Pu Songling
The novel was published under the pen name Xizhou Sheng (西周生), that is, "Scholar of the Western Zhou", the Golden Age in which Confucius lived. Hu Shih's confident announcement in 1931 of his discovery that it was written by Pu Songling has been "largely discredited". Nothing about the author is known, though authorship has been "wrongly" attributed to Pu on the grounds that the novel contains many phrases from the Shandong dialect, as does "Jin Ping Mei" (indeed "Jin Ping Mei" is quoted in the novel).