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Abstract
The large corpus of early medieval Chinese narratives now classified as records of the strange includes an abundance of stories of mistaken identity. This essay focuses on stories in which an animal successfully impersonates a human but is eventually found out. The questions I ask of these materials touch on issues of identity, privilege, and narrative: What does it take to pass as and replace a human, and possibly even a particular human? How are personal identity and privilege conceptualized, also across species and gender? How do narratives of initially mistaken and finally revealed “true” identity operate and what literary means do they employ? I propose that the political and social changes that shook early medieval China moved questions about ethnic, social, and personal identity to the center of thought, and that the literary conventions of records of the strange made the genre particularly suited to deliberating and negotiating these matters, especially in terms of access to privileged social spheres. Considering the literary sophistication with which records of the strange were usually composed, I also propose to include them more seriously in discussions of literary practice in early medieval China.
Acknowledgments
I first presented on this topic in the panel “On the Human / Nonhuman / Posthuman in Medieval China” at the 97th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America in March 2022. I would like to thank my co-panelists for their comments, especially Jack Chen, Karl Steel, and Xiaofei Tian. I am also grateful for the invaluable constructive feedback I received from an anonymous reader and from Xiaofei Tian in her role as editor of EMC. Last but not the least I would like to express thanks to the students in my graduate seminar on medieval prose in Spring 2022: I have learnt so much from all twelve of you. Li Sijia, Xinchang Li, Xiaoyue Luo, and Huiyao Yang deserve special mention.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 This was famously spelled out for foxes in a fragment of Xuanzhong ji 玄中記, generally ascribed to Guo Pu 郭璞 (276–324), as preserved in Taiping guangji 太平廣記 (comp. 978) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1961), 447.3652. As we will see below, there are alternative accounts of this particular ageing process. Animals other than foxes that acquire unusual abilities when they reach a high age are mentioned in the “Dui su” 對俗 chapter of the Baopuzi. See Baopuzi neipian jiaoshi 抱樸子內篇校釋, comp. Wang Ming 王明 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1985), 3.41–42. For a typology of transformations, see Robert F. Campany, Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 251–55. See also Xiaofei Tian, “The Cultural Politics of Old Things in Mid-Tang China,” JAOS 140 (2020): 317–43.
2 For research on animals in traditional China, see Chiara Bocci’s “Bibliographie zur Tierwelt im Alten China” [Bibliography on Animals in Ancient China] (Munich: Institut für Sinologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, 2010) at https://www.sinologie.uni-muenchen.de/forschung/publikationen/bibliographie_bocci.pdf. See also works by Roel Sterckx, including Animals through Chinese History: Earliest Times to 1911, ed. Sterckx, Martina Siebert, and Dagmar Schäfer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). The extensive ongoing “Animal Studies Bibliography” maintained by Michigan State University’s Animal Studies Program mostly covers works on Western cultures, but also includes selected research on Chinese literature; see https://animalstudies.msu.edu/bibliography.php.
3 Godfrey-Smith, Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020), 59, 87, 105, 211, 253–55, and passim.
4 Campany, The Chinese Dreamscape: 300 BCD–800 CE (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2020), 146. Also see stories that include first-person accounts of unintentional transformations into an animal, usually in the context of karmic retribution, as introduced by Wai-yee Li in “On Becoming a Fish: Paradoxes of Immortality and Enlightenment in Chinese Literature,” in Self and Self-Transformation in the History of Religions, ed. David Shulman and Guy G. Stroumsa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 30–31 and passim.
5 Pelham, Passing: An Alternative History of Identity (London: Hurst, 2021), 2.
6 “Mary Beard Keeps History on the Move: A New Yorker Interview,” The New Yorker, May 16, 2021 (https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/mary-beard-keeps-history-on-the-move).
7 See Anthony Barbieri-Low and Robin D. S. Yates, Law, State, and Society in Early Imperial China: A Study with Critical Edition and Translation of the Legal Texts from Zhangjiashan Tomb no. 247 (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 188; Yifan Zheng, “The Creating of Identities and the Making of ‘Commoners’ in Early China,” paper presented at the 24th Conference of the University of Colorado Boulder Asian Studies Graduate Association, February 5, 2023. For a study focusing on later periods of Chinese history, see Mark McNicholas, Forgery and Impersonation in Imperial China: Popular Deceptions and the High Qing State (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016).
8 Tian, “Migration, Identity, and Colonial Fantasies in a Fifth-Century Story Collection,” Journal of Asian Studies 80 (2021): 113–27, esp. 119–23.
9 For a recent discussion of the image of the “Ship of Theseus” together with an Indian body-swapping anecdote, “Er gui zheng shi” 二鬼爭屍, as preserved in Da zhidu lun 大智度論 (j. 12, T. 1509: 25.148), see Jing Huang and Jonardon Ganeri, “Is This Me? A Story about Personal Identity from the Mahāprajñāpāramitopadeśa / Dà zhìdù lùn,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 29.5 (2021): 739–62.
10 See, for instance, the images and studies in Kees W. Zimmerman, ed., One Leg in the Grave Revisited: The Miracle of the Transplantation of the Black Leg by the Saints Cosmas and Damian (Havertown: Barkhuis, 2013), and Anand Mahadevan, “Switching Heads and Cultures: Transformation of an Indian Myth by Thomas Mann and Girish Karnad,” Comparative Literature 54.1 (2002): 23–41.
11 Such notions are absent in the narrative of the legendary doctor Bian Que 扁鵲 (trad. 4th century BCE) exchanging the hearts of two men to cure them of a congenital imbalance between their intentions (zhi 志) and vital energies (qi 氣). See Liezi jishi 列子集釋, comp. Yang Bojun 楊伯峻 (1909–1992) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1991), 5.173–74.
12 The medical anthropologist Margaret M. Lock has pointed out that “a good number of organ recipients worry about the gender, ethnicity, skin color, personality, and the social status of their donors, and many believe that their mode of being-in-the-world is radically changed after a transplant, thanks to the power and vitality diffusing from the organ they have received.” See “Containing the Elusive Body,” The Hedgehog Review 3.2 (2001): https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/the-body-and-being-human/articles/containing-the-elusive-body. These anxieties are also at the center of contemporary novels such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (London: Faber and Faber, 2005) or Yan Ge’s 颜歌 Yishou zhi 異獸志, published in Jeremy Tiang’s translation under the title Strange Beasts of China (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2020), to mention only a couple of well-known examples.
13 See, for instance, the early fifth-century “Wu bu qian lun” 物不遷論 by Sengzhao 僧肇 (384–414?), Zhao lun 肇論 (j. 1, T. 1858: 45.151).
14 Keightley, “Epistemology in Cultural Context: Disguise and Deception in Early China and Early Greece,” in Early China/Ancient Greece: Thinking Through Comparisons, ed. Steven Shankman and Stephen W. Durrant (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 119, 130.
15 Tian, “Migration, Identity, and Colonial Fantasies,” 122.
16 Ascertaining the movement of literary and cultural information between China and its neighbors is notoriously knotty. See, for example, Glen Dudbridge, “The Tale of Liu Yi and Its Analogues,” in Paradoxes of Traditional Chinese Literature, ed. Eva Hung (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1994), 61–88; Carrie Reed, “Parallel Worlds, Stretched Time, and Illusory Reality: The Tang Tale ‘Du Zichun’,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 69 (2009): 309–42.
17 It is difficult to do justice to the full philological complexity that transmitted records of the strange present. Many texts in the corpus are hard to date or even to be securely placed in a certain collection, not to mention authorship. Since none of the early medieval story collections was transmitted in their entirety, what we have today are reconstructions from fragments preserved in commonplace books, commentaries, etc., with the result that many stories not only exist in different versions (with variants ranging from minor to substantial), but also are claimed to have originated in more than one collection. For an excellent introduction to many of these texts and issues, see Campany’s groundbreaking study Strange Writing.
18 The Chinese text used here is based, with emendations, on the version from Xinji Soushen ji xinji Soushen houji 新輯搜神記新輯搜神後記, comp. Li Jianguo 李剑國, 2 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2007), 2:6.539–40 (no. 62). The number in parentheses indicates the number assigned to the story in Li Jianguo’s edition of Soushen ji and Soushen houji. The emendations are indicated by being placed in square brackets in the Chinese text. The first emendation is based on Li Jianguo’s commentary, and the second, on a version preserved in Han Wei Liuchao biji xiaoshuo daguan 漢魏六朝筆記小說大觀, comp. Wang Genglin 王根林 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1999), 481 (here titled just “Lao huang gou” 老黃狗). Under yet another title, “Yu shi” 庾氏, the story is also preserved, with minor variations, in Taiping guangji 438.3564. Translations throughout the essay are my own. See also the translations of Soushen ji by Kenneth J. DeWoskin and J. I. Crump, Jr., In Search of the Supernatural: The Written Record (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996) and of Soushen houji by Richard VanNess Simmons, The Sōushén hòujì: Latter Notes on Collected Spirit Phenomena Attributed to Táo Yuānmíng (365–427) (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 2022).
19 Subjecting someone to certain tests to detect their true character is not without its history in China. Matthias L. Richter mentions “the examination of particular qualities of a person” as one of the three form elements in texts concerning character diagnosis in the context of new meritocratic recruitment practices. See Richter, “Self-Cultivation or Evaluation of Others? A Form Critical Approach to Zengzi li shi,” Asiatische Studien 56 (2002): 893 and passim. For a more comprehensive introduction of texts of this genre, see Richter’s Guan ren: Texte der altchinesischen Literatur zur Charakterkunde und Beamtenrekrutierung [Early Chinese Texts on Characterology and the Recruitment of Officials] (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005).
20 Examples from Soushen ji include: “then they captured [the raccoon dog] and killed it” 遂擒殺之 (Xinji, 1:18.307, no. 231); “he smote and wound [the pig and the fox] [to death]” 斫傷 (1:18.310, no. 234); “then they cooked [the fox]” 乃烹之 (1:18.316, no. 238); “then they beat [the dog] to death together” 便共打殺 (1:18.320, no. 240); “then they beat [the dog] to death” 便打殺之 (1:18.321, no. 241); “then they killed all three [scorpion, pig, cock]” 凡殺三物 (1:18.323, no. 243); “then they banded together to root out the [lizards and turtles] and they killed them all” 於是並會伐掘，皆殺之 (1:19.327, no. 247). In Soushen houji: “then he took a knife, chopped [the deer] up and made jerky out of them” 遂以刀斲獲之以為脯 (1:6.530, no. 54); “then he killed [the monkeys] and their sons” 乃殺猴及子 (1:6.531, no. 55); “then someone stabbed [the dog] [with a knife]” 刺之 (1:6.536, no. 59); “he then drew his crossbow and shot [the snake]” 因引弩射之 (1:6.541, no. 64).
21 Two excellent examples are the story of Hu Daoqia 胡道洽 in Liu Jingshu’s 劉敬叔 (fl. 5th c.) Yi yuan 異苑, in Han Wei Liuchao biji, 675, and the story “Jiao lianshi” 焦練師, collected in Dai Fu’s 戴孚 (jinshi 757) Guangyi ji 廣異記 (Taiping guangji 449.3672–73).
22 Other stories mention a dog hole or dog flap (goudou 狗竇) as a convenient entryway for demons. See, e.g., Xinji, 1:17.277 (no. 210) and a story in Yi yuan (Han Wei Liuchao biji, 654).
23 On the multifaceted uses and views of dogs as domestic and “daemonic” animals, see Roel Sterckx, The Animal and the Daemon in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 231–33. Also see Susan Crane, “Medieval Animal Studies: Dogs at Work,” in Oxford Handbooks Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/43514/chapter/364249325.
24 White cloth hats (baiqia) as part of mourning attire are mentioned in the fourth-century historian Wang Yin’s 王隱 (ca. 280s–ca. 350s) Jin shu 晉書, preserved in Taiping yulan 太平御覽 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1960), 688.6a. Other early medieval texts, however, do not support this narrow interpretation, but rather mention white cloth hats as part of informal attire.
25 See also Jacques Derrida’s famous reflections on humans as clothed and animals as naked in “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” (“L’Animal que donc je suis,” trans. David Wills), Critical Inquiry 28 (2002): 369–418.
26 Xinji, 1:19.321 (no. 241).
27 In the sixteenth-century case of an impostor pretending to be the French farmer Martin Guerre returning home after years of absence, for instance, much of the discussion focused on the wife’s complicity in helping the impostor sustain his role. See Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), a book that has itself sparked a considerable debate.
28 For an excellent treatment of this topic, see Madeline Kay Spring, Animal Allegories in T’ang China (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1993).
29 A more specific, and more speculative, interpretation would be to connect this with the family name of the wife and read the story as an allusion to the Su Jun Disturbance 蘇峻之亂, which brought about the death of Empress Mu 穆, Yu Wenjun 庾文君 (297–328). Empress Mu was a daughter of Yu Chen 庾琛, governor of Kuaiji commandery, and sister to Yu Liang 庾亮 (289–340). Yu Liang, via his difficult relationship with him, brings to mind Tao Kan 陶侃 (259–334), the great-grandfather of the supposed compiler of Soushen houji, who as a Southerner was famously called a “Xi dog” 溪狗. See Shishuo xinyu jianshu 世說新語箋疏, comp. Liu Yiqing 劉義慶 (403–444), comm. Yu Jiaxi 余嘉錫 (1884–1955) (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1993), 27.8 and 14.23.
30 The identity of the animal at the center of the story is difficult to determine with certainty, since the word li 狸 was used to describe a variety of canine and feline animals, both domestic and wild. In recent scholarship, the li is usually identified as a racoon dog (nyctereutes procyonoides), which, despite its name, resembles a fox more than a dog. Also see T. H. Barrett’s reflections on the word in “The Religious Affiliations of the Chinese Cat: An Essay Towards an Anthropozoological Approach to Comparative Religion,” The Louis Jordan Occasional Papers in Comparative Religion 2 (1998): 16–17, 25–26.
31 Xinji, 1:18.307 (no. 231). My emendations, indicated by square brackets in the Chinese text, follow Wang Shaoying’s 汪紹楹 (1909–1970) edition of the Soushen ji (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1979), 18.221 (no. 422). They are, in turn, based on the versions of the story as collected in Fayuan zhulin 法苑珠林 31, T. 2122: 53.0526, and Han Wei Liuchao biji, 418. See also the version in Taiping guangji 442.3614. In another story in Soushen ji, titled “Qin Jubo” 秦巨伯, the tables are turned and a grandfather is fooled into killing his grandsons, this time by unspecified demons; see Xinji, 1:19.334–35 (no. 253).
32 Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay Das Unheimliche has been translated into English several times, see, e.g., The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (New York: Penguin, 2003).
33 In this connection it is worth mentioning the Capgras delusion, a psychiatric disorder presenting as the belief that one’s family members or others have been replaced by doppelgangers. See William Hirstein and V. S. Ramachandran, “Capgras Syndrome: A Novel Probe for Understanding the Neural Representation of the Identity and Familiarity of Persons,” Proc. Biol. Sci. 264.1380 (1997): 437–44.
34 On Zhang Hua, see the introduction in Roger Greatrex’s The Bowu zhi: An Annotated Translation (Stockholm: Orientalska Studier, 1987), 5–26; also see Campany, Strange Writing, 284–88. On the relationship between Zhang Hua and Lei Huan, see Jin shu 晉書 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974), 36.1075–76. Although Zhang Hua’s official biography cites several events that are also collected as records of the strange, the story of the brindled fox is not among them.
35 Writing about how we might respond to different types of impersonation, Goffman has pointed out that while impersonating someone of “sacred status, such as a doctor or a priest” (depending on how sacred we regard the scholarly sphere in ancient China, this could well apply to the brindled fox) or a “specific, concrete individual” is usually considered an “inexcusable crime,” we feel less strongly about “impersonation of category membership” and often “have some sympathy for those who have but one fatal flaw” they try to conceal (which could again apply to the brindled fox). Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre, 1956), 39.
36 This phrasing recalls a story that shows Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒 (179–104 BCE), another historical scholar famous for his cosmological expertise and ability to detect the presence of nonhuman beings, jeering at a visitor: “If you are not a fox, you must be a rat” 卿非狐狸, 則是鼷鼠. See “Li ke” 狸客, Xinji, 1:18.308–9 (no. 233).
37 Xinji, 1:18.315–18 (no. 238). Versions of the story are preserved in a variety of collections, among them Taiping guangji 442.3612–13 (titled “Zhang Hua” 張華) and Han Wei Liuchao biji, 416–17 (titled “Zhang Maoxian” 張茂先); see also the much shorter version in Taiping yulan 909.7a (mentioned below). The reconstructions of this story in the editions compiled by Li Jianguo and Wang Shaoying differ considerably; my emendations in the first part of the story as well as the final passage starting from “乃遣人伐華表” are based on Wang Shaoying’s Soushen ji 18.219–10 (no. 421).
38 On this motif, see, e.g., Richard B. Mather, “Filial Paragons and Spoiled Brats: A Glimpse of Medieval Chinese Children in the Shishuo xinyu,” in Chinese Views of Childhood, ed. Anne Behnke Kinney (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1995), 118–22; and Kinney, Representations of Childhood and Youth in Early China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), esp. chapter 2, “The Precocious Child.”
39 Tian, “Migration, Identity, and Colonial Fantasies,” 126.
40 See, for instance, “Daosu fu” 擣素賦, attributed to Ban Jieyu 班倢伃 (d. ca. 6 BCE), in Ouyang Xun 歐陽詢 (557–641) et al. comp., Yiwen leiju 藝文類聚, collated by Wang Shaoying (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1965), 85.1546. Descriptions of male beauty are of course not rare in ancient Chinese literature. See, for example, many of the anecdotes in chapter 14, “Rongzhi” 容止, of Shishuo xinyu. Recent scholarship on homoerotic relationships in ancient China has pointed out that many famously paired historical figures could have been couples in same-sex relationships. Although Zhang Hua and Lei Huan are not counted among them, at least to my knowledge, historical records depict their bond as unusually strong. Their legendary connection through the gendered magical swords Ganjiang 干將 and Moye 莫邪 even made it into Zhang Hua’s biography in Jin shu.
41 Taiping yulan 909.7a.
42 Shi ji 史記 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959), 34.1558.
43 While this is the more common case, there are also exceptional stories whose nonhuman protagonists have names. See, for example, “Boqiu” 伯裘 in Soushen houji (Xinji, 2:6.531–35, no. 56), a story in which the titular character introduces “Boqiu” as his style name (zi 字). This story also answers the question what might have happened had the brindled fox survived his encounter with Zhang Hua: when asked “what creature are you?” 汝為何物, Boqiu responds that he used to be a thousand-year-old fox (千歲狐) who had eventually become a demon (魅) and was now on the verge of becoming a spirit (神). It remains unclear when and how he acquired his name, but going by its meaning, “Elder Brother Pelt,” it could date to Boqiu’s “fox period.” Speculating about the name that the brindled fox had chosen to put on his visiting card, we can only assume that it must have been more sophisticated.
44 See David R. Knechtges, “Southern Metal and Feather Fan: The ‘Southern Consciousness’ of Lu Ji,” in Southern Identity and Southern Estrangement in Medieval Chinese Poetry, ed. Ping Wang and Nicholas Morrow Williams (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015), 22–31, 40–41.
45 Studies of violence across the humanities have emphasized the ideological and rhetorical uses of legitimizing violence toward certain beings. Following in the footsteps of Giorgio Agamben’s “anthropological machine,” Karl Steel has suggested that “the human monopolization of violence” constitutes “the fundamental tool of domination” over animals in the European Middle Ages, see his How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011), 24. See also Mark Edward Lewis, Sanctioned Violence in Ancient China (Albany: State University of New York, 1990), 167–74.
46 Liezi jishi 列子集釋, comp. Yang Bojun 楊伯峻 (1909–1992) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1991), 1.22.
47 Major, “Animals and Animal Metaphors in Huainanzi,” Asia Major 21.1 (2008): 150; Knapp, “Noble Creatures: Filial and Righteous Animals in Early Medieval Confucian Thought,” in Animals Through Chinese History, ed. Sterckx et al., 6. On the Cartesian break, which basically reduced animals to machines, and some of the implications of this approach, see John Berger’s still highly relevant 1977 article “Why Look at Animals?” in Berger, About Looking (New York: Pantheon Books), 1–28.
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Antje Richter
Antje Richter is Associate Professor of Chinese at University of Colorado at Boulder. She studies the culture of early and medieval China, with research interests in literature, art history, religion, and medical thought. She is the author of Letter Writing and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China (2013) and a book in German on notions of sleep in early Chinese literature. She is the editor of A History of Chinese Letters and Epistolary Culture (2015).