The Story

Teng Mu was a young scholar of Hangzhou. One autumn night, drinking alone, he wandered through the city until he came to the ruins of Jujing Garden — once the pleasure grounds of the Southern Song court, now overgrown with weeds and crumbling into dust.

But tonight the garden was alive. Lanterns hung from the broken pavilions. Music drifted from the empty halls. Beautiful women in Song dynasty court dress moved through the moonlight, laughing, pouring wine, composing poems. Teng Mu, drunk and unafraid, walked in.

The women welcomed him as if he were expected. One in particular caught his eye — a girl of sixteen, with a face like a painting. She told him her name: she had been a palace maid in the court of Emperor Lizong, dead these two hundred years. She did not look dead. She looked like spring.

They spent the night together, drinking, composing poems, making love in a moonlit pavilion. She told him about life in the Song court — the music, the politics, the intrigues. She spoke of the fall of Lin'an to the Mongols, the panic, the suicides. Her voice was calm, but her eyes were wet.

At dawn, the lanterns faded. The music stopped. Teng Mu woke alone, lying in wild grass among crumbling stones. The garden was a ruin again. On his sleeve, he found a single hairpin — old, corroded, unmistakably Song dynasty.

🏯 Jujing Garden 聚景园 Jujing Garden was a real place — a imperial garden built during the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279) on the shores of West Lake in Hangzhou. After the Mongol conquest, it fell into disrepair. By the Ming dynasty, it was a ruin. Qu You's choice of setting is deliberate: the garden is a lieu de mémoire, a place where the memory of a lost civilization lingers. The ghosts who inhabit it are not random spirits but the collective memory of the Song dynasty, refusing to be forgotten.

Analysis 解读

This story is less about ghosts than about nostalgia — specifically, the Chinese literary tradition of mourning lost dynasties. The Song dynasty was remembered as a golden age of culture, art, and refinement. Its fall to the Mongols was felt as a civilizational catastrophe. Two hundred years later, in the Ming, that grief had not faded.

Teng Mu's drunkenness is important: he is not a spiritual seeker or a ghost-hunter. He is an ordinary young man who has had too much wine and stumbled into history. The ghosts do not test him or judge him — they simply include him, as if the boundary between past and present is as thin as the boundary between sober and drunk.

📖 The Ghost Garden as Literary Motif The "haunted garden" is a recurring motif in Chinese literature, from the Peony Pavilion (牡丹亭) to Dream of the Red Chamber (红楼梦). Gardens represent the cultivated beauty of civilization; when they fall to ruin, they become places where the past lingers. The ghost garden is not merely a scary location — it is a portal to memory, a place where the dead can still enjoy the pleasures they knew in life.

Further Reading