Mouse vs Cat in Chinese Literature Read online

  The Cat­Ghost Deity

  Within the borders of Liangzhou in Gansu the common people venerate

  the cat-ghost deity ( maoguishen). This is very similar to the case recorded in the Northern History (Beishi) of Lady Gao venerating a cat ghost. For this demon one uses a cat that has died from strangulation, and after one

  has conducted funeral ceremonies for seven Sevens, it is able to display its powers.85 Later one moves its wooden soul-tablet and places it behind the

  gate, where the owner of the cat most reverentially offers sacrifice to it. At its side is placed a linen sack of some five inches long, ready for use by the cat.

  Whenever it goes and steals from other people, the sack will suddenly disappear after the fourth watch of the night but before the cocks have started

  crowing. After a moment it is seen hanging from a corner of the roof. When

  you climb a ladder and take it down and open it, it is filled with up to two stone-weights of either grain or beans. These must have been provided by

  that evil demon. On occasion the sack contains even more, and those who

  venerate the demon have often suddenly acquired great wealth.

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  Once when one prefect celebrated his birthday, his fellow officials pre-

  sented him with more than ten stone-weights of dried noodles, which he had

  stored in a big vat. When a few days later that prefect ordered his servants to store the noodles in smaller containers, they saw that the vat was covered

  with a membrane of what looked like bamboo paper, and when they looked

  under it, the vat was utterly empty. When the startled servants reported this to the prefect, he ordered the runners to conduct an investigation. At the

  time there lived someone who venerated such a cat behind the prefectural

  premises. When the runners found its image, they administered a beating of

  forty strokes with the heavy cudgel to the wooden tablet, and also caned the owner, after which they dispatched him with a smile. Later they learned that after the tablet had received this punishment, the deity had lost its efficacy.86

  This type of cat cult (especially the belief that one’s neighbors are practicing it) has survived until the present day in many areas of northwestern

  China, such as western Gansu and northeastern Qinghai, not only among

  Han but also among Tujia, Tibetans, Hui, and Mongols.87

  From late-imperial times we also have information on local beliefs that

  some cats may turn into demons while still alive and, as such, prey on humans.

  The late seventeenth-century polymath Chu Renhuo records the following

  account of the demonic cats of Jinhua:

  Cat Demons in Jinhua

  After cats in Jinhua have been raised for three years they will each night of the fifteenth squat down on the roof, raise their mouths toward the moon

  and imbibe its essence. When after a long time they turn into demons, they

  move to hidden valleys deep in the hills. During the daytime they will stay in hiding, but at night they will come out and bewitch people.

  When they encounter a woman, they will turn into a handsome man,

  and when they encounter a man, they will turn into a beautiful woman.

  Whenever they come to somebody’s home, they will first pee in the water,

  and once people have drunk from it they will not be able to see their shape.

  All persons who are visited by these demons are still the same when these

  cats first come, but after some time they fall ill. If at night you place a black gown on top of the blanket [of these people] and inspect it the following

  morning, there seem to be hairs. One has to secretly engage the services

  of a hunter with several dogs. When he comes to the house and catches

  the cat, you have to skin the beast and roast its meat. The sick person will This content downloaded from 129.174.21.5 on Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:04:29 UTC

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  only recover on eating this meat. If it is a man who is ill and you catch a tomcat, or if it’s a woman who is ill and you catch a female cat, it will provide no cure.

  The prefectural student Zhang Guangwen had a daughter of eighteen

  who was very charming. Once she was invaded by this kind of monster, she

  lost all her hair. She only recovered when later a tomcat was caught.88

  Huang Han in his Garden of Cats included a long discussion of his friends about demonic cats:

  Ding Yusheng said, “The office compound of the circuit of Hui and Zhao

  (in eastern Guangdong) housed many cats that had gone wild. They would

  always come out late at night. Their eyes shone with a glimmering light,

  so they looked like fireflies. These were all, I gather, cats without an owner.

  By inhaling the moon and drinking the dew, they had eventually become

  demons. That’s why in going up and down walls and buildings they were

  so swift and nimble they seemed to fly. In the first month of summer, when

  the sea egrets arrived, they could even climb the trees and catch and devour them. The peacock that I kept in the garden also was mauled to death by

  them. But afterward these wild cats were not seen anymore. Someone

  remarked that a peacock’s blood is extremely poisonous and that the cats

  must have harmed their own lives by imbibing it. How stupid were these

  animals that they eventually caused their own death by goring on the

  fattest bird!”

  Zhou Hougong, also known as Shouzhai, from Yinxian said: “A cat can

  become a monster by bowing to the moon. That is why it is commonly said

  that a cat likes the moon. But people in Yinxian who keep a cat will kill it as soon as they see that it bows to the moon, because they are afraid that it will become a monster that will use its magic to seduce people. The way they do

  so is not different from fox demons. Tomcats can turn into men, and pussy-

  cats can turn into women.”

  He also said: “When a tomcat turns into a man, it can also put a spell on

  men, and when such a pussycat turns into a woman, she can also put a spell

  on a woman. Because this depends not on having sex but on inhaling the vital spirits. When people suffer from this, it is commonly called an evil disease, and nine out of ten people die. In Yinxian there was a widow who suddenly

  one day started to talk to herself and laugh at herself, acting in a most seductive manner. Later her mental energy and her physical shape both suddenly

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  decreased. When she was questioned, she said that she was visited by a cat that inhaled her yin, and then suddenly she was all deranged. Because her vital energy had been sucked up, she felt totally exhausted and was beyond help.”89

  As the comments of Zhou Hougong show, these rare cat demons were

  hardly different from the far more common fox demons that preyed on men

  and women by seducing them in human shape and robbing them of their vital

  essences. Belief in such cat demons appears to have been a very local affair.

  There is also in these sources no suggesti
on that the belief in cat demons was linked to a specific color of their fur.

  The most demonic cat in Chinese literature may actually well be the beau-

  tiful Snow Lion, a perfectly normal cat whose brief life is told in chapter 59

  of the sixteenth-century vernacular novel The Plum in the Golden Vase (Jin Ping Mei). The novel is set in the household of the wealthy merchant Ximen

  Qing and his six wives. When his sixth wife, Li Ping’er, gives birth to a boy, she becomes the center of his affection. His former favorite, his fifth wife, Pan Jinlian, becomes extremely jealous. She keeps a white lion cat with “fur so thick you could hide an egg in it.”90 She loves it so much that “when Ximen Qing was not in her quarters, the woman would go to sleep with the cat

  cuddled in her arms underneath the quilt.”91 She does not feed the cat calf’s liver or dried fish, but gives it half a pound of raw meat each day, which she wraps in a piece of red silk, encouraging the cat to pounce on it and devour it. As intended, one day when Li Ping’er has dressed the little boy in a shirt of red chiffon, the cat enters the room and pounces on the boy. The baby not only is badly mauled, but also suffers a terrible fright and goes into convul-sions. As a result of inept medical treatment, his condition only worsens.

  When Ximen Qing later learns that Pan Jinlian’s cat is the cause of the boy’s illness, he goes over to Pan Jinlian’s apartment, grabs the cat, and dashes its head against a stone pillar base, at which

  The contents of its brains burst into

  Ten thousand peach blossoms;

  Its mouthful of teeth were reduced to

  Scattered fragments of jade.92

  After Ximen Qing has left her room, Pan Jinlian wishes that her cat may

  demand Ximen Qing’s life in compensation once it appears before the author-

  ities in the underworld. The little boy will soon die of the injuries he has suffered and the medical treatment to which he has been subjected.93

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  Cat Lovers and Cat Lor e

  During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries three authors (apparently

  independently of each other) compiled comprehensive surveys of cat lore in

  traditional Chinese elite literature. Each of these compilations consists of topi-cally arranged excerpts from earlier writings. The first of these works was Chronicle of Cats (Maosheng) by Wang Chutong (1729–1821). Wang Chutong passed only the prefectural examinations, but after having served as a copyist during the imperial project of the compilation of the Complete Books of the Four Storerooms (Siku quanshu), he held a string of lower administrative positions in the provinces. Throughout his life, Wang was a productive scholar and writer, whose writings ranged from erudite critical commentaries to plays. His best-known work nowadays is a compendium of writings on women, History of the Boudoir (Lianshi). His Chronicle of Cats of 1798 is a much smaller work and is divided into eight “scrolls.” The first of these collects materials on the names and shapes of cats, while the second collects anecdotes. The third scroll is devoted to materials on the breeding and keeping of cats, as well as to their burial, while the fourth scroll deals with a great variety of subjects ranging from their qualities as mousers (or lack thereof) to their transformations and appari-tions as ghosts, demons, spirits, and immortals. Whereas the fifth scroll deals with the various kinds of cats, the sixth scroll is mostly taken up by materials on paintings of cats. The work is concluded by two scrolls that collect prose essays and poems about cats. In his preface, the author states that the stimulus for this compilation was provided by the competitive writing of poems on cats and the paucity of easily available allusions.

  The second compilation is by the Hangzhou woman poet Sun Sunyi (1783–

  1820). She started collecting materials for her Smal Record of Cricket­Snatchers (Xianchan xiaolu) while she was still a young girl at her parents’ home (her preface is dated to 1799). Her work is also made up of eight scrolls, the last three of which are filled with essays and poems on cats, and was first printed in 1819.

  Even though it was also reprinted at a later date, it appears to have enjoyed only a limited circulation. Her inspiration seems to have been her love of cats—a passion that was not shared by her jealous husband, as we learn from one of her best-known poems, which reads very much as a catalog of cat allusions:

  The Cat That I Love Was Chased Away by Yinglou,

  So I Wrote This Poem to Tease Him

  The cat may be a minor animal

  But it is listed in the Triple Rites:

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  It shared the sacrifice of the Eight Cha,

  So it was not neglected by the Sage!

  Moreover, it was loved by many people,

  It is impossible to count them all:

  One built a grave to mark its frost-like brow;94

  One chanted poems praising its white nose.

  Huang Quan excelled in limning its behavior95

  And Han Yu wrote a record of its deeds;96

  Its fivefold virtue may have been derided

  But its ten joys are pictured in a painting.

  A perfect image once was made of gold

  And aloe was carved to serve as coffin.97

  From this one knows that love of cats ignores

  Both high and low, and large and very small.

  I, too, am suffering from this addiction,

  In this I am exactly like Zhang Bo:

  I housed my cat in curtains of green silk

  And called it by a name such as Black Roundels.

  I bought it for red salt on bamboo leaves

  And fed it some small fishes as its meal,

  So at all times it purred around my knees—

  At night it slept while lying on my blanket.

  I wrote a book about it that fills tomes

  And pride myself not little on its rareness.

  I compiled A Small Record of Cricket-Snatchers in eight scrol s.

  The monk Zhi Dun admired supernal steeds,

  But caged geese obsessed the Right Commander:

  The animals they loved were not the same

  But their enjoyment did not hurt their mind.98

  My sweetheart, what may be the reason then

  That you, it seems, resent the fawning of Fuyi?99

  As soon as it one day had roused your ire,

  You tied it up and had it thrown outside.

  To take a seat and swallow hearts of bulls100

  May show the gall of a celebrity,

  But pulling out the orchids at her gate

  Is bound to hurt the feelings of a beauty.

  I know that you delight in Chan conundrums

  And so this action, too, must have its purpose:

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  By swallowing the head of a dead cat101

  One is enlightened to the highest truth!102

  Her husband, Gao Di (also known as Yinglou), countered with a poem of

  equal length, titled On Detesting Cats (Zengmao shi), which starts with the following four lines:

  A cat is just a common animal,

  Its only task is catching mice and rats.

  But if it does not execute its duty

&nbs
p; Its fivefold virtue has no use at all.103

  The best known of the three compilations of cat lore is Garden of Cats

  (Maoyuan) by Huang Han, a minor official of the mid-nineteenth century.

  Again, the work is divided into eight scrolls, devoted to kinds of cats, shapes of cats, color patterns of cats, miraculous manifestations of cats, famous

  examples of cats, anecdotes about cats, writings about cats, and additional materials. As might be expected, Garden of Cats shares many materials with Chronicle of Cats and A Small Record of Cricket­Snatcher s, but a major difference between Garden of Cats and its two predecessors is, as we have already seen in quotations from this work, that Huang and his friends often comment at length on the quotations from earlier authorities, basing themselves on

  their own experiences with their pets.104

  Learned as these three authors are, they limit themselves to excerpting

  the writings of literati, and none of them deigns to dabble in the vernacular and popular stories of the animosity between rodents and felines. It is these popular materials that will occupy us in the next chapters.

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  The White Mouse and the Five Rats

  S e v e r a l s ou r c e s f r om t h e f i r s t m i l l e n n i u m c l a i m that old rodents (after a hundred or a thousand years, depending on the

  source) can turn into bats ( bianfu) and in that shape can enjoy an eternal life as “immortal rats” ( xianshu). The Tang poet Bai Juyi (772–846) in the final years of his life was intrigued by white bats and the image they projected of immortality, as becomes clear from the following quatrain:

  Bats in Their Cave

  After a thousand years a rat becomes a bat that’s white

  And hiding in the blackest cave avoids the fowler’s net.

  It does succeed in fleeing harm and so protects its life,