the process of conceptualizing and theorizing class, race, ethnicity, religion, politics, and any aspect of people’s social experiences. Religious symbols, and cultural symbols in general, evoke multiple interpretations that constantly negotiate and compete with one another. They symbolize power relationships of human agents and social institutions in a given historical context.

From different angles, these scholars provide theoretical tools with which to go beyond the conventional boundaries between the elite and the popular and study different appropriations of the fox spirit in the exercise of power in Chinese society. Feared yet worshipped, the fox embodied popular perceptions of marginal groups, ranging from daughters and daughters-in-law in family life to courtesans, entertainers, spirit mediums, migrants, and outlaws in society at large. The cult of the fox harbored morally ambiguous pursuits, such as trading sex for money or stealing from one family to enrich another. It also symbolized politically dubious activities, for fox spirits were believed to preach sectarian teachings, instigate rebellions, and take up residence in government offices. I will therefore show that wielding the power of the fox in everyday life involved a complex process of negotiating, safeguarding, and challenging well-established social and cultural boundaries in late imperial and modern Chinese society.

Furthermore, instead of identifying the power of the fox with a particular social group or institution, I study how such power was actually produced in the process of fox worship and fox exorcism. In particular, I pay attention to how people imagined the power of the fox in the context of their social and religious life. The ways they reacted to fox spirits in relation to ancestors, ghosts, gods, and goddesses in specific contexts, rather than the normative labels and titles they applied to the spirits, invested them with both public and private meanings. As foxes freely crossed gender boundaries, their powers were used to define the official and unofficial, private and public, and moral and immoral in social and religious practices. Their marginality embodied cultural conflicts and compromises in everyday life. Cult practices, characterized by a variety of activities of worshipping, exorcising, and writing about fox spirits, reveal diverse popular conceptions of contending power relationships in Chinese society and offer valuable insights into the complex ways Chinese people constructed social order and cultural values.

SOURCES AND METHODS

Anybody who studies Chinese local cults will encounter the problem of scanty sources, and this problem is especially acute in the case of the fox cult. Throughout Chinese history, fox spirits surfaced only occasionally in formal genres such as government documents, standard histories, local gazetteers, Daoist and Buddhist scriptures, and literati anthologies, for they belonged to a terrain about which Confucians did not speak. Also, as I shall show in the following chapters, fox shrines were generally established in insignificant and private places, such as backyards, doorways, or bedchambers, and in extremely simple forms, such as a wooden box, unnamed tablet, or haystack. These shrines were ephemeral, easily erected and quickly torn down. When worshipped in public places, foxes were regularly shielded in temples dedicated to prominent gods or goddesses. These characteristics of the fox cult indicate that its practices might be considered not only inappropriate but also less notable for independent entries in local gazetteers and formal documents. Informal anecdotal writings in the form of biji (miscellaneous notes) and zhiguai (accounts of anomalies), as the petty talk (xiaoshuo) outside of official historiography, were convenient tools for the literati to freely discuss the fox cult and the illicit practices fox spirits embodied. They constitute the richest source of material.²¹ During the late Qing and the early Republic, when local customs and religious practices became serious subjects of historical and ethnographic research, fox cult practices began to appear in local gazetteers and works by scholars and missionaries. My study of the fox cult in late imperial and modern north China, therefore, relies heavily on records from the vast repertory of literati anecdotal writings, while using other types of sources as supplements. I sometimes intentionally parallel sources from modern gazetteers, ethnographic records, and missionary reports with anecdotal writings from earlier times to suggest possible historical similarities and continuities and to overcome the shortage of materials from premodern times.

The validity of anecdotal writings as historical records is now widely recognized by scholars of Chinese history and religion. In his groundbreaking study of zhiguai writings in early medieval China, Robert Campany shakes the conventional idea that zhiguai are fictional creations and argues that they were compiled as verifiable historical accounts to fulfill different religious and political agendas.²² Edward Davis maintains that the anecdotes in the Southern Song collection of Yijianzhi (Records of the Listener) are not folktales, but primarily a record of subjective experiences, a document of private life that contrasts with such public documents as historical biographies, eulogies, and grave inscriptions.²³ Based also on Yijianzhi, Robert Hymes argues that biji and zhiguai are a special form of historiography providing the literati a means to discuss matters regarding gods, spirits, and other miscellaneous topics unsuitable for formal genres.²⁴

An assertion of authenticity was deeply embedded in the traditional biji and zhiguai genres. Many Ming-Qing compilers of fox stories adopted a serious attitude and formats similar to those employed when writing official histories. They collected materials from all types of people, ranging from poor peasants to high officials and from household women and servants to traveling merchants and monks. They sought to transcribe tales as accurately as possible, carefully identified their informants and references, and claimed loyalty to the truth.²⁵

Qing anecdotal writings have been divided into two opposite types: one represented by Pu Songling (1640–1715)’s Liaozhai zhiyi (Liaozhai’s Records of the Strange, hereafter referred to as Liaozhai) and the other by Ji Yun’s Yuewei caotang biji (Random Jottings at the Cottage of Close Scrutiny, here after referred to as Yuewei), both major collections of fox stories that attracted large numbers of followers.²⁶ Liaozhai is hailed as a masterpiece of Chinese fiction, inheriting the Tang tradition of chuanqi marked by well-rounded characters and full development of narrative plots. Ji Yun opposes this trend toward literary re-creation of folklore and emphasizes the faithful recording of original informants in the form of brief zhiguai anecdotes as a prerequisite for expounding on moral ideas. Leo Tak-hung Chan’s study of Yuewei points out that truthfulness and didactic utility were the twin principles that buttressed his [Ji Yun’s] compilation, and "whether the events involving the supernatural did occur and whether the accounts were authentic were