Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio

Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio was once considered to be the masterpiece of classical Chinese novels. Judging solely from the language and certain expression techniques used by the author, this evaluation makes sense; however, from the perspective of the development of ancient Chinese novels, this evaluation is not comprehensive enough. Therefore, further explanation is needed. There are two development systems for ancient Chinese novels. One system belongs to classical Chinese, which originated from the legends of the Six Dynasties and flourished in the Tang Dynasty; the other system belongs to the vernacular, which originated from the scripts formed by the speeches of the Tang and Song Dynasties, and then developed into long chapter novels. Text is text, white is white, the boundaries are clear. Of course, there are some exceptions, such as those who write chapters and chapters in classical Chinese. However, these two systems are not in conflict with each other. Instead, they influence each other, compete with each other, and even struggle with each other under different historical conditions. Viewed from this perspective, the emergence of Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio is not simply the natural, smooth and linear development of classical Chinese novels... This novel and its characters are purely fictitious. Any similarity is purely coincidental and should not be imitated.