The third vernacular retelling from Zuicha Zhiguai.
There was a man surnamed Li in the county. One evening he was cooking lamb, and the fragrance carried even beyond the house. An old man with white hair pushed the door open and came in. “The lamb smells wonderful,” he said. “I wonder whether you might let me taste a piece.” Li gladly invited him to sit and laid out chopsticks. The old man took the seat by the window and said, almost to himself, “I have drifted far from home and am lodging at a nearby temple. I came for meat because I admired your refined bearing.” The two drank together. The old man could hold an extraordinary amount of liquor. He emptied ten pots without getting drunk, while Li, after drinking with him, slumped onto the bed and fell asleep.
When Li woke, the old man had already gone. In his place he had left a tiny stone, no bigger than a pellet, shining with five-colored light. Li set it into a porcelain cup, and the cup turned to gold. He rushed outside to search for the old man, but could not find him anywhere nearby, which only made him surer that the visitor had been an immortal. When he returned home to look for the little stone, it was gone. He asked his family about it, and they said they had thrown it into the water. Li regretted it for a long time, and so stored the golden cup away in a chest.
Note: Zuicha Zhiguai, by Li Qingchen of the Qing dynasty.
The Chinese short tale passed from the Former Qin through the Wei and Jin, the Tang and Song, and the Ming and Qing, continually taking on new meanings and new forms. The earliest sense of xiaoshuo as “brief jottings” survived across that long history through notebook fiction devoted to odd anecdotes, variant accounts, and scattered talk. The body of such writing is immense and fascinating, covering history and geography, astronomy and calendrics, crafts and techniques, institutions and customs, and popular legend.
Because notebook fiction was written across so many different periods, its diction varies enormously. Add to that the modern decline in classical literacy, and a great deal of marvelous material has slipped out of common view.
For that reason, I want to recast many lesser-known notebook collections into plain modern prose and offer them to readers, especially works less famous than Youyang Zazu, Yuewei Caotang Biji, or Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio.
Notebook fiction is brief, taut, and perfectly suited to the fragmented reading habits of the internet age. I hope every reader can find a small measure of delight in a minute or two of reading.