Original Text
In Tianjin, there was a boatman who dreamed one night that a person said to him: "Tomorrow, someone will come to rent your boat carrying a bamboo basket; demand one thousand taels of silver from him, and do not ferry him across the river if he refuses." The boatman awoke and did not believe this. After falling asleep again, he had the same dream, and in this dream the person wrote the three characters "Guang + Bei Bei, Guang + Bei Bei Bei, Guang + Bei Bei Bei Bei" on the wall, instructing: "If that man is stingy and unwilling to pay the thousand taels, show him these three characters." The boatman found it very strange, but he did not recognize those three characters nor understand their meaning.
The next day, he carefully observed the travelers coming and going. As the sun was setting in the west, a man indeed arrived, driving a mule laden with a bamboo crate, and sought to hire a boat to cross the river. The boatman demanded the price as the figure in his dream had specified, but the man scoffed at him. They haggled for a long time, until the boatman took the man's hand and wrote those three characters with his finger. The man's face turned ashen with terror, and he vanished instantly. Searching his belongings, they found tens of thousands of tiny coffins, each no longer than a finger, and each contained a single drop of blood. The boatman showed those three characters to people far and near, but none could recognize them. Not long after, Wu Sangui's rebellion was exposed, and all his followers were beheaded; the number of corpses laid out exactly matched the number of those tiny coffins. This story was told by Xu Baishan.
Commentary
Pu Songling was by nature romantic and curious, thus much of what he recorded concerns the strange and uncanny. This tale recounts matters beyond imagination: characters never before seen in any dictionary; figures elusive and indistinct, whether monsters, ghosts, or immortals, impossible to fathom. As for the small coffins described—their number, size, and contents—they are utterly unheard of. One can only explain such phenomena by the principle that turbulent times inevitably bring extraordinary events, and that the great slaughter during Wu Sangui's rebellion accounts for these wonders.