Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, Vol. 1

the date of the former event. For we are there told that P‘u Sung-ling successfully competed for the lowest, or bachelor’s, degree before he had reached the age of twenty; and that in 1651 he was in the position of a graduate of ten years’ standing, having failed in the interim to take the second, or master’s, degree. To this failure—due, as we are informed in the history above quoted, to his neglect of the standard path of academic study—we owe the existence of his great work; not, indeed, his only production, though it is the one par excellence original: "par excellence"; French for "preeminently" or "by way of excellence." by which, as Confucius said of his own Spring and Autumn annals, men will know him. All else that we have on record of P‘u Sung-ling, besides the fact that he lived in close companionship with several eminent scholars of the day, is gathered from his own words, written when, in 1679, he laid down his pen upon the completion of a task which was to raise him within a short period to a foremost rank in the Chinese world of letters. Of that record I here append a close translation, accompanied by such notes as are absolutely necessary to make it intelligible to those who are not students of Chinese.

VOL. I.