Mei Ouchang, a juren from south of the Yangtse River, once told me of a strange case which his friend Sun from the same hometown had handled, while he was an official at Dezhou, in Shandong Province.
There used to live in the county a scholar named Wang who was the seventh child in an official’s family. Ever since he was a boy, he’d had great admiration for the miracles Taoist priests perform. When he heard there were many immortals up on Laoshan Mountain, he shouldered his book bag and off…
When young I went to the prefectural seat to take an examination and happened to be there on Spring Festival. According to custom, on the eve of this day all the shopkeepers decorated their storefronts and organized a musical procession that went through town to the yamen of the provincial treasury. This was called…