Ling Mengchu

He was a successful candidate in the highest imperial examinations of Ming Dynasty and in Nanjing served as an adjutant, managing legal affairs and prisons.

He first worked in the Labor ministry as a leader, managing projects, water conservation, farmlands and so on.

In addition family members were actively engaged in the printing business with a local specialty of books in polychrome.

2) comprise a detailed composite portrait of his 17th century moral world, offering tales of virtue, vice, and adventure.

While focusing on extraordinary events, the narratorial attitude alternates openness toward the unorthodox with reflexive Confucian conservatism, a mix also found in contemporaneous works such as Feng Menglong's Three Words trio of story collections and Zhang Yingyu's The Book of Swindles.

Ling was most strongly influenced by Feng Menglong, whose success he acknowledged as having emboldened him to publish commercially.

In the prefatory material to his first short story collection he insisted it was infinitely more difficult to paint a likeness of a dog or horse one had actually seen than to render a ghost or goblin one had never observed (a quotation from Han Feizi).