Throughout history, we are shown different aspects of what has past but rarely are we presented with the detail of everyday people living their everyday lives. In The Death of Woman Wang by Jonathan D. Spence, the grueling details of everyday life in the seventeenth century in T'an-ch'eng county are displayed in a shockingly detailed manner. Jonathan D. Spence gathers his information from three sources. One source that Spence looked at was the Local History of T'an-ch'eng which was a historical record produced by Feng. Another source he used was the personal memoir and handbook by a scholar official, Huang Liu-hung. The Local History of T'an-ch'eng and the personal memoir/handbook seemed to hold the most accurate historical recounts while the third source he used, a collection by the essayist P'u Sung-ling was a collection of stories that mixed reality with fantasy. Many of P'u Sung-lings stories are...