'Strange Stories From a Chinese Studio' Summary

Pu is popularly believed to have completed the majority of the tales sometime in 1679, when he wrote the preface to the anthology, though he could have added entries as late as 1707. However, according to Chinese scholar Zhang Peiheng (章培恒), the original Liaozhai comprised eight volumes, the earliest and latest of which were completed around 1681 and 1707 to 1714 respectively. 

The compilation was first circulated in scribal copies but it was not published until after the author's death in 1715. Shandong financial commissioner Yu Chenglong reportedly offered Pu a thousand taels circa 1693 in exchange for his Liaozhai manuscript, but Pu declined his offer. The final manuscript was "carefully preserved" by the Pu family after his death, with many different individuals, including the local magistrate, requesting to make copies of it. The earliest surviving print version of Liaozhai was printed in 1766 in Hangzhou by publisher Zhao Qigao (趙起杲), who claimed that Pu originally intended for his anthology to be titled Tales of Ghosts and Foxes（鬼狐傳). Although Zhao also alleged that his publication was based on the "original manuscript" as was copied by a friend, it did not contain all the stories found in the original manuscript; in the preface to his publication, he writes, "I have expunged simple and brief notes which are dull and commonplace, forty-eight in all." Moreover, Zhao censored stories that had "brief references to sensitive topics". Nonetheless, the Zhao edition was well-received and was first republished by scholar Li Shixian (李时憲) in 1767. 

At some point after 1871, Pu Jieren (普价人), a seventh-generation descendant of Pu Songling, had the original manuscript, which was reportedly made up of twenty volumes, rebound in eight volumes. They were then kept in two boxes, one of which disappeared "under circumstances which are still obscure". In 1950, the Pu family donated the surviving four volumes, which contained some 237 short stories, to the Liaoning Provincial Library.