Chinese Fairy Tales and Fantasies (Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library)

The Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library

Contents

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank first of all Professor C. N. Tay of New York University for his sustaining encouragement and for sharing his extraordinary knowledge of language and literature;

the Pantheon editor, Wendy Wolf, and the copy editor, Mary Barnett, whose excellent judgment in matters of literary taste and English style improved my manuscript in countless ways;

my wife, Florence, and my children, Sean and Jennifer, who read the manuscript with care and made many valuable suggestions;

our friend, Shirley Hochhausen, who listened to these tales with a keen and appreciative ear;

the students in the East Asian Studies Program at New York University, who have stimulated so much of my research into Chinese literature.

A Note on the Illustrations

The illustrations were taken from the Ming encyclopedia
San Ts’ai T’u Huei
, or
Compendium of Illustrations for the Three Orders of Heaven, Earth, and Man
(1608). I am grateful to Mr. Jack Jacoby of the East Asian Collections of the Columbia University Libraries for permission to use their reprint edition. I also wish to thank Mr. David Tsai, Curator, and Ms. Alice Chi of the Gest Oriental Library of Princeton University for their assistance.

Introduction

The tales, fables, and fantasies in this collection blend the everyday life of mortals, the fabulous kingdom of birds and beasts, and the supernatural world of gods and ghosts. Like Western folk and fairy tales, they spring from the deep wells of a civilization’s history and imagination, and their cast of peasants, philosophers, virgins, kings, judges, tigers, and parrots may sometimes remind us of characters in more familiar legends. At the same time, these stories bear the stamp of the society and traditions that originally produced them. They illuminate the Chinese social order through the structured relationships that defined it: emperor and subject, father and son, husband and wife (or wives), official and peasant, human and beast.