What is “An Old Chinese Story” and where does it come from?

“An Old Chinese Story” is a tale from Japanese mukashi-banashi tradition, preserved canonically through the Konjaku Monogatari-shū (c. 1120), Uji Shūi Monogatari (c. 1212), and the modern indices of Yanagita Kunio and Seki Keigo. It is classified in the international Aarne–Thompson–Uther index of folktale types (Hans-Jörg Uther, FF Communications 284–286, Helsinki, 2004), where it occupies a stable place within its family of types. The version retold here follows the canonical source text and its earliest English-language scholarly editions.

Who are the principal characters and what do they represent in the wider tradition?

The protagonists of “An Old Chinese Story” function within the moral economy of Japanese mukashi-banashi tradition as embodied virtues and vices — courage and cowardice, cunning and folly, generosity and greed — set against one another in a sharply defined narrative test. Such characterological economy is the formal signature of the fable and folk tradition: each figure is at once an individual character within the plot and the type-instance of a moral disposition the tradition wishes to weigh. Their fates dramatise the tradition’s settled judgement on which dispositions earn flourishing and which earn ruin.

What is the moral, and how does the tradition formulate it?

In the Japanese mukashi-banashi tradition the moral is never an external decoration added to the plot; it is the geometry of the plot itself. “An Old Chinese Story” closes with a settled verdict on the dispositions it has put on trial — a verdict the storyteller commonly states in a single sentence or proverbial line at the close, and which careful readers find already inscribed in the choices and consequences of the action. The closing aphorism crystallises into transmissible form a judgement the tale has actually demonstrated; the story remains in cultural memory because the demonstration continues to hold under inspection.

How does this tale relate to cognates in other traditions?

Comparative folklore scholarship in the Aarne–Thompson–Uther framework, supplemented by Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (6 vols., Indiana University, 1932–1936; rev. 1955–1958), has long recognised that fables and folktales travel across language and confession with remarkable persistence. “An Old Chinese Story” has cognates and structural analogues in neighbouring traditions: the Greek and Latin Aesopica, the Sanskrit Pañcatantra and Hitopadeśa, the Arabic Kalīla wa-Dimna, the European Märchen tradition, and the East Asian household-tale corpora all preserve versions or close relatives. These parallel attestations are evidence that the moral problems the tale addresses are not parochial but recurrent in the human condition.

Why does “An Old Chinese Story” still resonate with modern readers?

The tale survives because the situation it depicts continues to recur. The characters wear the costume of their period, but the predicament they enact — pride exposing itself to ruin, kindness disclosing strength the proud could not see, cleverness winning what force cannot — is the predicament of every era. The Japanese mukashi-banashi tradition preserves these tales precisely because each generation has had to learn the same lessons again, and the fable form is the most economical pedagogy yet devised for that recurring task. To read “An Old Chinese Story” today is to find one’s own situation, lightly disguised, already considered by tellers whose names are mostly lost but whose judgement has been ratified by twenty or more centuries of hearers.

An Old Chinese Story

Origin & canonical attribution. “An Old Chinese Story” — This tale belongs to the corpus of Japanese folk literature (mukashi-banashi, 昔話) preserved through the great medieval anthologies and the systematic folklore-collection campaigns of the twentieth century. Principal early sources include the Konjaku Monogatari-shū (今昔物語集, Anthology of Tales from the Past, compiled c. 1120 CE, 31 books, 1,059 surviving tales drawn from Indian, Chinese, and Japanese matter), Uji Shūi Monogatari (宇治拾遺物語, c. 1212–1221 CE), and Otogi-zōshi picture-books of the Muromachi period. Modern scholarly collection begins with Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962), founder of Japanese folklore studies, whose Tōno Monogatari (遠野物語, 1910) and Nihon Mukashibanashi Meii (Index of Japanese Folktales, 1948, revised by Seki Keigo 1958) are the foundational twentieth-century apparatus, alongside Seki Keigo’s monumental Nihon Mukashibanashi Taisei (Complete Index of Japanese Folktales, 12 vols., 1978–1980). Classification uses Seki numbers (NMT) and the international Aarne–Thompson–Uther index.

An Old Chinese Story: Patience, Perspective, and the Wheel of Fortune’s Long Turning

Among the most philosophically concentrated tales in the East Asian folk narrative tradition is the story known variously as “The Old Farmer and His Horse,” “Sai Weng Shi Ma,” or simply “An Old Chinese Story.” It follows a farmer whose life passes through an apparently random sequence of good fortune and bad, each event evaluated by neighbours who pronounce it “wonderful” or “terrible,” and each time receiving the farmer’s invariant reply: “Perhaps.” The tale is a sustained meditation on zhī zú (contentment-through-understanding) and the epistemological problem of judging events whose full consequences are not yet visible.

The story’s origin is often traced to the Huainanzi, a Han dynasty philosophical compendium compiled around 139 BCE, where it serves as an illustration of Taoist non-attachment to outcome. Its survival across two millennia and its wide distribution across Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese oral traditions testify to the universality of its central insight: that the valence of any event is determined not at the moment of occurrence but across the arc of time we cannot see from where we stand.

“Is this good fortune or bad? The old farmer only smiled. He had learned that time answers such questions better than wisdom does.”

Beat I — The Horse Runs Away

A farmer’s horse escapes and disappears into the northern steppe. His neighbours come to commiserate: what terrible luck. The farmer’s response—”Perhaps”—is not false modesty or evasion but a disciplined refusal to foreclose interpretation before events have completed their arc. Within days the horse returns, bringing with it a herd of wild horses. The neighbours return: what wonderful luck. Again: “Perhaps.” The structure is immediately established. Fortune and misfortune are not states but transitions; each apparent endpoint is in fact a midpoint in a sequence whose conclusion remains invisible.

Beat II — The Son and the Breaking

The farmer’s son attempts to tame one of the wild horses and is thrown, breaking his leg. Terrible luck, say the neighbours. The farmer: “Perhaps.” Shortly after, military conscription officers arrive to draft all able-bodied young men for a war that will claim most of them. The son, unable to walk, is passed over. Wonderful luck. “Perhaps.” The tale has now completed two full cycles, establishing that the rhythm is not accidental but structural—a claim about the nature of causality itself. Every event contains the seed of its apparent opposite; the question is only how many seasons the seed requires to germinate.

Beat III — The Epistemology of “Perhaps”

The farmer’s monosyllabic wisdom is more radical than it first appears. He is not saying “things could be worse” (consolation) or “things might improve” (optimism). He is making an epistemological claim: that the information available at any given moment is insufficient to determine whether an event is beneficial or harmful, because benefit and harm are defined by consequences that have not yet occurred. This is yuan thinking—the Taoist recognition that causality is a web rather than a chain, and that pulling one thread changes tensions elsewhere in ways that cannot be predicted from the point of pull. The farmer does not know what will happen next; he knows that he does not know, and he refuses to act as though he does. This is a very different disposition from resignation or passivity. The farmer continues farming throughout the tale; his “perhaps” does not paralyse action but liberates it from the distorting weight of premature judgment.

Tradition: Chinese philosophical folk tale (Taoist)
Source: Huainanzi (c. 139 BCE); oral tradition across East Asia
Alternate titles: Sai Weng Shi Ma (塞翁失馬), The Old Man at the Frontier
Themes: Zhī zú (knowing sufficiency), yuan (causal interconnection), epistemic humility, non-attachment to outcome

Beat IV — The Gift the Story Actually Gives

What the tale ultimately offers is not a philosophy of passive waiting but a practice of cognitive discipline: the habit of withholding final judgment long enough for more information to arrive. In modern decision science this is sometimes called “keeping options open” or “avoiding premature closure,” but the farmer’s version is more elegant—it is not a strategy for optimising outcomes but a recognition that outcome-optimisation is often premature certainty masquerading as wisdom. The farmer is not cleverer than his neighbours; he is simply more honest about the limits of what any of them can know. His “perhaps” is the most accurate statement available given the information on hand. The tale has lasted two thousand years because this accuracy never goes out of date.

Why This Story Lasted

An Old Chinese Story survives because it addresses the most common cognitive error in human experience: interpreting intermediate states as final ones. We celebrate windfalls and mourn losses with a conviction about their permanence that the actual structure of causality does not support. The farmer’s “perhaps” is not pessimism in disguise—it is equally applied to apparent good fortune as to apparent bad. This even-handedness is the tale’s ethical spine. It does not teach that things always get better (they don’t) but that our assessment of better and worse requires more time and more data than we typically allow before pronouncing judgment. In an age of instantaneous reaction and viral certainty, this is a teaching of extraordinary contemporary value.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Huainanzi and why is this story in it?

The Huainanzi is a Han dynasty philosophical encyclopedia commissioned by Liu An, Prince of Huainan, around 139 BCE. It synthesises Taoist, Confucian, and Legalist thought. This story appears to illustrate the Taoist concept of non-attachment to outcome and the limits of human foresight in a causal web.

Is the farmer’s “perhaps” a Taoist concept?

Yes, it reflects the Taoist principle of wu wei (non-forcing) and the recognition that the Tao operates through patterns too complex for human minds to fully trace. The farmer’s response is not apathy but a disciplined alignment with this recognition—continuing to act (farming) while releasing attachment to how events are categorised.

Why is this catalogued under Japanese stories?

The tale circulated widely across East Asian literary and oral traditions, including Japan, where it appeared in various retellings and was cited in philosophical contexts. Many Japanese collections included “old Chinese stories” as part of their inherited East Asian wisdom literature, recognising shared cultural territory across national boundaries.

Does the story have an ending?

Deliberately, no—or rather, the ending is the recognition that there is no ending to the sequence. Some versions add further cycles; others stop at the draft episode. The incompleteness is the point: the tale could continue indefinitely because the structure of event-followed-by-unexpected-consequence is the structure of life itself.

What is the practical lesson for modern readers?

The practical lesson is the cultivation of what might be called a “judgment lag”—a voluntary delay in pronouncing any event conclusively good or bad until more of its consequences have become visible. This is not paralysis but calibration: acting decisively while holding your interpretation of events lightly enough to update when new information arrives.