Chinese Literature

He immediately called for help and tried to rescue them, but they had vanished. The fact is that when Hsiu-hsiu’s parents knew that she had been beaten to death, they had drowned themselves in the river. They | were ghosts too.

Tsui went home in low spirits. When he reached his room, there was Hsiu-hsiu sitting on the bed.

“My love!” begged Tsui. “Spare me!”

“For your sake,” answered Hsiu-hsiu, “I was beaten to death by, the prince and buried in the back garden. But it was all Sergeant Kuo’s fault—he talked too much. Today I have got my own back, because the prince has given him fifty strokes on the back; but now that everybody knows I am a ghost, I can’t stay here any longer.”

Having said this, she got up and seized Tsui with both hands. He uttered a cry, and fell to the ground; and when the neighbours came in to look, they found that:

His pulse had stopped, his spirit fled, And the unhappy man was dead!

So he was carried off to join his ghostly wife and parents.

THE DOUBLE MIRROR

The crescent moon shines over many lands, On homes with happy and unhappy faces; Some wedded pairs behind one curtain sleep, But some are parted in far distant places.

This verse, which appeared during the Chien Yen period (1127-1130 A.D.), describes the sadness of those who were separated from their loved ones in those troubled times. For, as a result of misrule during the Hsuan Ho period (1119-1125 A.D.) when traitors and flatterers held the reins of government, in the Ching Kang period (1126-1127 A.D.) the Nu Chen Tartars stormed the capital, captured Emperor Huei and Emperor Chin and carried them off to the north. Then Prince Kang abandoned Kaifeng, the northern capital and, thanks to the miracle of the clay horse, crossed the Yangtse River to reestablish his empire in the south, naming the new era Chien Yen. Terrified of the Tartars, the citizens of the old capital followed the prince south. Pursued by the invaders’ horsemen and threatened with fire and the sword, they fled in all directions; and who knows how many families were broken up! Many fathers and sons or husbands and wives, who were separated, never saw each other again. There were some, however, who came together once more; and remarkable stories of this kind have been handed down to us.

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