linguistic:voice_change, information:extraction, structural:summarization, quality:correction, structural:expansion
Folklore

While Cai's personal life is mostly unknown, a popular folktale suggests he was a shopkeeper and trickster with a wife and brother, though there is no historical confirmation for this. The story goes that after Cai's improvements to paper there was little demand for the product so he had an ever-growing surplus. As such, Cai and his wife developed a ploy to increase sales; they told townsfolk that paper becomes money in the afterlife when burned.

In the most popular variation to the tale, Cai Mo and Hui Niang—Cai's brother and sister-in-law of unconfirmed historicity —take the place of Cai and his wife. In this version, Hui convinced Cai Mo to learn the new papermaking trade from his younger brother, and when he returned in only three months, the paper he and his wife produced was too low quality to sell. To address this, Hui pretended to have died, and Cai Mo stood beside her coffin, wailing and burning money as tribute. Then, their neighbors checked in on them, and Hui sprung out of the coffin, explaining that the burned money was transferred to her in the afterlife, with which she paid ghosts to return her from the dead. Believing the story, the neighbors quickly purchased large amounts of paper for their own use. While mostly a fictitious story, intense wailing and burning offerings are commonplace in Chinese culture.