The Shadow Book of Ji Yun

Imagine if a national political figure like Benjamin Franklin was also a paranormal investigator, one who wrote up his investigations with a storytelling flair that reads like a combination of M.R. James, Lafcadio Hearn, and Zhuangzi-with a dash of the bureaucratic absurdism of Kafka sprinkled in, alongside a healthy dose of H.P. Lovecraft's weird antiquarianism. In China, at roughly the same time that Franklin was filling the sky with electrified kites, there was such a figure. He was Special Advisor to the emperor of China, Imperial Librarian, and one of the most celebrated scholars and poets of his time. His name was Ji Yun (纪昀).


Beginning in 1789, Ji Yun published five volumes of weird tales and ghost stories that combined supernatural autobiographical accounts with early speculative fictions. Combining insights into Chinese magic and metaphysics with tales of cannibal villages, sentient fogs, alien encounters, and fox spirits; as well as accounts of soul swapping, haunted cities, and the "jiangshi" (the Chinese vampire), there is no literary work quite like that of Ji Yun.