Yuewei caotang biji

Record summary

Ji Yun’s Yuewei caotang biji records stories and reflections concerning spirits, dreams, possession, strange animals and moralized supernatural encounters. Its continuing nineteenth-century circulation makes it useful for comparing Chinese accounts of altered states with contemporaneous European spiritualist and mesmerist writing. Ji Yun often signals uncertainty, hearsay and competing explanations, which may be especially valuable for studying epistemic framing. The work is a literati miscellany, however, and its narrative conventions, editorial arrangement and later translations complicate efforts to isolate historical events.