All Stories
Browse our complete collection of folk tales, Panchatantra stories, and moral stories from around the world.
Bengal Folk Tales
Ages 9-12
The Origin of Opium
A holy man’s pet mouse keeps wishing to be something grander, from cat to elephant to beautiful girl, until her story ends in the first poppy plant.
Bengal Folk Tales
The Boy Whom Seven Mothers Suckled
Seven blinded queens raise one boy in a hillside cave, and he grows strong enough to outwit the demon queen who has been eating the king’s city.
Bengal Folk Tales
The Bald Wife
A cruelly treated wife is kind to a cotton plant, a plantain tree, a bull and a basil plant, and a forest sage rewards her with beauty and riches.
Bengal Folk Tales
Ages 9-12
The Story of a Hiraman
A talking parrot helps a king abduct a distant woman, then joins her in planning an escape after a second king takes her captive.
Bengal Folk Tales
The Clever Wife
A merchant jokes that his wife should build a well and give him a son while he is away for a year, and she cleverly manages both, outwitting a king.
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.
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
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
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
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.