Which Classic Is That?

Which Classic Is That? is the strangest comic novel in Chinese: a whole story set in the world of ghosts, where ghost officials take bribes, ghost scholars sit examinations and ghost soldiers march to war, all told in a torrent of Wu dialect slang, proverbs and rude jokes. Lu Xun loved it and helped get it reprinted. Absurd, vulgar and very funny, it is a satire of the living disguised as a ghost story. This is a complete new English translation, with names in modern pinyin and the text rendered as plain, readable English prose. It is one of the long narratives that shaped Chinese fiction, full of household detail, comedy and grief, and it reads straight through like any great novel.