In Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, "The Monk of Changqing" offers an unusual version of what would now be called a body-switch or time-travel fantasy.
The story centers on an elderly monk from Changqing County in Shandong, a man of deep spiritual attainment. After his death, his soul does not disperse. Carried by the wind for more than a hundred li, it enters the body of a wealthy young man who has just died, and the youth suddenly comes back to life. His family, overjoyed, welcomes him home.
Yet the revived man does not truly think of himself as the son of that rich household. Though he now possesses a young body, comfort, status, and a life surrounded by wives and concubines, he still knows inwardly that he is the monk from Changqing Temple. In the end, he abandons that house, leaves behind its wealth and worldly pleasures, and walks back alone to the temple. There he puts on monastic robes once more and resumes religious practice. When the monks, astonished to see him, ask what has happened, he tells them of this strange encounter.
What makes the tale striking is that it is not only a supernatural anecdote. The fantasy of a soul entering another body, or of stepping outside ordinary time, had appeared in Chinese writing long before this story.
For example, in the Southern Dynasties text Shu Yi Ji, the story of Wang Zhi tells of a woodcutter who goes into the mountains and watches a game of chess. What feels like only a short while passes, but when he returns, the handle of his axe has already rotted away, and more than a century has gone by at home.
In the Jin dynasty collection Soushen Ji, the account of Li E's return to life describes a woman in the late Eastern Han who dies after being summoned to the underworld by mistake. When officials there realize the error and send her back, her original body has already decayed, so she revives by entering the body of a dead neighbor girl named Zhang Yan.
And in the Tang anthology Taiping Guangji, the tale of Zhu Jizhen says that after dying in the Chen-Cai region, his soul enters the corpse of Zhao Zihe from the same village and lives again, identifying himself as Zhu Jizhen.
Seen alongside these earlier stories, "The Monk of Changqing" does more than repeat an old fantasy motif. Pu Songling gives it moral and spiritual weight. The heart of the story is not the thrill of rebirth, borrowed flesh, or a second chance at luxury. It is the refusal to forget one's original self, the insistence on remaining true to one's calling, and a clear detachment from fame and wealth.
That is what sets it apart from many modern web novels built around transmigration. Contemporary stories in that vein often stretch to millions of words and center on the idea that one's fate can be seized and rewritten by force of will. Their appeal is very different. But both kinds of writing have their place in literature. What matters is the difference in what they seek to express: one turns fantasy toward reflection on life and human nature, while the other often turns it toward struggle, ambition, and self-assertion.