Because the plot is fantastic and exaggerated, it makes people feel very scary. But this article does not seem like a simple storytelling. After reading it, I always feel that Pu Songling wants to express some meaning through this story
During the Shunzhi period, when led the peasant uprising in Shandong on Qi , the court cruelly encircled and implemented the policy of implicating the situation. The killed people were everywhere, and the bodies were piled on the roadside and no one was buried. Villager Li Hualong fled back from the mountains and was marching at night. Li Hualong was afraid that the Qing army would find out and cause trouble. In an emergency, he could not find a place to hide, so he lay stiffly among the dead people pretending to be dead. After a large number of people gradually faded away and there was no sound, Li Hualong did not dare to get up immediately.
Suddenly I saw the bodies that turned their heads and broke their arms all stood up, densely packed like a large forest. One of the corpses, whose head was cut off, was still attached to his shoulders, and he made a sound from his mouth, saying, "What should I do when the wild dog is here?" The corpses also echoed in a mess, "What should I do, what should I do!" After a while, the corpses fell back to the ground and returned to quiet.
Li Hualong was trembling in fear, but something came. When he saw that there was a beast's head and a human body, he was lying in the pile of dead people, biting the heads, sucking the brains of the corpse one by one. Seeing this terrifying scene, Li Hualong was extremely scared and hid his head under the corpse. Soon, the monster approached and moved Li Hualong's shoulder, trying to turn his head out. Li Hualong lie on the ground with all his strength. The monster failed to fiddle several times, so he began to push away the body covering his head. After removing all the corpses, the head finally showed up. Li Hualong was extremely frightened and tried his best to fumble the ground below his waist. He touched a stone as big as a bowl and held it in his hand. The monster lowered his body and wanted to bite him. Li Hualong suddenly stood up, shouted loudly, raised the stone and slammed the monster's head, just hitting it in the mouth. The monster was beaten to howl, like a roaring hawk. He ran away while screaming, covering his mouth and snarling. He vomited some blood on the way. He walked closer and saw that there were two teeth in the blood, with a curved middle and sharp ends, and more than four inches long. He put it in his arms and took it away for others to show it, but he didn't know what kind of monster it was.
There is nothing particularly surprising about this story. But behind the absurd story is a bloody peasant uprising. My understanding is to accuse the brutality of the rulers of the Qing . The murder at the beginning refers to the Qing soldiers massacred the rebels and innocent people. Those people and the farmers in the uprising were brutally slaughtered when they were alive, and they were swallowed by wild dogs after they died. They were devoured by wild dogs. The dignity of no one. That wild dog is a metaphor for the Qing Dynasty soldiers, or they may be green camp officers and soldiers who are willing to be evil dogs. Wild dogs reflect the cruelty of the war through supernatural ghosts. Specifically, it was the Qing court's cruel suppression of the anti-Qing people, so that they would rather kill a thousand people by mistake than miss one.
