Travels in a Dream
A Novel of Prophecy, Ghosts and Office
A wandering physiognomist reads a boy's face, writes eight lines of prophecy,
and vanishes. Everything that follows in this book has already been written on
that slip of paper.
About the Book
Shi Maolan is born to an upright official who resigned rather than take a
eunuch's money. His whole life is foretold before he can read, and the novel is
the working out of the prophecy: a haunted house bought for friendship's sake,
three ghost pupils who come out of the dark to study with him, an examination
attempt that ends in the Huangzhou jail under Wei Zhongxian's faction, a case
argued in the Governor's hall, a soul sent onward by the City God to be reborn
in another household, two girls who keep their honour through a hundred
torments and are restored to life in borrowed bodies, and finally a frontier
command where his wife breaks the Miao and quiets the border.
It is a strange, fast, thoroughly enjoyable book that moves between the county
yamen and the courts of the dead without changing its tone, because to this
author they are the same administration.
About This Edition
This complete English translation presents all eighteen chapters, rendered
directly from the Chinese text. The original gives each chapter a single seven
character title rather than the usual couplet, and this edition preserves that
exactly, without inventing a matching half. Sixteen places where characters are
lost in the surviving text are marked in brackets rather than silently bridged.
Inconsistencies in the original, including a decree that gives the hero the
wrong post, are kept and noted. Nothing is abridged.
Themes and Legacy
- Physiognomy, prophecy and a life lived inside a prediction
- The Wei Zhongxian years and what they did to honest officials
- Ghosts, the City God's court, rebirth and return to the body
- A wife who takes the field and wins the campaign
- Eighteen chapters, tightly plotted, no padding
For Readers Who Love
Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio - The Journey to the West - Investiture of
the Gods - Chinese Ghost Stories - Chinese Literature in Translation
"The fortune teller was right about all of it. That is the problem."
At a glance
About the series
Rediscover the great epics, mysteries and chronicles of dynastic China: gods and generals, swindlers and scholars, courtesans, ghosts and emperors, in complete English translations.
