What was the name of the first ghost book in ancient China?

The first fairy tale: Shan Hai Jing

The first collection of fairy tales: looking for the gods

If we have a broad understanding of the scope of myth, in addition to ancient myths and legends, we also include stories about gods, ghosts and monsters created by literati in past dynasties, that is, stories about strange stories, so there are a lot of them and quite a few excellent works.

Myth novels began in Wei and Jin Dynasties. In these two generations, influenced by local ideas and superstitions of Taoism and Buddhism, some literati wrote stories about ghosts and gods, many of which were rich in imagination and beautiful in words. More prominent are Gan Bao's "Searching for God" and other books. By the Northern and Southern Dynasties, the atmosphere of writing strange novels had not diminished.

After the Middle Tang Dynasty, many famous literati engaged in legendary writing, which was the real beginning of China's novels. The legends of the Tang Dynasty have a wide range of contents, involving all aspects of human feelings and social life. Formally, it is no longer a miscellaneous note in a few words, but a short story with complete structure and strong story, which is thousands or even ten thousand words long. In these legends, there are many wonderful stories of gods and ghosts. The legend of strange tales in Song Dynasty generally inherited the tradition of Tang Dynasty. Although there are excellent works, they are generally not as good as those in the prosperous Tang Dynasty. In terms of novels, an important contribution of the Song Dynasty was the compilation of an ancient novel collection-Taiping Guangji. It contains about 7,000 works in the pre-Qin, Han and early Northern Song Dynasties, divided into 500 volumes, with a total word count of nearly 3 million, and has collected more than 340 books, many of which have long been lost. Thanks to Tai Ping Guang Ji, some of them have been preserved. There are quite a few works about immortals and ghosts in 7,000 stories.

Stories written in vernacular Chinese have been used in the Song Dynasty and are usually called "story books". The most famous novels in Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties are vernacular novels, such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, The Journey to the West, Scholars and A Dream of Red Mansions. The widely circulated short stories Sanyan and Erpai are also written in vernacular Chinese.

In the early Qing Dynasty, there appeared a collection of strange stories written in ancient Chinese-Pu Songling's Strange Tales from a Lonely Studio. This book was all the rage and received wide acclaim. Since then, Ji Yun, who presided over the compilation of Sikuquanshu, wrote Notes of Yuewei Caotang, which recorded some rumors involving gods, foxes, ghosts and monsters. After Ji Yun, although there are still some myths or strange novels written in ancient Chinese, few of them have great influence.