China
Explore Chinese folk tales, legends and literary adventures, including stories preserved through older translated collections. Source notes identify the version followed and distinguish its imagined world from historical or religious commentary.
80 stories are in this region right now.
Chinese Folk Tales
Ages 9-12
How Molo Stole the Lovely Rose-Red
A young man cannot read a palace girl’s secret finger signs, but his old servant Molo, a flying sword hero, can, and rescues her over ten walls.
Chinese Folk Tales
Help in Need
A Tang magistrate dreams that a widowed Dragon Princess begs for soldiers against a bullying dragon, and his best general goes to fight for her.
Chinese Folk Tales
How Greed for a Trifling Thing Led a Man to Lose a Great One
A loving son is given a magic helper called Small Profit; his envious brother gets Great Duty instead, then loses both by grabbing at the smaller gift.
Chinese Folk Tales
Giauna the Beautiful
A scholar joins a mysterious family, is healed by Giauna, and later risks his life to protect them during a supernatural storm.
Chinese Folk Tales
Ages 9-12
Dschang Liang
After a failed ambush on the First Emperor, Dschang Liang fetches an old man’s shoe, passes a test of patience, and receives a book of hidden wisdom.
Chinese Folk Tales
Ages 6-8
Fox-Fire
A farmer swallows the glowing elixir a fox breathes toward the moon, gains spirit powers for thirty years, and then the fox comes to take it back.
Chinese Folk Tales
Black Arts
A young man who marries into a family of hill sorcerers survives a poisoned feast and a dragon only by heeding his clever wife, who flees with him.
Chinese Folk Tales
Ages 9-12
A Legend of Confucius
A magical Kilin foretells the greatness of Confucius, and centuries later a proud emperor who opens the sage’s tomb finds a warning waiting.