Ma Ji, styled Longmei, was a merchant’s son. He was handsome and graceful, free-spirited from his youth, and loved singing and dancing. He often went about with the actors of the Pear Garden, a brocade kerchief wound round his head, as lovely as a pretty girl, and so he got the nickname “the Beauty.” At fourteen he entered the prefectural school and soon made a name for himself. His father, grown old, gave up trading and came home. “A few rolls of books,” he said to Ma, “cannot be cooked when you are hungry or worn when you are cold. My son, you had better carry on your father’s trade.” So Ma began, little by little, to trade on his own account. He went to sea with some other men and was carried off by a typhoon. After several days and nights he came to a great city. Its people were all extraordinarily ugly. When they saw Ma arrive they took him for a monster and fled in a shouting crowd. At first, seeing how they looked, Ma was terrified; but once he realized that it was the people of the country who were afraid of him, he turned it against them. Whenever he came upon people eating, he would run at them, and when they fled in terror, he would finish what they had left. After a long while he came into a mountain village. Some of the people there looked fairly human, but they were as ragged as beggars. Ma rested under a tree. The villagers did not dare come near, but only watched him from a distance. After a long while, seeing that Ma was not one to eat people, they began little by little to come closer. Ma laughed and talked with them. Their speech was strange, but he could understand about half of it. So Ma told them where he had come from, and the villagers were glad, and spread the word among all their neighbours that the stranger did not seize and devour people. But the ugliest of them took one look and went away, and never dared come near. Those who did come had mouths and noses placed much as in China. Together they set out drink for Ma. Ma asked why they had been so frightened of him. “We once heard our grandfathers say,” they answered, “that twenty-six thousand li to the west there is a land called China, whose people all look very strange. We only knew it by hearsay; now at last we believe it.” He asked why they were so poor. “What our country values,” they said, “is not learning, but looks. The most beautiful become the highest ministers. The next are given districts to govern. Even the lowest win the favour of the great, and so they have rich food to feed their wives and children. But people like us — when we were born, our parents all thought us ill-omened and often cast us out. Those they could not bear to abandon at once were kept only to carry on the family line.” “What is this country called?” Ma asked. “The Great Rakshasa1 Kingdom. The capital is thirty li to the north.” Ma asked them to take him to see it. So they got up at cockcrow and set off with him.

At daybreak they reached the capital. Its walls were built of black stone, black as ink, and its towers and pavilions were nearly a hundred feet high. But there were few tiles: the roofs were covered with red stone. Ma picked up a broken piece and rubbed it on his fingernail, and it was just like cinnabar. It was the hour when court had just ended, and officials in caps and canopied carriages were coming out. The villagers pointed: “That is the Chief Minister.” Ma looked: both his ears grew backwards, his nose had three nostrils, and his eyelashes hung over his eyes like curtains. Then several more came out on horseback. “Those are grandees,” said the villagers, and named the office of each in turn. All of them were hideous and grotesque, but the lower the rank, the less the ugliness. Before long Ma started back. When the people in the streets saw him, they shrieked and ran, stumbling and falling, as if they had met a monster. Only after the villagers had explained a hundred times over did the townsfolk dare to stand and watch from a distance. After he had gone back, the whole country knew there was a strange man about. The gentry and grandees were all eager to see something new, and had the villagers invite Ma. But at every house he went to, the gatekeeper shut the door, and the men and women of the household peeped at him through the crack, whispering together. All day long, no one dared receive him. “There is a Gentleman of the Halberd here,” said the villagers, “who once went abroad as an envoy for the late king. He has seen many kinds of people. Perhaps he will not be afraid of you.” They went to the gentleman’s gate. Sure enough, he was delighted and bowed Ma in as an honoured guest. Ma looked at him: he seemed eighty or ninety years old. His eyes bulged out of his head, and his beard curled like a hedgehog. “In my youth I went abroad on the king’s missions more often than anyone,” he said, “but China was the one place I never reached. Now, at more than a hundred and twenty, I have lived to see a man of the superior country. This must be reported to the king. I have lived in retirement among the woods for more than ten years and have not set foot on the steps of the court, but early tomorrow I will go there for you.” Then he had food and wine served and did the honours of host to guest. When the wine had gone round several times, he brought out ten or more singing girls to sing and dance in turn. They looked like yakshas. Each had her head wound in white brocade and wore a red robe that trailed on the ground. What they were singing Ma could not tell; the tunes and rhythms were outlandish. The host watched them with delight. “Have you music like this in China?” “We have,” said Ma. The host asked him to give a sample, so Ma beat time on the table and sang a song. The host was delighted. “Marvellous! It sounds like the cry of the phoenix and the roar of the dragon. I have never heard anything like it.”