Collections of stories about the strange and supernatural became popular among the elite of the Eastern Jin (317-420) and Southern Dynasties (420-589). The Youming lu, one of these collections, was compiled by scholars under the patronage of the Liu-Song imperial prince Liu Yiqing (403-444). The whimsical return-to-life story translated below, though fictional, is of interest to historians as indirect evidence for the presence of Sogdian immigrants near the Eastern Jin capital at Jiankang (modern Nanjing); Sogdians from the city-state of Samarkand, known to the Chinese as Kang or Kangju, typically used the Chinese surname Kang. The story also reflects certain stereotypes that the Chinese associated with “Hu” peoples like the Sogdians: namely, abundant body hair and strong body odor.¹

The translation below has benefited from Zhenjun Zhang’s full translation of the Youming lu. See Zhenjun Zhang trans., Hidden and Visible Realms: Early Medieval Chinese Tales of the Supernatural and the Fantastic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).

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During the reign of [Eastern] Jin Emperor Yuan (r. 317-323), a certain man from an elite clan died of a sudden illness. He saw a man who brought him up to heaven to see the Controller of Fate. The Controller of Fate double-checked his records and found that his life span was not up yet. He had been summoned by mistake. The supervisor sent down an order to release him.

The man’s feet still hurt.² He could not walk and thus had no way to return to the mortal world. Several supervisors became anxious. They said to each other, “If this man cannot return in the end because of the pain in his feet, we will be punished for detaining an innocent person.” Consequently, they went together to the Controller of Fate and told him. The Controller thought about this problem for some time and then said, “There is a newly summoned Hu, surnamed Kang, who is waiting outside the western gate. This man is supposed to be dead, but his feet are still very healthy. If we exchange their feet, it will be no loss to either party.”

The supervisors came out bearing these instructions. They were going to exchange the feet, but the Hu’s body was extremely ugly, and his feet were especially repulsive. The man refused to accept them. The supervisors said, “If you won’t change your feet, then you must be prepared to stay here forever.” The man had no choice and complied. The supervisors told both him and the Hu to close their eyes. In an instant, their feet had been exchanged. The man was then sent back to the mortal world and suddenly revived. He told his family the whole story, and when they took off his shoes, his feet were indeed those of the Hu. They were covered in hair and had a distinctive Hu odor.

The man was an elite scholar who liked grooming his hands and feet. Now that he suddenly had new feet like these, he could not bear to look at them. Though he had been given a chance to come back from the dead, he was disconsolate and wished he were dead. Some people who had known the Hu when he was alive told him that his body had not yet been put in a coffin and buried, and that his family lived nearby, at the Eggplant Bank.³ The man went himself to see the Hu’s body and sure enough, his feet were attached to it. The body was just about to be taken out for burial, and the man wept as it was taken away. The Hu’s sons were all very filial and, on festival days and the first day of every month, would grieve for their father longingly. They would run over to the man’s house, embrace his feet, and wail out loud. Even if they ran into one another on the street, they would clamber up [his carriage] and weep. For that reason, whenever he had to leave his house, he would order his servants to watch the gates and keep an eye out for the Hu’s sons.

For the rest of his life, he detested his feet and would not look at them. Even in the hottest weeks of summer, he would always hide them beneath several layers of robes.

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1. Due to genetic reasons, East Asians typically have less body hair and are less prone to body odor than certain other Asian populations. ↩︎
2. The cause of this foot pain is unclear, but may be related to the illness that killed the man. ↩︎
3. The Eggplant Bank (qiezi pu), also known as Eggplant Island (qiezi zhou), was an islet in the Yangzi River near Jiankang. ↩︎