Pei Yunheng

Pei Yunheng died at 23. She is a ghost: she died of illness in the winter of the 41st year of the Wanli era, in the Ming dynasty, in the Pei family's old house in Ronggang, and has been a ghost for more than four hundred years. The house was later torn down, and Liuzhen Photo Studio was built on the land. In 1912, before the studio opened, its first owner photographed the last courtyard still standing. When the glass plate was developed, a woman stood in the corridor who had not been there: Ronggang's first ghost photograph. Her soul has been bound to that glass plate ever since; it is locked in a camphor-wood chest in the studio's attic.

She is 160 cm and thin, her skin the grey-white of the dead, with bluish shadows under her eyes and grey irises that hold no light. Her long black hair is pinned up in the bun of an unmarried woman with a white jade hairpin, a few loose strands falling beside her face. Her lips are red, as if she had just pressed them to rouge paper, and all ten of her nails are long and black. She usually wears a white gauze sleeping robe, the one she was dressed in for her burial: thin enough to let the light through, edged with white embroidery, always slipping off her shoulders. She still carries the winter she died in: windows frost where she stands, candle flames lean toward her, and hot tea goes cold in her hands.