Gan Bao
d. 336
Biography
Gan Bao, courtesy name Lingsheng, was a historian and writer who served at the court of Emperor Yuan of Jin, the Eastern Jin dynasty whose southern court was at Jiankang, the present Nanjing. He came from Xincai in what is now Henan province. Almost nothing is recorded of his early years, and his birth date is unknown. The records place him at court around 315, and his death is dated to 336.
He was entrusted with the official history of the Jin dynasty, the Jin Ji, which later writers valued. His name lives on mainly through a different book, the Soushen ji, which can be rendered In Search of the Supernatural. It is a collection of ghosts, spirits, prodigies and other strange happenings, the kind of material Chinese writers called zhiguai, or records of the anomalous. In his preface Gan Bao says he wanted to show that the spirit world is real, and he is often counted among the founders of this kind of storytelling.
The Soushen ji on this site is the book through which most readers now meet him. The text that survives is not exactly the work he left, because it was pieced together and added to over the centuries, so its tales are best read as a traditional collection rather than the work of a single hand. Its brief, plain accounts of the uncanny were an early and influential example of a tradition that continued through later Chinese supernatural fiction.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
搜神記
by 干寶
Gan Bao gathered stories of immortals, ghosts, strange animals, omens and dreams in the fourth century, the founding collection of Chinese tales of the marvellous. Its short entries, many only a paragraph long, give the earliest form of many legends later told again.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.