• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Two Short Stories From A 12th Century Text

王泥喜法介

Devoted Cultist
Joined
Jun 6, 2018
Messages
125
In the past, traditional Chinese intellectuals usually record something unusual or surprising in the form of notes. Down to today, some remain intact and available, and I prefer to read this type of literature to gain some fresh knowledge, especially for something supernatural.

Frankly speaking, even though I have read a lot of stories regarding this theme, most of them appear unconvincing because there was only one witness in most stories. In so doing, no matter how amazing those stories are, the reliability is open for question regardless. However, I find two of them below are different; they are highly reliable. Firstly, the authors of the two stories were local administrators; secondly, the two stories were witnessed by more than thousands, so it appears to be impossible to collude with all of them to fabricate such stories.

The first one is about a building. In the 12th century, there was a bell tower in a city which was located in the southeast of China. In the past, the bell tower was usually the central area of a city, so did this city.

What is surprising is that this tower suddenly disappeared on a stormy night. This event appeared to be unthinkable for all people in that city. For one thing, it was impossible to deconstruct a tower in such a short time. For another, even if someone had removed this building, nobody perceived anything abnormal last night. You can imagine, such a deconstruction should be a huge project in the 12th century.

Although this event seemed to be impossible, it really happened. And citizens attempted to explain this abnormality by their knowledge involving ghosts and magic.

To solve a potential disturbance, the local administrator started to examine this case immediately. At first, the administrator called the night watchman at the court and asked him to recall what happened last night, but that poor watchman said he had seen nothing different. The administrator then summoned several people who lived around there, but his effort proved vain. Under desperation, the administrator spared no effort to control the conversation, which was probably hazardous to control the law-and-order situation.

However, something incredible happened again. After a few months, after a stormy night again, the bell tower came back silently. Nobody detected anything unusual at that night, as well as the night when the tower disappeared.

The second one is about sheep. In contrast to the story above, this one is much simpler. This story outlined that thousands of people who lived in a coastal line in Guang Dong Province witnessed a large group of flying sheep. This case lasted around three hours, and the number of sheep was around 500. All sheep flied slowly and high, finally disappeared behind clouds.
 
Last edited:
Great stories! But wouldn't a flock of sheep at high altitude have looked like clouds anyway?
 
Back
Top