The princess Miao Shan, strangled at her own father's order for refusing to marry, wakes as from a dream to a terrible discovery: lifting her head and looking round, "she could not see her body". She has arrived somewhere with "neither mountains, nor trees, nor vegetation" — no sun, moon, nor stars, no sound of fowl or dog. A young man in blue bearing a great banner comes for her, sent by "Yen Wang, the King of the Hells" — the ruler of the underworld — to bring her to "the eighteen infernal regions".

So the soul makes its circuit. Miao Shan visits every one of the ten hells, and when she prays the instruments of torture turn to lotus-flowers and the place becomes a paradise, until its keeper begs to be rid of a saint who is emptying his kingdom. The return had been arranged beforehand: the supreme god Yü Huang had ordered a magic pill placed in her mouth "to arrest decay", so that her "triumphant soul" might find the body whole and be able to "re-enter it and animate it afresh". At the last the youth in blue "conducted her soul back to her body", which lay beneath a pine-tree, and Miao Shan "found herself alive again" — with a bitter sigh, remembering all she had seen below.

This is the one witness wired to served text: Werner's Myths & Legends of China (published 1922), where the journey belongs to the legend of Kuan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy. Thompson gathered the wandering soul far more widely — Irish and Estonian, Slavic and Norwegian, Greenland Eskimo and North American Indian authorities — but those wait unread beside this single Chinese witness. What the tale insists on is the seam: a body kept from rotting on the chance the soul comes back. If a soul can tour the whole of Hell and return to a body held in waiting, where, in all that travelling, was the person herself?