Zhu Erdan of Lingyang, styled Xiaoming, was bold and free by nature. But he had always been slow-witted, and though he studied hard, he had not yet made a name. One day the members of his literary society were drinking together, and someone teased him: “You have a name for daring. If you can go to the Hall of the Ten Kings1 in the dead of night and carry back the judge2 from the left-hand gallery, we will all chip in and stand you a feast.” For in Lingyang there was a Hall of the Ten Kings, where the gods and demons were all carved of wood and painted to the life. In the east gallery stood a judge with a green face and a red beard, more hideous and fierce than all the rest. Sometimes at night the sound of beatings and interrogations was heard from the two galleries, and anyone who went in felt every hair on his body stand on end. That was why they set Zhu this challenge. Zhu laughed, got up and went straight off. Before long a great shout came from outside the gate: “I have invited the Bearded Examiner3, and here he is!” They all rose. In a moment Zhu came in with the judge on his back. He set it on the table, raised a cup and poured three libations to it. The others looked at it, shrank back and could not sit still in their seats, and begged him to carry it back. Zhu poured more wine on the ground and prayed: “Your student is wild and rash and has no manners. I trust, Great Examiner, you will not hold it against me. My humble house is not far. Come whenever the mood takes you and have a drink with me. Please don’t stand on ceremony.” Then he carried the judge away.

The next day, as promised, the others invited him to drink. At dusk he came home half drunk, and with his spirits not yet spent, he trimmed the lamp and drank alone. Suddenly someone lifted the door curtain and came in. He looked: it was the judge. Zhu stood up. “So I am going to die! I insulted you the other night — have you come to put me under the axe?” The judge parted his thick beard and smiled. “Not at all. Yesterday you kindly made an appointment with me. Tonight I happen to be free, so I have come to keep my promise to a man of open mind.” Zhu was delighted. He tugged him by the sleeve to sit down and got up himself to wash the cups and light the fire. “The weather is mild,” said the judge. “We can drink it cold.” Zhu did as he was told. He set the jar on the table and ran to tell his household to prepare food and fruit. His wife was terrified when she heard and told him not to go back out. Zhu would not listen, and stood waiting until the dishes were ready, then carried them out. They exchanged cups and toasted each other, and only then did Zhu ask his guest’s name. “My surname is Lu,” he said. “I have no given name.” Zhu talked with him of the classics, and his answers came back like echoes. “Do you know examination essays4?” Zhu asked. “I can tell the fine from the ugly fairly well,” said Lu. “In the underworld we read and recite much as you do in the world of the living.” Lu drank hard, ten goblets at a go. Zhu had been drinking all day, and before he knew it he toppled over like a jade mountain and fell asleep drunk across the table. When he woke, the candle had burned down to a dim yellow stub, and his ghostly guest was gone.

From then on Lu came every two or three days. They grew ever closer, and sometimes slept foot to foot in the same bed. Zhu showed Lu his practice essays, and Lu would always strike through them in red and say none of them was any good. One night Zhu got drunk and went to bed first, while Lu went on drinking by himself. In his drunken sleep Zhu suddenly felt a slight pain in his belly. He woke and looked. Lu was sitting bolt upright by the bed. He had opened Zhu’s body and taken out his bowels and stomach, and was putting them in order, strand by strand. “We have never had any quarrel,” cried Zhu in horror. “Why are you killing me?” Lu laughed. “Don’t be afraid. I am only giving you a cleverer heart.” Unhurriedly he put the bowels back, closed the body up again, and last of all bound Zhu’s waist with a foot-wrapping cloth. When he had finished, there was not a trace of blood on the bed. Zhu’s belly felt a little numb. He saw Lu put a lump of flesh on the table and asked what it was. “This is your heart,” said Lu. “Your writing was not fluent, and I knew the openings of your heart5 were blocked. Just now in the underworld I picked out a good one from among thousands upon thousands of hearts and changed it for yours. I am keeping this one to make up the number.” Then he got up, closed the door behind him and left. At daybreak Zhu untied the cloth and looked. The wound had already closed, and only a red line was left. From then on his writing made great strides, and whatever passed before his eyes he never forgot. A few days later he brought out his essays again to show Lu. “They will do,” said Lu. “But your luck is thin. You will never rise high. You will pass the provincial examinations, no more.” “When?” asked Zhu. “This year you will surely come out on top.” Before long Zhu took first place in the qualifying examination, and in the autumn provincial examination he did indeed come first in his classic6. The members of his society had always mocked him. When they saw his examination essays in print, they looked at one another in amazement. Only when they questioned him closely did they learn of the strange thing that had happened. Together they begged Zhu to introduce them, for they wished to make Lu’s acquaintance. Lu agreed. They laid on a great feast to receive him. At the first watch Lu arrived, his red beard stirring as if alive, his eyes flashing like lightning. The others went blank and pale, their teeth chattering, and one by one they slipped away.

Zhu then brought Lu home to drink. When he was tipsy, Zhu said, “You have washed my bowels and scraped my stomach — I have had much from you already. There is one more thing I would trouble you with. Would that be all right?” Lu asked what he wished. “If hearts and bowels can be changed,” said Zhu, “I suppose faces can be changed too. My wife has been with me since we were young. Below the neck she’s not bad at all, but her face is not very pretty. I’d like to trouble you to take your knife to it. What do you say?” Lu laughed. “Very well. Give me time to see to it.” A few days later he came knocking at the gate in the middle of the night. Zhu got up quickly and let him in. By candlelight he saw something wrapped in Lu’s robe, and asked what it was. “What you asked me for the other day,” said Lu. “It has been hard to find. Just now I got hold of a beautiful woman’s head, and I have come to report that your orders are carried out.” Zhu pushed the cloth aside and looked: the blood at the neck was still warm. Lu urged him to go in quickly and not to wake the chickens or the dogs. Zhu worried that the doors would be barred for the night. But when Lu reached the door, he pushed it with one hand and it swung open. Zhu led him to the bedroom, where his wife lay asleep on her side. Lu gave Zhu the head to hold. From his boot he drew a gleaming blade like a dagger, pressed it to the wife’s neck and bore down as if slicing bean curd. The flesh parted before the blade, and the head dropped beside the pillow. Quickly he took the beautiful head from Zhu’s arms, set it on her neck, studied it closely to see that it was straight, and then pressed it into place. After that he moved the pillow and packed it against her shoulders, told Zhu to bury the head somewhere quiet, and left. Zhu’s wife woke up. Her neck felt a little numb, and her cheeks were rough and scaly. She rubbed them and flakes of blood came off. Badly frightened, she called a maid to bring water to wash. The maid saw her face smeared with blood and nearly fainted with fright. When she washed, the water in the basin turned red. Then she raised her head, and her face was not her own at all, and the maid was more frightened still. The wife took up a mirror and looked at herself, stunned, unable to make anything of it. Zhu came in and told her what had happened. Then he looked her over closely, again and again: long eyebrows sweeping into her temples, dimples set below her cheekbones — a woman out of a painting. He opened her collar to look. A red line ran all the way round her neck, and the skin above and below it was plainly two different colours.

Before this, Censor7 Wu had a daughter who was very beautiful. Two men she was betrothed to had died before she could marry, so at nineteen she was still unwed. At the Lantern Festival she visited the Hall of the Ten Kings. The crowds there were very mixed, and among them was a ruffian who spied her and was struck by her beauty. He secretly found out where she lived. That night he climbed in by a ladder, dug through the bedroom door, killed a maid under the bed and tried to force himself on the girl. She fought him with all her strength and screamed, and in his rage he killed her too. Mrs. Wu faintly heard the commotion and called a maid to go and look. The maid saw the bodies and nearly fainted. The whole household rose. They laid the body out in the hall, with the head set beside the neck, and the family wept and wailed in turmoil all night long. In the morning they lifted the quilt: the body was there, but the head was gone. The Censor had all the maids flogged, saying they had kept such careless watch that the head had ended up in a dog’s belly. He reported the crime to the prefecture. The prefect set a strict deadline for the murderer’s capture, but three months passed and the culprit was not found. In time someone told Wu the strange story of the changed head in the Zhu household. He grew suspicious and sent an old woman to look into it at the house. She went in, saw Zhu’s wife, and ran back in fright to tell her master. Wu found his daughter’s body still where it had been, and was too shocked and puzzled to know what to think. Suspecting that Zhu had used black arts to kill his daughter, he went to confront him. “My wife’s head was changed in a dream,” said Zhu. “I truly do not understand how. But to say I killed your daughter — that is a false charge.” Wu did not believe him and took him to court. The household servants were arrested and questioned, and they said just what Zhu had said. The prefect could not decide the case. Zhu went home and asked Lu what to do. “That’s easy,” said Lu. “I will have the girl tell him herself.” That night Wu dreamed that his daughter said, “I was murdered by Yang Danian of Suxi. Zhu the provincial graduate had nothing to do with it. He did not find his wife beautiful, so Judge Lu took my head and gave it to her in exchange. So my body is dead, but my head lives on. Please don’t treat him as your enemy.” When Wu woke he told his wife, and she had dreamed the same. So he told the officials. They made inquiries, and there was indeed a Yang Danian. They arrested him and put him in irons, and he confessed. Wu then went to call on Zhu and asked to see his wife, and from then on they treated each other as father-in-law and son-in-law. And Zhu’s wife’s head was joined to the girl’s body, and they were buried together.

Zhu went to the metropolitan examinations three times, and each time he was disqualified for breaking the rules of the examination hall. After that he lost heart for an official career. Thirty years went by. One evening Lu told him, “You have not long to live.” Zhu asked when it would be, and Lu answered, “In five days.” “Can you save me?” “What Heaven ordains, how can anyone bend for private ends? Besides, to a man who sees things clearly, life and death are one. Why must living be a joy and dying a grief?” Zhu thought he was right. At once he got ready his grave clothes and shroud, his inner and outer coffins. When everything was done, he dressed in his finest clothes and died. The next day, as his wife was weeping with her hands on the coffin, Zhu came drifting slowly in from outside. His wife was frightened. “I am truly a ghost,” said Zhu, “but no different from when I was alive. I worried about you, a widow with an orphan son, and could not bear to leave you.” His wife wept bitterly, her tears running down onto her breast, and Zhu tenderly comforted her. “In the old days there were stories of souls coming back to life,” she said. “Since your spirit still has power, why not live again?” “Heaven’s decree cannot be defied,” said Zhu. “What work do you do in the underworld?” she asked. “Judge Lu recommended me to oversee the records of cases. I have been given rank and office, and I suffer no hardship.” His wife wanted to say more, but Zhu said, “Lord Lu has come with me. You might lay out some wine and food.” And he hurried out. His wife did as he said and prepared it. From the room she heard them laughing and drinking, their voices loud and hearty, just as in his lifetime. At midnight she peeped in: they had vanished without a trace. From then on Zhu came every few days. Sometimes he stayed the night and was as loving as ever, and he saw to the household’s affairs as they came up. His son Wei was just five, and whenever Zhu came he would pick him up and hold him. When the boy was seven or eight, Zhu taught him to read by lamplight. The boy was clever too. At nine he could write essays, and at fifteen he entered the county school as a licentiate, never knowing that he had no father. After that Zhu came less and less often, only once in a long while. Then one evening he came and said to his wife, “Today I must say goodbye to you for ever.” “Where are you going?” she asked. “By command of the Emperor on High I am to be Minister of Mount Taihua8. I must go far away. My duties will be heavy and the road is long, so I cannot come any more.” Mother and son clung to him weeping. “Don’t,” he said. “Our boy is grown now, and the family has enough to live on. What pair of phoenixes stays together a hundred years without parting?” He turned to his son. “Be a good man, and don’t let your father’s calling go to ruin. In ten years we shall meet once more.” And he went straight out of the gate, and that was the end of his visits.

Later, when Wei was twenty-five, he passed the palace examination and was made a Messenger9. He was sent to offer sacrifice at the Western Peak. On the way he passed through Huayin, when suddenly a carriage with outriders and a feathered canopy came racing straight into his procession. He was astonished. He looked closely at the man in the carriage: it was his father. He got down from his horse and lay weeping at the side of the road. His father stopped the carriage. “You have a good name as an official,” he said. “Now I can close my eyes in peace.” Wei lay there and would not get up. Zhu urged his carriage on and sped off like fire, without looking back. When he had gone a few paces, he looked round, untied the sword at his belt and sent someone back to give it to Wei. “Wear it, and you will rise high,” he called from afar. Wei wanted to go after him, but the carriage, horses and men went swirling away like the wind and were gone in an instant. Wei grieved for a long time. He drew the sword and looked at it. It was exquisitely made, and a line of words was engraved on it: “Let your courage be great10 and your heart be careful; let your wisdom be round and your conduct square.” Wei later rose to be Minister of War. He had five sons, named Chen, Qian, Mi, Hun and Shen. One night he dreamed that his father said, “The sword should go to Hun.” He did as he was told. Hun rose to be Censor-in-Chief and was known for good government.

The Historian of the Strange11 says: To cut a crane’s legs12 and lengthen a duck’s is the folly of one who forces nature; to graft flowers and splice trees is the marvel of an inventor. How much more so, then, to chisel and pare at a man’s heart and bowels, and put knife and awl to his neck! Lord Lu may be called fine bones wrapped in an ugly skin. From the end of the Ming to now is not so many years. Is Lord Lu of Lingyang still there? Does his spirit still have power? To hold the whip13 for him would be my joy and my desire.