Admin

In October 2011 two Chinese cargo boats were seized on the Mekong and thirteen crewmen were killed. Finding the man behind it took more than half a year, three failed raids, and a handover negotiated with three governments at once.

A king took an official’s wife, and buried the two of them in separate graves to keep them apart. Then a tree came up out of each grave, and the branches found each other in the air.

The swordsmith knew the king would kill him for taking three years over a sword, so he hid the better half of the pair in a pillar and left it to a son who had not been born yet.

Zheng Liu met a woman in white on an empty road at dusk and spent the night in a great house that was not there the next morning. She was a fox, she told him so, and she stayed with him for years.

Xi Fangping went down to the courts of the dead to clear his father’s name, and found the same thing there that he had left behind: a rich man who had already paid everyone off.

For a month Cheng Ming hunted crickets for the emperor and found nothing, and the magistrate promised to beat him again. Then his nine-year-old son opened the cage.

He was the scribe of the Yellow Emperor, and he read the first characters off the tracks that birds and deer left in wet ground. On the night writing was made, heaven rained millet and the ghosts wept: heaven was afraid people would stop farming, and the ghosts were afraid of being written down.

Long before anyone knew which plants could be eaten, one man put them into his own mouth, one after another, and found out. On a single day he ran into seventy poisons. He taught the world to plant grain and opened the first market, and at the end of the hillside he found a yellow flower that looks exactly like honeysuckle.

The tree on the moon is one and a half kilometers tall. A man with an axe cuts into it, and before he can lift the axe again the wound has closed. He was sent there for a fault committed while he was studying to become an immortal, and the old books never say what the fault was.

She wove the clouds of heaven. He owned one ox and nothing else. When soldiers from the sky took her back, the ox gave him its hide and he went up after her with a child in each basket. He almost caught her, and then a hand drew a line across the sky.