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3rd Apr, 2026 On Chinese Gothic part 1

When thinking about gothic, people tend of think of soaring castles and misshapen stone spires. But the Chinese have a sense of the gothic, which has been quietly flourishing in recent storytelling like moss on the gravestone, and harks back to literary traditions. Instead of derelict abbeys and dungeoned great houses, we have ruined temples and equally labyrinthine ancient mansions, usually enclosured with courtyards and gardens sprawling into unfathomable depths. Instead of the ghostly woman in black, we have the ethereal woman in white, for white is the colour of death and mourning for the Chinese, the white-robed woman often symbolising the innocent and pure. She is ever briefly glimpsed, through abandon quarters and desolate fields, singing, weeping, or brushing her hair. In traditional stories like Pu Songling’s Liaozhai, she’s mostly a femme fatale, a ghost or a fox demon, luring men to their demise, or leaving them to wake up cold in cobwebbed ruins. Contemporary Chinese horror inherits this aesthetic, a prime example being Cai Jun’s novella Huangcun (which you can read in Sinophagia), but the emphasis is placed more on the phantomising of victims by traditional societal constraints and expectations. This is evident in the story of the vanishing brides in Snow Tower, the ‘ghostly figure’ at the Long Clan mansion leads the protagonists to eventually discover that the women had been murdered and buried by the clan’s deranged leader on their stormy island, where the tombs of the clan’s female infants lie hidden in the underground caves. Continue Reading →