Ming and Quing China were well populated with foxes, shape-changing creatures who transgressed the boundaries of species, gender and the metaphysical realm. Each section of this book traces a particular boundary violated by the fox and examines how maneuvers across that boundary change over time.

As "middle creatures", foxes were morally ambivalent, endowed with superhuman but not quite divine powers; like humans, they occupied a middle space between the infernal and the celestial.