Mengchu Ling

Born in 1580 in Wucheng, Zhejiang, Ling Mengchu was a Ming-dynasty writer, publisher, and dramatist. He came from an official family and built a reputation as a talented man of letters, but he is remembered most for bringing energy and polish to popular storytelling.

His best-known works are the paired story collections Pai'an jingqi—often known in English as Slapping the Table in Amazement and its second series. Written in the vernacular rather than in more formal classical prose, these stories mix romance, crime, coincidence, satire, and moral reflection, while also offering a vivid picture of urban life and social change in late imperial China.

Ling died in 1644, at the turbulent end of the Ming dynasty. Even centuries later, his fiction remains important for readers and scholars alike because it shows how entertaining storytelling could also capture the values, anxieties, and ambitions of its time.