Surprising Stories – Story 6 – The Fatal Seduction

This is a story from a collection of 40 erotic stories from the Ming Dynasty. The author, Ling Mengchu, lived from 1580 to 1644. Because the author, Ling Mengchu, uses actual names, dates and places and recites historical events, we cannot be sure whether he is writing fiction or fact. He seems to be giving us factual accounts. It is also possible that these stories have been passed down from history and he is just recounting them from other sources. Each story recites historical events that must have been well known back then, but of which we know little today. Ling Mengchu did not like religious people. Nuns and Monks are revealed to be the most wicked people imaginable in his stories. Another unusual feature of the works of Ling Mengchu is he gives the moral to the story at the beginning, not at the end. In the Fatal Seduction story, he starts by saying that nuns are the most vicious and evil women. On the pretext of preaching Buddhism they gain entrance into private respectable homes, where otherwise blameless women fall into their intrigues. Different publications of the works of Ling Menchu have different numbering sequences for the stories and different titles. One must search with difficulty to find the same story published in a different book. For example, the story of “The Fatal Seduction” is the same as the story entitled “Nun Zhao Ensnares a Beauty with Narcotic Wine; Scholar Jia Takes His Revenge with an Ingenious Plot” which is Tale 4 – First Series – page 66 – of “Ling Mengchu Amazing Tales” published by Foreign Languages Press in Beijing.