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Bestiary of Cryptids & Legendary CreaturesChinese fox spirits can become human companions, repay a kindness with hidden knowledge, or enter a household carrying loyalties of their own.
Also recorded as Húlijīng, Chinese fox spirit
Ch’ê reaches across his bed and touches something soft. A light reveals a drunken fox beside the empty wine bottle. He could kill it. Instead, he draws the covers over his unexpected companion and keeps the candle burning to see what it will become. [3]
Read the manuscriptA Chinese fox spirit may enter a house as a scholar, a young woman or an elderly visitor. Human appearance brings a place at the table, a marriage proposal or a claim upon someone’s trust. In Pu Songling’s stories, those relationships develop through the ordinary business of finding money, keeping a home and caring for relatives. The fox’s arrival can enlarge a family, but it can also expose the dangers concealed in an apparently harmless meeting. [3][6]
The two encounters that follow come from Pu Songling’s Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, in Herbert A. Giles’s 1880 English selection. They are The Boon-Companion and Miss Ying-ning; or, the Laughing Girl. Giles’s older spellings distinguish the people in these particular translations: the wine-loving Ch’ê and the young scholar Wang Tzu-fu. [3]
Ch’ê is poor and so fond of wine that he struggles to sleep without it. One night he wakes to find a fox sprawled drunkenly beside him. He covers it, rests an arm across it and leaves the candle lit. Around midnight the animal stirs. When Ch’ê draws back the covers, an elegantly dressed young scholar appears. The visitor bows and thanks him for not cutting off his head. Ch’ê admits his own weakness for drink and invites him to return. By morning the stranger has gone. That evening, a goblet of fine wine is waiting when he arrives. [3]
The fox’s jokes delight his host, but he worries about the cost of their friendship. He tells Ch’ê to look beside a road two miles southeast, where he finds two pieces of silver. They buy delicacies to accompany the wine. A second discovery, in a vault beneath the backyard, yields more than a hundred strings of cash. Ch’ê believes their drinking expenses are settled. His guest knows that a store of money can run out. Next he advises buying buckwheat while it is cheap. Neighbours laugh at the purchase, until a drought ruins other crops. Buckwheat still grows, and Ch’ê sells his stock for a great profit. [3]
The fox continues to advise him about planting. Ch’ê buys good farmland and becomes comfortably established. His companion treats his wife as a sister and the children as his own. No demand for repayment interrupts this domestic happiness. When Ch’ê dies, however, the visits stop. The friendship ends with the mortal life that gave it a home. [3]
Ying-ning enters another household by a less straightforward route. At Lo-tien in Shantung, in Giles’s spelling, Wang Tzu-fu sees a laughing young woman carrying plum blossom during the Feast of Lanterns. She drops the sprig; he retrieves it and keeps it beneath his pillow. Longing makes him ill. His cousin Wu promises to find her, fails, then invents encouraging news: she is their cousin and lives in the southwestern hills. Wang recovers, but Wu avoids him. Eventually he sets out alone, carrying the dried flower in his sleeve.
A shadow matters to Wang’s mother because Ying-ning’s ordinary presence needs testing. Ch’ê, by contrast, has already seen the animal in his bed; the scholar’s clothes conceal nothing from him. E. T. C. Werner’s 1922 Myths and Legends of China lists older men, scholars and young women among fox transformations. The folio’s robed man follows that range of possible forms. Its fox-shaped shadow is an artistic choice, rather than the test Giles describes: Ying-ning’s convincing shadow reassures the household. [3][6]
Historical fox veneration has its own vocabulary. In his 1948 study around Peking, now Beijing, Li Wei-tsu records respectful names including Hu-yeh and Hu-hsien. He cautions that hsien has no exact English equivalent. His Four Great Families comprise fox, weasel, hedgehog and snake; sacred animals are distinguished from ordinary members of their kind. Household spirits are expected to safeguard prosperity, while those approached at special altars heal, protect and predict. These are distinctions reported from rural communities around the city. [1]
Werner also attributes great longevity, foresight and the ability to strike fire from the tail to foxes. Ch’ê’s guest uses a less spectacular gift: knowing what his friend cannot yet know. Silver is already lying beside a road, money already rests beneath the yard, and the coming drought will change a crop’s value. There is no inexhaustible purse. The scholar must go out, dig, buy and plant. [6][3]
Konstantin Tertitski identifies this constraint across Qing fox texts: wealth is transferred, borrowed or discovered rather than created without limit. He also distinguishes literary relationships from religious practice, where worship and offerings can condition prosperity. A friend buying wine and a worshipper approaching an altar may both seek help, but they do not establish the same obligation. [4]
The beautiful hill house belongs to Ying-ning’s childhood with the dead. Peach and apricot trees grow within its walls; bamboo and flowering creepers surround the rooms. Its disappearance turns Wang’s search for a bride into a search for a family’s history. Li Wei-tsu’s account gives secluded places another use: mountains and old tombs are sites of fox self-cultivation. A grave can hold a demand from the past, or provide a retreat in which a being works towards a different future. [3][1]
An older fox mother pursues that future forcefully in The Magic Box and the Complete Biography of the Five Poisons, an 1832 woodblock fiction discussed by scholar Yizhuo Li. Granny Jin saves a scholar and marries her daughter to him, then manipulates him into releasing demons. Heavenly Master Zhang, the Daoist authority sent to stop them, fails. Granny Jin stages their defeat and wins imperial favour. She wants his Thunder Seal stamped upon her and her daughter’s garments. Zhang recognizes their demonic material and refuses, but her healing of a princess helps bring pressure from the court. He yields; mother and daughter gain immortality. Li reads the victory as a challenge to male religious authority. This fictional fox belongs to the study’s comparison with theatrical and religious portraits of Jinhua; those portraits are not all foxes. [2]
T. W. Johnson’s comparison of East Asian fox lore challenges the idea that every Japanese fox tale came from China. Ainu material and Japanese roles without Chinese counterparts complicate that claim; his Korean coverage was limited by the material available in Western languages. Shared animal form does not settle how a story travelled. His study also follows exchanges between oral and written tales, where repeated quotation can make an account seem more widely attested than it is. [5]
Werner acknowledges Giles’s permission to reuse the fox stories. In his version of The Boon-Companion, however, Ch’ê’s welcome loses the reference to Damon and Pythias, the exemplary friends of Greek legend, that appears in Giles. The change removes a familiar European comparison from an English rendering of a Chinese friendship. It is a small alteration readers can see for themselves, and a reminder that the voice greeting the fox has passed through a translator’s choices. [3][6]
Giles’s Ying-ning leaves intention unresolved at the wall. The neighbour believes he sees an invitation; the account reports what he grasps and the sting that follows, without giving Ying-ning a confession. Her eventual tears reveal another concealed part of her life, yet do not solve that earlier scene. A reading that makes her simply innocent or simply murderous loses the uncertainty that survives her acceptance into the family. [3]
Ying-ning’s laughter protects servants before it becomes something the family suppresses. The magistrate’s favour protects her husband, but does not explain the neighbour’s fatal mistake. Her new home offers affection and influence as well as limits on how she may behave. Ch’ê’s friendship has no comparable silencing: he welcomes the fox’s jokes and accepts advice without requiring his guest to become less strange. The two households accommodate their visitors at different costs. [3]
Giles’s stories XV and XXII preserve the complete encounters followed here. Werner’s preface identifies his debt to that translation, allowing the later English welcome to be compared directly with it. [3][6]
Li Wei-tsu · Folklore Studies / Asian Ethnology archive · 1948
Opening scanned/PDF pages 1–8; Part I, Chapter I definitions and self-cultivation; historical archive bibliographic range 7(1):10–94 differs from scan numbering
This historical study concerns communities around Peking; its distinctions do not describe every Chinese community.
Checked 2026-10-11
Yizhuo Li · Journal of Chinese Studies / Chinese University of Hong Kong · 2025
Journal of Chinese Studies 81; Granny Jin in Literature and Religion, printed pp.160–163/PDF pages 12–15; DOI 10.29708/JCS.CUHK.202507_(81).0004
Granny Jin’s plot is followed through Li’s account, not an independent reading of the woodblock fiction.
Checked 2026-10-11
Pu Songling · Project Gutenberg; historical English edition · 1880 · 1880 English selection · Translated by Herbert A. Giles
XV Miss Ying-ning; or, the Laughing Girl; XXII The Boon-Companion
The encounters follow Giles’s 1880 English selection; the Chinese text has not been independently compared.
Checked 2026-10-11
Artwork
Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.
Manuscript checked 2026-10-11. Artistic interpretations © Scott Schubr / Luminary Oddities.
Return to the Bestiary ↑After ten miles he finds a hamlet almost hidden by trees and flowers. Outside one house, the girl appears with apricot blossom in her hand. He waits until an elderly woman invites him inside. She identifies herself as Mrs. Ch’in and claims a family connection. Ying-ning, whom she has raised, giggles through the introduction. In the garden next day, Wang offers the treasured plum sprig as a declaration of love. She wonders why he kept a dead flower and offers him a basket of fresh ones. His explanation of marriage is no more persuasive: she dislikes the idea of always being with someone. [3]
When his mother’s servants arrive to fetch him, Wang asks to take Ying-ning home. Mrs. Ch’in agrees. His mother is astonished: Wu’s account was invented, and the woman he describes died years ago. Wu now supplies a disturbing family history. Mr. Ch’in had been bewitched by a fox; Ying-ning was their daughter. After his death, an exorcism drove the fox away with her child. An attempt to recover the hill dwelling finds only wild flowers where the village stood. Yet Ying-ning laughs, sews beautifully and settles into the household. Wang’s mother watches for anything unnatural, finds that she casts a proper shadow, and arranges the marriage. [3]
The bride laughs so much that she cannot kneel for the ceremonies. Later her cheerfulness can soothe her mother-in-law’s temper, and servants facing a beating ask her to be present. She secretly pawns her jewels for rare flowers until the home is full of them. Her habit of climbing a neighbour’s flowering tree leads to danger. Its owner mistakes her smile and pointing gesture for an invitation. At night he reaches for what he believes is her hand and grasps a log instead. A scorpion stings his finger; he dies before morning. [3]
His family brings an accusation of witchcraft against Wang’s wife. The magistrate, an admirer of Wang’s scholarship, refuses the summons and orders the accuser beaten. Wang intervenes to prevent the punishment. At home, his mother scolds Ying-ning: a less sympathetic official could have exposed her to public questioning and disgraced her husband. Ying-ning becomes serious. From that moment, no one can make her laugh again. [3]
One evening she comes to Wang in tears. Her mother was a fox, she explains, but a ghost raised her for more than ten years. That foster-mother’s remains still need a proper burial. Trust now lets her ask for help. She guides her husband to a grave in a thicket of brambles; together they take the bones home for burial in the Ch’in family vault. That night Wang dreams that the old woman thanks him; Ying-ning says she has seen her too. Ying-ning also explains that her childhood maid was a fox, remembered fondly for bringing cakes and fruit. Husband and wife continue to visit the family tomb. Within a year their son arrives, laughing at strangers as his mother once did. [3]
Konstantin Tertitski · Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics 19(2) · 2025
pp. 68–75 and conclusions pp. 78–79; DOI 10.2478/jef-2025-0018
Checked 2026-10-11
T. W. Johnson · Asian Folklore Studies 33(1); Nanzan University · 1974
Opening pp. 35–38; discussion pp. 39–42; DOI 10.2307/1177503
Checked 2026-10-11
E. T. C. Werner · Project Gutenberg; historical book edition · 1922
Preface acknowledgments; Chapter XV, The Fox, printed pp.370–371; The Fox as Friend, The Boon-Companion
Checked 2026-10-11