Background
Pu Songling was born in 1640, during a serious famine, to a small landlord-gentry family that also engaged in commerce. The civil service examinations were becoming more and more formalized and restrictive, with the notoriously rigid "eight-legged-essay" established as the primary testing instrument. He passed the lowest level of the civil service exam at the age of eighteen, and became a Cultivated Talent. Despite persistent attempts year after year until he finally gave up in 1690, Pu Songling never passed the next level.
After his marriage at the age of seventeen and the division of his parents' household among four brothers several years later, Pu Songling faced dire poverty.
After serving as a magistrate for about a year, he spent much of his adult life as a country schoolteacher working for the wealthy Bi household from 1679 to his retirement in 1709. He became not only the Bi clansmen's close friend, but also a trusted family counsellor.
During this period he wrote his magnum opus, Liaozbai zbi yi ("Strange Tales from Make-do Studio"), a collection of nearly 500 elegantly constructed stories about fox spirits, ghosts and other supernatural phenomena, always built around some human drama. Pu Songling continued to add tales to the collection, perhaps as late as 1707. This book was not printed until fifty years after his death.
Pu Songling also wrote colloquial dramas, including one called "The Wall" that bears a striking resemblance to King Lear, written by his near contemporary, William Shakespeare. The plays were not published until the late 20th century, nearly 300 years after his death.
In 1713, his wife, to whom he had been married for fifty-six years, died, and Pu Songling himself died in early 1715