Abstract
A Chinese story, originally included in Feng Menglong’s collection Stories to Caution the World (1624), was made known to the West in 1735 through father Dentrecolles’s translation, included by Du Halde in his monumental Description de la Chine. In it the wife of the philosopher Zhuangzi, after his faked death, breaks her vow never to remarry, and when her new suitor falls ill, she attempts to remove the brain from her husband’s corpse, after she is told this would be the only effective cure. But Zhuangzi comes back to life and she hangs herself. Similarities with Petronius’ tale of the matron of Ephesus were immediately pointed out. Some scholars maintained that Petronius had taken the theme from the Orient, but the differences between the Eastern and the Western stories can hardly be ignored.
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