It is said that the night before Pu Songling was born, Pu Songling's father had a dream. In the dream, an ascetic monk in rags with a round plaster on his waist walked into his house and smiled at him. The next day, Pu Songling was born. Strangely, Pu Songling has a round birthmark on his waist, which looks like a plaster, as if it indicated that he was reincarnated as an ascetic monk.
Pu Songling's life as a teenager is still relatively moist. Although he is a black sheep landlord family, his family is a scholarly family, and Pu Songling received a good education. 19-year-old scholar, first in three subjects: township, county and Daoli. This incident caused a sensation in ten miles and eight townships, adding luster to the Pu family. Many people think that Pu Songling is a "child prodigy" and his future is limitless.
However, fate seems to be joking with Pu Songling. In the next 40 years, Pu Songling took part in 19 scientific examinations in succession, but they all ended in failure. On one occasion, Pu Songling played very well. The examiner, Busch Gong Yu, read his answer sheet and admired him very much. He was going to be the first. Unexpectedly, in the next exam, Pu Songling suddenly fell ill and could not continue the exam, so he had to give up, which made Pu Songling regret for life.
If the house leaks, it will rain. After Pu Songling got married, she separated from her two brothers. The two powerful eldest sisters shared most of the family's property, only giving Pu Songling 20 mu of thin land and 240 Jin of grain, and Pu Songling's life became tight. Pu Songling regards himself as a scholar, and his body is thin. He doesn't want to put down his face and farm at home, but chooses to be a private school teacher. Pu Songling became a private school teacher in 14, but the salary of this job is meager, earning only 8 taels of silver every year. During the Qianlong period, a family of four lived at least 200 taels a year, while Pu Songling only earned 800 taels. You can imagine how hard life is.
Pu Songling met the great poet Wang at the age of 35. Wang appreciates Pu Songling's literary talent very much and gives him some help in his life. Encouraged by Wang Shizhen, Pu Songling began to write Strange Tales from a Lonely Studio, alluding to the darkness of the imperial court and the corruption of officials at that time by talking about ghosts. This book exhausted Pu Songling's later life, but it didn't bring him any gains. Because at that time, scholars had to pay for books themselves, and Pu Songling, who could not even guarantee food and clothing, could not afford to publish books at all. It was not until more than ten years after Pu Songling's death-thirty-one years of Qianlong that Strange Tales from a Lonely Studio was published and spread slowly.
For Pu Songling's poverty, Guo Moruo once used this sentence to evaluate that "he struggled with poverty all his life, but even if he was gifted, he could not turn over."