Pu Songling

(1640 - 1715)

Having passed the first civil-service examination at the age of eighteen in the late 1650s, Pu Songling failed to obtain a government post, so he became a private tutor for a local family in 1679. By that time the self-titled “historian of the strange” had collected the majority of the 431 tales that comprise his book Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. At odds with the prevailing literary tastes of the day, the work was not celebrated until some fifty years after Pu’s death.