In the Tianbao years of the Tang dynasty, in the city of Changan, there lived a young man named Zheng Liu. He had little money of his own and worked for a wealthy cousin of his, a man of the Wei family. One evening he rode out of the city alone along the dirt road on the eastern side.
On that road he met a woman. She was dressed in white, and a young maidservant walked behind her, and the two of them were going along slowly.
It was almost dark and there was nobody else on the road. He reined in his horse and looked at her twice. In that look he lost the next several years of his life.
A fox spirit in a story from China is not the same creature as a monster in a story from Europe.
A European werewolf dreads the full moon. A vampire is held off with a cross and a wooden stake. They are things that change from the inside, and you can recognize them, and there is a way to deal with them.
A Chinese fox is different. It spends hundreds of years in cultivation, and what it learns to do is become a person. It becomes a beautiful woman and walks into the crowd, and no one can tell the difference. It does not bite. It does not eat anyone. What it wants is a human heart. That is the shape of a great many Chinese ghost stories, and it is why they are so hard to shake off afterward.
Shen Jiji, a writer of the Tang dynasty, wrote the most famous story of this kind. It is one of the oldest Chinese supernatural tales that still reads like a modern short story. It is not frightening. It is worse than frightening. It is about a fox who loves like a person, and about what people do to her.
Zheng Liu got down from his horse and spoke to her.
She was not startled and she was not angry. She raised her head and looked at him once, a very steady look, as though she had known he would come. She said her family name was Ren, that she was the twentieth child of her house, and that the family had moved out of the city some time ago to a place out here on the road.
He went home with her.
It was a large house, with a high gate, lamps burning in the courtyard, servants moving about. He spent the night there. In the morning he rode back into the city on business, already planning to come again.
When he came again, there was no large house on the road.
There was a patch of waste ground, with a mound of earth on it, and a few bones scattered in the grass, and beside them the collapsed mouth of a fox den.
He stood there a long time. Daylight came up, and there were people on the road. He asked an old man passing by, and the old man said there was no great house anywhere near here; there had been a fox den once, and it had fallen in. Then Zheng Liu understood. The high gate and the lit courtyard the night before had been staged for one man only.
Afterward he saw her again in the market in the city. She did not hide and she did not pretend not to know him. She simply stood there and waited for him to come over.
He asked her what she was.
She said she was a fox, and that if he did not want her, she would go.
He did not send her away.
Ren lived with Zheng Liu after that. She was not that kind of woman. She kept his house and saved him every coin, and when his clothes tore she mended them herself.
He was poor, and she never once asked him for money. She also never went to the western market.
She cooked well for him and ate almost nothing herself. Sometimes he woke in the middle of the night and saw her sitting alone at the window, and could not tell what she was thinking about. He would ask, and she would smile and say it was nothing, and tell him to sleep.
The markets in an old Chinese city were divided into east and west, and the western market kept a great many hunting dogs. She was afraid of dogs. Dogs knew her for what she was. Everywhere else in the city she could go. The western market she never entered, not one step.
Zheng Liu had a relative named Wei Yin, a young man of good family, rich, idle, and fond of beautiful women. When he heard that Zheng Liu had a woman of extraordinary looks, he came round and insisted on seeing her.
The moment he saw her, he wanted her. He had money and position, and he used all of it. He sent gifts. He made promises. He came back again and again.
He came seven or eight times. Sometimes with wine, sometimes with two servants, and he would sit in the courtyard for half a day with his pleasant talk. She never gave him a warm look, and she never turned him out either. She simply sat, and waited for him to run out of things to say.
She refused him every time.
What she said to him was written down and has survived. She told him that Zheng Liu was a poor man and he was a rich one, but that the things he had, she could get for herself if she wanted them. She said she stayed with Zheng Liu not for money but because he was true to her, and that she had seen his sort before.
Wei Yin, hearing this, came to respect her, and became her friend.
He asked her once, if she had such powers, why she did not make Zheng Liu rich.
She said that she could.
So she began to make money for him.
She knew one thing better than anybody: what would rise in price, and when. She told Zheng Liu to buy a horse, a thin and unpromising animal that nobody wanted, at a low price. He did it. In a while the horse filled out and proved to be very fast, and a man offered three times what it had cost, and Zheng Liu would not sell. Later the price went higher still, and then he sold.
He did this a few times, and his household grew solid.
In time he began to understand something. In those years with him, Ren had lived herself into the shape of a person. Rising early, cooking, keeping the accounts, worrying about him, mending his clothes. But she was not a person. Most of what people have, she did not have. And the one thing she did have, no person could ever use.
The strange part is that she took none of it. Every coin she made, she gave to him. She still wore mended clothes and ate plain food and went without rouge.
There was one thing, though, that Zheng Liu never gave her.
In time Zheng Liu was given a post, and the post was in the west, and he had to go.
Ren refused flatly to travel west with him. She told him the truth. There were hunting dogs in the west, and if she went she would die. She asked him to leave her behind in Changan.
He would not do it. He could not bear to leave her, and he had a little hope in him that the road would pass without incident.
She gave in to him. On the day of departure she changed her clothes and mounted and said that she would go with him.
She was uneasy the whole way. They came to the western edge of the city, nearly out of it, and a large dog came rushing out from the side of the road.
It was a hunting dog, bred to chase foxes.
It came straight for her. She cried out and rolled off her horse, and as she hit the ground she turned back into what she was: a fox, thin and dull-coated.
The dog was on her at once and fastened its teeth in her throat.
Zheng Liu jumped down after her, too late. He gathered the fox into his arms, and it struggled once, and then it was still.
He shouted at the owner of the dog. It did no good. The dog had only done what a dog does.
He sat in the inn that night until morning. The next day he went on to take up his post, as planned. He made a career of it. But from then on there was nobody to keep his house, and nobody to mend his clothes when they tore.
He found a place beside the road and buried the fox there.
The record says that he never married.
Told one way, this is a story about a man who failed a woman. But Zheng Liu was not exactly faithless. He simply would not believe her. He would not believe that her fear was real.
Ren could reckon horses and markets and the hearts of men. The one thing she did not reckon was that this journey would kill her.
Or she reckoned it, and came anyway.
Some readers say she chose to go, and went to walk that road beside him. Others say she only yielded to a man who would not take no for an answer.
Shen Jiji stops there. He leaves her at that crossroads and writes no further.
Writers of the Tang told stories like this and then let go of them at the worst moment. He does not judge whether Zheng Liu was faithless, and he does not say whether Ren was foolish. He simply leaves the crossroads standing. On one side is the post he had been given. On the other is the death she had warned him about.
A fox cultivates for hundreds of years. It learns to be a person, to keep a house, to love. In the end it becomes a fox again and dies in the mouth of an ordinary hunting dog. The dog never even knew what it had killed.
