Classical Chinese Tales of the Supernatural and the Fantastic

In Chinese literary history, the Six Dynasties (317-588) and the T'ang(618-906) were the great creative times for the production of supernatural andfantastic stories in the classical language. This major collection of ninety-sixstories, most of them newly translated, represents the very best of this tradition.These are all basically fictional narratives or stories, butunlike Western supernatural stories, are considered more or less as records ofobservable facts and have the effect of giving the fantastic a rootedness inhistorical reality. Underlying the recording of these supernatual stories is abelief in supernaturalism and magic and, above all, the acceptance of the unnaturaland the supernormal on their face value as factual.