The Secrets of Hanlin Academy

by Ji Yun (1724-1805), translated by Yi Izzy Yu and John Yu Branscum

The center outside door leading to Hanlin Academy’s main hall has been closed for so long that it’s sealed shut with a crust of bird feces, rust, and autumnal debris. It will remain so into the future no matter what because if it is opened it is said that tragedy will fall upon the school’s senior scholar.

Only once since I have been involved with Hanlin has this prohibition been tested. During a 1773 inspection, Prince Zhi Jun refused to use a lesser door and demanded that the large, center door be unsealed. It was, and soon thereafter both the Director Liu Wenzheng and his assistant died.

Then there’s the sandy embankment built in front of the academy to protect its students, scholars, and manuscripts from flood waters.  Whoever built it planted strange smooth balls of hardened earth into the dirt as if they are occult artifacts of some kind—or maybe the balls formed themselves over time through a mysterious alchemical process—perhaps one related to thwarted flood waters or drownings.

Whatever the case, if the stone-like balls are broken—even by accident—harm too will befall the teachers in the academy. During the flood season that ran from the summer of 1763 into early 1764, the waters that hurled themselves against the embankment exposed a ball and then a child, perhaps innocently, perhaps not, hurled it against the ground where it cracked open like an egg. As a result, my senior colleague Wu Yunyan abruptly died. Since then we’ve all been careful to shoo interlopers away from the embankment.

Opening certain things. Breaking certain things. These have both been proven to be great dangers at Hanlin, and the distinction between the teachers, the land, and the architecture to be far less than one would imagine.

As well, where one sits at Hanlin can also be fraught with peril. For example, if a faculty member’s parents are still living, he should avoid the southwest corner of the Yuanxin Pavilion. The scholar Lu Ershan laughed when he was warned of this, thinking it nonsense. He sat in the pavilion without the least bit of concern.

But when his father died not long afterwards, his cries were heartbreaking.

These are just three examples of the many taboos associated with the academy. Sometimes, I think that perhaps the taboos are the main point of Hanlin. Or, to put it another way, I sometimes think that the connections between things that initially seem to have no connection and the generation of rules based on the perception of these connections may be the deepest lesson taught. Indeed, similar institutions also have their lists of unexpected relationships and consequent taboos.

This is not to say, however, that I fully understand the principles involved. But it’s not necessary that I do to know such connections are there. 

Devotees of the weird, Yi Izzy Yu and John Yu Branscum teach Cross-Cultural Communication and English Studies at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Their collaborative work has appeared in magazines ranging from New England Review and Strange Horizons to Cincinnati Review and Wigleaf, and their translations of Ji Yun’s supernatural and horror work are collected in The Shadow Book of Ji Yun (Empress Wu 2021). You can find them on Twitter @YizzyYu, and on Instagram @sometimes_a_fox.