I'm all for these lavish super serious high fantasy adaptions of the Chinese folklore, but when am I going to get a comedy about THE GHOST THAT PRETENDS TO SPEAK MANDARIN SO HE CAN GET HIS COMPLAINT AGAINST A CHILD WHO PEED ON HIM TAKEN MORE SERIOUSLY.

Or the one about the goats who are reunited reincarnated lovers just trying to get one last bang in before they get slaughtered for some official's birthday and escape with their lives.

Or the one about the young man whose nickname was duckfucker because a duck tried to bang him.

This is from the book 子不语 (ie. what Confucius wouldn't talk about), written by 袁枚 (also known for his books on cookery) Published in the late 18th Century.

Disciple: So, the story about the goats?
Confucius: *not dignifying it with a response since 500BC*

This is from the genre that was basically compendiums of anecdotes, with titles like "stories of when you're trimming the lamp wick", "tales overheard", "gossip from the riverbanks", etc

Literati liked to trades stories & this helped boring people spice up their conversation.

Much like me. I am spicing up the conversation now. Thanks, 袁枚!

The most famous of these anecdote/folklore compendiums is 聊齋誌異 ("Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio") by Pu Songling.

Some of the longer stories from it have been adapted into films: Painted Skin (1994, remade 2093), Chinese Ghost Story (1987, remade about a thousand times), etcZ

There are compendiums that read more like Snopes, where they're comparing versions and discussing the validity or morality of what happened.

Others are just a sequence of events, not judgment.

Okay, enough serious stuff.

Among What Confucius Doesn't Talk About is the mysterious case of wandering corpses. This culminates in the officials realising that the dead were just sneaking out to bang in the wilderness and they thus cremated the two lovebirds together.

There's also the one where a GHOST SUES HER STILL LIVING LOVER, listing nineteen separates offenses against him. Whilst waiting for their court date, she possesses him. It's remarkably intricate and there is a lot of bribing and investigating. The living won the case, in the end.

There's also the one about a FOX SPIRIT WHO PRETENDS TO BE A SUSPICIOUSLY SEXY KWAN YIN STATUE, granting miracles to her monks and luxuriating in offered incense.

Oh there's also the woman (secretly a ghost) who hires a scholar whose SECRET HOBBY was to make dresses and helmets out of shiny paper to outfit a whole wedding party. Later, there's a commotion by the tombs and he realises it's the very pomp and circumstance that he outfitted.

Relative: why do you and your friends have pierced ears?
Merchant: bears
Relative: ....
Merchant: they kidnapped us and tied us up by threading a vine through our ears! There was this emperor bear on a stone palanquin! We barely escaped with our lives!

Also in 子不语 is a love story about a pair of beautiful young men, who meet cute after one gropes the other's butt. After their tragic murder by town bully, the locals set up a temple celebrating their gay love. Double Blossom Temple becomes super popular.

A corrupt magistrate denounces the temple dedicated to the love between these two androgynous scholars as obscene and tears it down, but the lovers (as ghosts) argue with historical precedents that gay love is beautiful. Temple is rebuilt.

There are stories that.... well, they very much feel like they are explanations of strange (or just slightly unusual) occurrences told backwards, ending with the hook.

I can immediately hear in my head the conversation that brought about the tall tale (eg: bear story).

There's also one about a man who invents a fucking machine with variable iron rod sizes powered with daoist magic, making him the least favourite customer of local prostitutes. A daoist nun then takes vengeance for them by sex-vampiring him to death.

I think what I'm enjoying the most about retelling these tales in this punchline-driven catchy twitter format is that this is precisely how they were meant to be used by the literati. Recorded in a sparse, bare style, they're meant to become anecdote fodder.

The title! 子不语 "What Confucius Would Not Speak Of" is a reference to line "子不语怪力乱神", for he would not speak of the strange, the strength, the chaos (riots?), the spirits (gods).

It's one of my favourite lines of Analects. This book was unsurprisingly deemed heretical.

There's also an amazing one where a nun makes the case for Universal Basic Income for ghosts, to prevent haunting.

Only poor, hungry ghosts haunt people, you see. It's why hauntings always involve disheveled apparitions.

Or the one about the fisherman's epic battle with a SEA MONSTER with gold eyes and jade claws, which he survives through the CUNNING TACTIC OF WEARING HIS TROUSERS ON HIS HEAD.

There's the one about a ghost haunting the wrong person to death. Everyone is shocked and appalled at his poor grasp of the legal system but are powerless to save the victim.

"There is a man from the Zhang family by the name Third Master Ghost. The name arose from the fact that he was the third son born, but also because his father was a ghost."

There is also this young scholar who gets his stomach haunted as a ghost and a fox spirit hitch a ride on a piece of eggplant .

An exorcist manages to get rid of the fox but the ghost has a Legit Grievance. And so she haunts him to death.

Secretary in yamen pulls bureaucratic prank by switching characters in a name on a arrest warrant for a pirate. His scholar friend finds it deeply unfunny and burns the memorandum, accidentally sending it to the city god who has him ARRESTED BY THE GHOST POLICE.

Drunken city god fucks up & the NotPirate has to appeal to Guandi (aka Kwan Kung) to rectify this miscarriage of justice.

Secretary dies vomiting blood, their boss loses 3 months salary, city god is struck down & dying scholar is reincarnated as a top of the list graduate.

The moral of the above story is that you should NEVER BURN ANYTHING THAT CAN BE MISCONSTRUED AS A MEMORANDUM TO THE GHOST POLICE, because you never know when the various divinities are drunk and try to act on your hilarious prank warrants.

There's also one where a scholar mansplains how to hang yourself to the ghost of a dead woman (she's haunting the place, ritually reenacting her own death, the usual) and she vacates the manor as a result.

For those looking for legal shenanigans, there's one abt fox spirit patriarch raising a legal complaint against a minor god for the slaying of a fox spirit (who was sexually harassing a woman). Petitions are filed, fox corpses fall from sky.

Minor god gets off with a wrist slap of a punishment due to the locals showing up en mass to back him and shout down the fox patriarch's defence.

OMGWTF. I've just read one about hairy mountain people, descendants from those avoiding conscription by the Qin Emperor to build his Great Wall (rightly so, it's a very lethal project). As a result you can apparently scare them away by chanting "Build the wall".

The moral of the story (according to Yuan Mei) is that the Qin Emperor must have be truly terrifying for his chants ("BUILD THE WAlLL") to be inspiring such fear so very many hundreds of years after his terrible reign.

There's another about an old woman in her 70s who spontaneously turns into a giant white-haired wolf. She wanders the wilderness but returns regularly to play with in her grandkids. But her sons were forced by the neighbours to tell her to never come home because she's scary.

What I have learnt from this is that my FINAL FORM is a fearsome WHITE-HAIRED WOLF, that will cause superstitious villagers to quake in terror but beloved by my grandkids.

*am very amused*

There's a penguin translation of Strange Tales from Chinese Studio (mentioned above) but most of the thread stories are from 子不语, which has the catchy English title of Censored by Confucius. https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Censored_by_Confucius.html?id=zYYYDQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button&redir_esc=y