Near the town was a mountain called Stone Mirror Mountain. To see the ‘mirror’ you followed a winding path through the mountains for about a li and then came to a cliff with water rushing down its face, and with moist greenery that itself seemed about to begin dripping over the ground. Gradually climbing higher to the middle of the mountain, you arrived at a square stone pavilion with four high walls. The left and right of the pavilion were as flat as screens, and the light reflected from their lustrous green surfaces so that you could see yourself in them. It was said that once, if a man looked into them, they would reflect what he had been in a former life. But when Hung Tsao came there, he is supposed to have looked into the walls and seen the image of an ape, and then he set fire to the pavilion and burned the walls so they lost their power.
Shen Fu, “The Delights of Roaming Afar” (Six Records of a Floating Life)
