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Hello and welcome to the history of China.

Episode 309, Strange Tales 10.1

Fateful Encounters

The leaves are catching fire in autumn's chill

and the harvest moon hangs overhead.

Now is the time each year

when the veil between worlds grows thin

and can be most easily breached

by the living, the dead, and the

other all the same. That's right. It's time for more strange tales. Our quartet of stories today,

like most folk tales from China, has no single definitive source, or even one agreed-upon

version. There are as many as there have been village storytellers to regale people around

the chill evening's hearth. Yet they share many themes, both stated and implied. While they're

often hapless protagonists face the supernatural, these spectres are often not their actual main foe.

As with much speculative fiction, I mean, completely true and factual stories that I'm about to tell, of course,

the scary monster can also function as, or highlight, the more mundane, yet just as dangerous,

social and governmental abuses that couldn't

at the time be complained about directly. What is horror after all, but dark reflections of the

real world we all live in? And so, with that, let's dig right in. The grave dirt's freshly turned.

Our first tale today, in the shadow of an ancient execution ground where the wind whispers

of unjust blades and forgotten screams, a lone wanderer strums his lyre beneath the harvest

...