4 h 54 minAudiobook14 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at cost
Audiobook edition · 4 h 54 minPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
In Shanghai’s pleasure quarters, charm draws people close—and desire carries a price.
The Nine-Tailed Fox by Pinghuazhuren opens a world of courtesan houses, crowded streets, and new money. Shanghai’s pleasure quarters bring merchants, officials, students, and idlers together. In this Chinese novel, seduction and ambition share the stage with the hunger for pleasure, status, money, and admiration.
The title draws on the fox spirit of Chinese folklore, a creature that takes human shape and wins people through charm. That image sets the mood for a scandalous portrait of Shanghai’s demimonde. Come with patience: this older fiction invites you to linger over social detail rather than hurry past it.
What you’ll discover
- The lure of charm Explore the fox spirit image that gives the novel its mood of seduction.
- A city of appetites Enter Shanghai’s pleasure world, where new money meets the wish to be admired.
- Ambition without restraint Consider the price of a life shaped by pleasure, status, and restless wanting.
- Rules behind the pleasure Look beyond the courtesan houses to a social world with rules of its own.
- Room to look closer Settle into a slower manner that gives social detail space to hold your attention.
Who will love it
Readers who enjoy vivid portraits of city life will love this novel, with its banquets, gossip and sharp-tongued servants. It also suits fans of a narrator who talks straight to you.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- The fox begins as a girl
- Flattery makes caution feel like wisdom
- A wedding becomes a bargaining lesson
- Desire breaks the marriage bargain
- Her customers pay different prices
- Fashion turns attention into influence
- Age makes another role look appealing
- Appetite gives everything a price
- Charm needs restraint to spare others
Who’s who
- Hu BaoyuBorn Pan, sold into a brothel, she is first called Lin Daiyu and wants admiration, money and endless new lovers.
- Yang SiA Ningbo silk millionaire who loves luxury and chooses to marry the courtesan who has taken his heart.
- A-JinBaoyu's sharp-tongued maid, who arranges her secrets and quietly puts a little money aside for herself.
- Huang ZhiquanA newspaper editor with a sharp eye, who sees through Baoyu early and later ranks the city's courtesans.
- Guo SuizhiA handsome young merchant from Guangdong who spends freely and falls deeply for Baoyu.
- ShisandanA star actor of women's roles from Beijing whom Baoyu pursues across the country.
- Hu XiulinA young courtesan who becomes Baoyu's goddaughter and hopes to learn her ways.
- Shan QuxianA talkative hanger-on who steers rich men toward Baoyu and expects a reward for it.
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The Nine-Tailed Fox
A Shanghai courtesan charms rich men out of their money while her own narrator warns every reader against her.
Challenging10–20 hours to read2 languages
Learn a language with challenging classicsSpanishFrenchGermanItalianJapanesePortugueseEnglishHow we measure levels
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In short
Picture an upstairs room in old Shanghai. Courtesans, wealthy merchants and servants fill rooms where wine, drinking games and flattering conversation enliven the gatherings.
The Nine-Tailed Fox at a glance
- Reading time
- About 17 h 20 min13 h 45 min fast, 20 h 35 min slow
- Length
- 247,500 words
- Library level
- Challenging long sentences, a rich vocabulary
Reading time at 238 words a minute (fast 300, slow 200). How long the classics take to read · Updated
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
A narrator names his heroine a fox
The book opens with a joke that is also a plan. There is already a novel about a Nine-Tailed Turtle, a rich official whose messy private life gets him into trouble. The author decides a Nine-Tailed Fox must follow, a woman whose flirtatious charm is her power.
He argues that a fox with a human heart is a person, and a person with a fox's heart is a fox. So a prostitute who drains one man and moves on to the next is a monster among people. Then the story begins. Her father, nicknamed Little Mirror, joins a rebel band, and she is born of his affair with a cooper's wife. Poor and alone, her mother sells the girl to a brothel when she is a little over ten.
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Which edition is right for me
- 15-minute summary
- The key ideas of the whole book in about 14 minutes. A good first look, or a refresher.
Details
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 3 h 10 min
- Level
- Challenging
Cite this edition
Pinghuazhuren. The Nine-Tailed Fox. Library of Alexandria, 2026, libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-nine-tailed-fox.
Pinghuazhuren. (2026). The nine-tailed fox. Library of Alexandria. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-nine-tailed-fox
Pinghuazhuren. The Nine-Tailed Fox. Library of Alexandria, 2026. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-nine-tailed-fox.
@book{pinghuazhuren2026ninetailed,
author = {Pinghuazhuren},
title = {The Nine-Tailed Fox},
publisher = {Library of Alexandria},
year = {2026},
url = {https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-nine-tailed-fox}
}
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What is The Nine-Tailed Fox about?
It follows the courtesan Hu Baoyu in Shanghai, from a girl sold into a brothel to a woman near forty running her own house. Along the way it shows banquets, lovers, actors, money tricks and the warnings of a moralizing narrator.
Why is the book called The Nine-Tailed Fox?
The author says a fox spirit with nine tails is lustful and good at charming people. He adds that he wrote the book to match a novel about a Nine-Tailed Turtle and gives that fox name to his heroine.
Who is Lin Daiyu and who is Hu Baoyu?
They are the same woman. She starts out working under the sign name Lin Daiyu, borrowed from a famous novel, and later takes the name Hu Baoyu, under which she becomes known across Shanghai.
The author
Pinghuazhuren
Chinese novelist
Pinghuazhuren is a pen name, and the writer is known to readers only through this book. The novel shows a man at home in the newspapers, theaters, gardens and brothels of Shanghai's foreign settlements, who knew the talk of merchants and brothel servants. He writes in the manner of a serial storyteller, with moral warnings, verses and cliffhangers.
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