In Suzhou, with its gray-tiled roofs and green-brick walls, a shadow that has lingered for a thousand years stirs beneath willow-lined canals and painted bridges. The Strange Tales of Suzhou takes the Wu region as its setting, weaving more than a hundred uncanny stories into the misty rains of Jiangnan. Every page is soaked in moonlight and streaked with blood.
In the Thirty-Six Mandarin Duck Hall of the Humble Administrator's Garden, the eyes of painted maidens turn with the candlelight, while blood seeps from their skirts and stains the century-old nanmu wood. At Maple Bridge, amid the flickering fishing lights, the deathly pale face of a Ming dynasty scholar appears. Every page of the poetry collection in his arms is filled with the names of those who drowned. Behind the carved lattice windows of an old house on Shantang Street, the sound of an embroiderer threading her needle always comes at midnight. Yet reflected on the window paper is a headless figure cutting out a wedding dress.
From the red-clad vengeful ghost roused by the midnight bells of Hanshan Temple to the pale blue hand reaching up from a dry well in the Garden of the Master of the Nets; from a paper wedding sedan chair that suddenly appears in an alley in the ancient town of Tongli to an empty bowl on a Taihu fishing boat that can never be filled... These eerie legends, hidden in the melodies of Suzhou pingtan storytelling and woven into the silk threads of Suzhou embroidery, reveal the horrifying truth beneath Jiangnan's gentle facade. When you open this book, you may hear sobbing beneath the stone slabs of Pingjiang Road, or see white silk fluttering from Panmen Gate's towers. And within that lingering sandalwood fragrance, a blood-red secret from another time is stirring.
