Granny Meng's Pavilion

Where memories are left behind

At Granny Meng's pavilion, departing souls drink a soup that makes them forget their former lives before rebirth. Popular art often shows a small stall beside Naihe Bridge. Other names include Granny Meng's Lodge and the Terrace of Forgetting. They need not refer to an identical building in every account.

The morality-book version

Yuli Baochao describes a much larger establishment associated with the tenth court and six bridges. Its five-flavored drink and carefully arranged corridors belong to that text's moralizing narrative. Late Ming and Qing fiction helped connect Granny Meng with bewilderment and forgetting; the older use of her name for wind follows a different history. Local mourning customs sometimes imagine ways to avoid the soup and preserve memory. Modern tales of a thousand-year romantic vigil are further retellings, not established ancient biography.