Original Text
A villager named Wang from Boxing County had a daughter who had reached marriageable age. A local bully, captivated by her beauty, seized her when she went out, and no one noticed. He took her to his home and attempted to rape her, but she cried out loudly and resisted with all her might, so he strangled her to death. Outside his gate there was a deep pool, and the bully tied stones to her corpse and sank it into the depths. Wang searched everywhere for his daughter but found no trace and was at his wit's end. Suddenly, rain fell, and thunder and lightning gathered over the bully's house; with a single thunderclap, a dragon descended, snatched off the bully's head, and flew away. When the sky cleared, a female corpse floated up from the deep pool, one hand clutching a human head—upon close inspection, it was the bully's head. When the authorities learned of this, they arrested the bully's family for interrogation and thus uncovered the truth. Could that dragon have been the transformed spirit of the girl? Otherwise, how could such a thing have happened? How strange!
Commentary
This piece of writing is as sharp and soaring as a spear or a manifesto aimed directly at the powerful and arrogant. A common woman, seized by a local tyrant, relies on a "dragon" to "snatch away the villain's head"—a romantic and heroic act, yet it also serves as a stark testament to the helplessness of real-world society. The despair and powerlessness of ordinary people in reality become the catalyst for the romantic imagination in literature, where the weak are transformed into the strong. In the tale "Xiang Gao," Pu Songling writes in his "Historian of the Strange's commentary": "To borrow another's death to achieve one's own life—such an immortal's art is truly divine! Yet there are so many things in this world that make one's hair stand on end. If only the wronged could always remain human, how I wish they could temporarily become tigers!" This statement reveals the very driving force behind the creation of such stories.