Tales from Tang Dynasty China: Selections from the Taiping guangji ed. by Alexei Kamran Ditter, Jessey Choo, and Sarah M. Allen (review)

Taiping guangji 太平廣記 has long been recognized as a critical source for scholars and students of Tang and pre-Tang literature and culture. Compiled in the late tenth century, the massive compendium contains 500 volumes of materials culled from a variety of earlier sources, which are identified and preserved in Taiping guangji. However, to date, only a small portion of the chapters and individual entries included therein have received extensive scholarly attention, and even fewer have been translated into English. Tales from Tang Dynasty China offers engaging, erudite new translations of twenty-two tales from Taiping guangji, thus making them accessible to a wider audience. The book is an excellent and essential resource for students, instructors, and other readers interested in Tang China.

In addition to the translations, the volume provides a clear and informative introduction that discusses not only the compilation and contents of Taiping guangji, but also important aspects of elite Tang culture and life, such as the civil service examinations, the career path and lifestyle of the government official, the role of poetry in social life, the position of women, beliefs in the afterlife, the nature of the soul, and the supernatural. The translations are grouped into three sections relating to understandings of the relationship between the human realm and other realms: “This World,” “Between Worlds: Otherworldly Encounters in the Human World,” and “Between Worlds: Travel to Other Worlds.” The theme of otherworldly encounters with immortals, ghosts, animal sprites, and other supernatural beings forms an important strand in Tang tale literature and is especially prominent in Taiping guangji; the editors’ organizational scheme is therefore very well-designed and apt. Each translation is prefaced by a useful introduction and list of relevant scholarly works. The volume concludes with several appendices, which include a chronologically organized list of the translated tales and lists of the sources, Taiping guangji categories, and themes for the tales. These materials are sure to prove highly valuable to student and instructor, specialist and non-specialist alike.

The translations themselves are well-written, precise, and engaging. Many of the tales are translated into English for the first time, and the selection of tales has been carefully crafted by the editors and translators so as to provide a range of motifs, styles, and genres. Under the three broad thematic categories outlined above, the tales touch upon themes relating to politics, criminal enterprise, Daoist practice, romantic encounters, family life, and various permutations of human encounters with non-human beings and worlds. The volume includes various stories that deal with tropes that are common in the corpus of Tang tales (for example, the young examination candidate coming to the capital, or the encounter between a human man and a woman who turns out to be a ghost or fox sprite), but with entertaining twists that engage the interest of both students who are new to Tang tales and those who are more familiar with them. For example, “Lu Yong” 陸顒 (pp. 124–131) follows the story of the titular protagonist, a young man who arrives in Chang’an from the provinces as a “tribute student” (gongsheng 貢生) to take part in the civil service examination. However, his life moves in a different, less expected direction when he is approached by a group of mysterious westerners (hu 胡), who visit him at the Imperial Academy for examination students and seek his friendship, offering him gifts of food and drink and, later, gold and silks. It turns out that their goal in so doing is to obtain a wheat-eating parasite residing in Lu Yong’s stomach. The parasite is a “rare treasure” that holds the key to obtaining untold riches. The westerners had been able to locate it by following a green qi 氣 (vapor/essence) emanating from wherever Lu Yong was...