A Garden of Marvels: Tales of Wonder from Early Medieval China by Robert Ford Campany (review)

BOOK REVIEWS ROBERT FORD CAMPANY, A Garden of Marvels: Tales of Wonder from Early Medieval China. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. xliv, 164 pp. US$26 (pb). ISBN 978-0-8248-5350-1 The appearance of Six Dynasties (220–589) zhiguai 志怪, or “accounts of anomalies,” was an important cultural phenomenon in the history of China but is relatively little studied in the West. In the past three decades, though, several scholarly monographs and translations of zhiguai collections have appeared in English, including Robert Campany’s Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), Kenneth J. DeWoskin and J. I. Crump’s In Search of the Supernatural: The Written Record (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), Campany’s Making Transcendents: Ascetics and Social Memory in Early Medieval China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009), Campany’s Signs from the Unseen Realm: Buddhist Miracle Tales from Early Medieval China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012), as well as my own Buddhism and Tales of the Supernatural in Early Medieval China: A Study of Liu Yiqing’s Youming lu (Leiden: Brill, 2014). However, volumes devoted to English translation of zhiguai texts remain rare. Campany ’s A Garden of Marvels, translated primarily for undergraduate students and other non-specialist readers, is an important new contribution to this field. On first sight the title may appear to readers familiar with this field as indicating a translation of Liu Jingshu’s 劉敬叔 (fl. early fifth century) Yiyuan 異苑. However, Campany’s is by far the most comprehensive English rendition of selected tales of early medieval China, including 225 tales from twenty-six or more collections. In prior published selections in English, sixty tales of the Six Dynasties were included in Karl Kao’s Classical Chinese Tales of the Supernatural and the Fantastic: Selections from the Third to Tenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985) and ninety tales were included in Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang’s Selected Tales of the Han, Wei and Six Dynasties Periods (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2006), which was previously published in 1958 and again in 1990 as The Man Who Sold a Ghost: Chinese Tales of the 3rd–6th Centuries. Compared with the Yangs’ selection, Campany’s new book includes only zhiguai texts, excluding the texts of zhiren 志人 (accounts of men) such as Liu Yiqing’s 劉義 慶 (403–444) Shishuo xinyu 世說新語 (A New Account of Tales of the World). The selection of zhiguai tales in this book also follows the following standards: First, it does not include tales from the collections that have been translated in their entirety into English, such as the Shanhai jing 山海經 (The Classic of Mountains and Seas), Bowu zhi 博物志 (Treaties on Curiosities), Soushen ji 搜神記 (In Search of the Supernatural : The Written Record), and Mingxiang ji 冥祥記 (Signs from the Unseen Realm). Second, Campany avoids texts that are somewhat marginal to the zhiguai Journal of Chinese Religions, 44. 2, 174–211, November 2016© Society for the Study of Chinese Religions 2016 DOI 10.1080/0737769X.2016.1207390 genre, such as the legends of Emperor Wu of Han (r. 141-87 BCE) and Wang Jia’s 王 嘉 (fourth century) Shiyi ji 拾遺記 (Uncollected Records). Third, it does not include certain texts that have received significant prior attention, while giving some preference to texts that have been relatively neglected in published scholarship. Fourth, Campany selects from surviving stories those that have more developed plots. To help the targeted audience, college students, to understand the text, Campany discusses the zhiguai from different perspectives in the introduction, including the interpretation of the term zhiguai, its content and characteristics, compilers’ motives and aims, sources for the texts, literary form and implied worldview, the nomenclature of spirits, and why these texts should be read. In order to benefit more advanced readers, the translator provides some annotations regarding the texts in the endnotes and includes a list of textual sources at the end of the book as well. The translation of this selection is generally reliable and accurate. In comparison with the Yangs’ book in which the translation is largely concise and to the point, but sometimes “free,” Campany’s rendition is more literal, pursuing accuracy by following the original...