In Caozhou there was a man named Li, a licentiate1 of his county. His family had always been well off, though the house itself was not very large; behind it lay a garden of several mu2, left to run wild. One day an old man came to rent the place and offered a hundred taels of silver for it. Li declined, saying he had no rooms to let. “Please take the money,” said the old man, “and don’t trouble yourself about it.” Li did not understand what he meant, but he took it for the time being, to see what strange thing would follow.

The next day the villagers saw sedan chairs, horses and whole families going into Li’s place, a great crowd of them. They all wondered where Li could possibly put them, and asked him. Li knew nothing of it. He went home and looked, but there was neither trace nor sound of anyone. A few days later the old man suddenly came to call. “We have been sheltering under your roof for some days now,” he said. “Everything has been makeshift, setting up stoves and building hearths, and I have had no leisure to pay you the courtesies a tenant owes. Today I have had my girls cook a little millet, and I hope you will honour us with a visit.” Li went with him. They entered the garden, and all at once he saw handsome buildings there, brand new. Inside, the furnishings were fragrant and lovely. Wine bubbled in cauldrons along the veranda; tea smoke curled up from the kitchen. Soon the wine went round and the dishes were brought, every one of them delicious. Now and then he saw young men in the courtyard, a great many of them coming and going. He heard young women murmuring, too, and talk and laughter behind the curtains. Counting family, maids and menservants, there seemed to be scores of them, perhaps a hundred. Li knew in his heart that they were foxes. When the feast was over he went home, secretly bent on killing them. Every time he went to market he bought saltpetre and sulphur, until he had stored up several hundred pounds of it, and in secret he spread it over nearly the whole garden. Then all at once he set it alight. The flames reached up to the heavens, like a giant black lingzhi3; the stench of burning and the blinding ash kept anyone from going near. All that could be heard was crying and wailing and howling, a din that deafened the ears. When the fire had burnt out he went in to look: the ground was covered with dead foxes, their heads scorched and their faces burnt, more than could be counted. While he was looking them over, the old man came in from outside, his face stricken with grief, and reproached him: “There was never any quarrel or grudge between us. A hundred taels a year for a wild garden is no small rent. How could you bear to wipe out my whole clan? A wrong as monstrous as this will not go unavenged!” He went off in a rage. Li expected him to make trouble by throwing stones4, but for more than a year nothing strange happened at all.

It was in the early years of the Shunzhi reign5. Bandits had risen in the hills, rallying more than ten thousand men, and the officials could not catch them. With so large a household, Li worried day after day about the disorder. Just then an astrologer came to the village who called himself the Old Man of the Southern Mountain (Nanshan Weng). He told people’s fortunes, good and bad, as clearly as if he had seen them with his own eyes, and he became famous. Li called him to the house and asked him to cast his horoscope. The old man started up in awe. “Here is a true sovereign!” he said. Li was greatly alarmed and thought it nonsense, but the old man, his face grave, insisted. Li half doubted and half believed. “Was there ever a man who started with empty hands,” he said, “and received the Mandate and became emperor?” “Not so,” said the old man. “Since ancient times most emperors and kings have risen from common men. Who was ever born the Son of Heaven?” Li was taken in. He drew his seat closer and asked for his counsel, and the old man boldly cast himself as the Sleeping Dragon6. First, he said, several thousand suits of armour and several thousand bows and crossbows must be made ready. Li worried that no one would come over to him. “Let me, your servant, link up the mountain bands for you, Great King,” said the old man, “and bind them close. If I have talkers spread the word that the Great King is truly the Son of Heaven, the soldiers in the hills are bound to rally to you.” Li was delighted and sent the old man off. He dug out his hoarded silver and had the armour made. It was several days before the old man came back. “By the Great King’s majesty and good fortune,” he said, “and with my three-inch tongue, every band in the hills is willing to hold the whip and bridle and follow beneath your banner.” Within ten days, sure enough, several thousand men had come to submit. So Li made the old man his chief strategist. He raised a great standard and set up coloured banners thick as a forest; he took a mountain and built a stockade on it, and his power shook the region. The county magistrate led troops against them; the old man commanded the outlaws and routed him. The magistrate took fright and sent to Yanzhou Prefecture for help. The Yanzhou troops came a long way, and the old man laid the outlaws in ambush and fell on them. The troops were utterly routed, with a great many officers and men killed or wounded. Li’s power grew more fearsome still, his followers were counted in tens of thousands, and so he set himself up as the King of the Nine Mountains. The old man worried that they were short of horses. It happened that horses were being sent from the capital to Jiangnan, south of the Yangzi, and he sent a detachment to waylay them on the road and seize them. After that the name of the King of the Nine Mountains was known everywhere. He gave the old man the title Great General Protector of the Realm. He lay at his ease in his mountain lair, openly full of himself, thinking the day the yellow robe7 would be put on him could not be far off. Because of the stolen horses, the Governor of Shandong was already about to send troops to wipe them out; then the report came from Yanzhou too, and he sent several thousand picked troops, who joined with forces on six roads and closed in from all sides. Troops and banners filled the hills and valleys. The King of the Nine Mountains was terrified. He sent for the old man to make a plan, but no one knew where he had gone. At his wits’ end, the King of the Nine Mountains climbed the mountain and looked out. “Now I know how great the power of the court is!” he said. The mountain fell. He was taken, and his wife and children were put to death. Only then was it understood that the old man was the old fox, who had repaid Li by having his family wiped out.

The Historian of the Strange8 says: A man who keeps to his wife and children and stays bareheaded behind his own gate — where could anyone get at him to kill him? And even if he were killed, how could his whole family be wiped out9? The fox’s scheme was clever indeed. But where there is no seed in the soil, nothing grows however you water it. In the cruelty with which he killed the foxes, the root of a bandit was already in his heart, so the fox could nurse the sprout and turn it to revenge. Now try stopping a man on the road and telling him, “You are to be the Son of Heaven!” Every one of them will take fright and run. Here he was plainly being led into a course that would wipe out his family, and still he was happy to listen. That his wife and children were put to death — what more is there to say? Yet when people listen to wrongful talk, at first they are angry to hear it, then they doubt, and then they believe; only when they and their good name are both destroyed do they see their mistake. That is how it nearly always goes.