Selected & annotated by Zhao Botao 
Selected Stories in Strange Tales from A Chinese Studio 

Strange Tales from A Chinese Studio is a famous collection of short novels of classical style created by Pu Songling, an author in the early Qing Dynasty. The book contains nearly 500 articles such as fox and ghost stories and anecdotes. These articles are classified into four categories by their themes: criticism of the imperial examination, description of the love between men and women, criticism of political corruption and social darkness and praise of folk wisdom and virtues. The author is characterized by refined by his refined but vivid style of writing, showing his understanding and expectation of society and people. In Selected Stories in Strange Tales from A Chinese Studio, there are 46 readable stories featuring high ideological value and artistic achievements, which are accompanied by correct notes, thus providing readers with a basic selected work for their understanding of the Strange Tales from A Chinese Studio. The text in this book is based on the manuscript version; for any content missing in the manuscript version, the author referred to the transcript version in the reign of Emperor Kangxi; if some information was still missing, the author further referred to the Qingketing version or the Yishi. Furthermore, the author consulted the 24-volume transcript and Zhuxuezhai transcript for proofreading, to present an accurate text. The author’s notes were famous because: 1. The author was skilled in precise and in-depth explanation, especially the involved systems, the background of the imperial examination system, and the life stories of the persons in the Qing Dynasty involved; 2. The author marked the pinyin of the doubtful and hard-to-read Chinese characters; 3. The author explained the theme of each article in the first note attached, expressing the intention of Pu Songling and inspiring readers a lot. This is a paperback 16-fold book with text in the upper part and notes in the lower part on each page. It is properly arranged with rich content and 27 selected color illustrations. The illustrations accompany the stories, to help users understand the story content.