Stories from a Chinese Studio episode two: more fox stories

So last time we discussed how in Pu Songling’s Liaozhai Zhiyi there are foxes that change into human form, and there are foxes that just stay in their animal form. In fact, the startling “humanness” of a fox appearance is consistent also across many Tang Chuanqi stories too, which are short fictional stories first formed in the Tang dynasty. The Tang dynasty was a long time before the Qing dynasty. In these Tang tales the human traits are indicative of ideas intimately connected to the social exchange of the stories among elite men of the era. However, quite different from the Liaozhai stories where you see a lot of times the fox fairies falls in love with humans and often marries into the household, the fox is either eventually killed off or runs away, with none able to successfully stay close to the human community forever or  ...