The Magic Cask

There was once a man who was digging in his field when his spade struck a big earthenware cask. He carried it home and told his wife to scrub it out.

But as soon as his wife began brushing the inside, the cask started filling itself up with brushes. However many she took out, new ones kept appearing in their place. So the man sold the brushes, and the family lived quite comfortably on what they earned.

One day a coin dropped into the cask by accident. In a moment the brushes were gone, and the cask began filling itself with money instead. Now the family grew rich, for they could take out as much money as they liked.

The man had an old grandfather living at home who was feeble and shaky on his feet. His grandson set him to work shoveling money out of the cask despite his frailty. Whenever the grandfather grew tired and could not go on, the grandson flew into a temper and shouted at him that he was lazy and did not want to work.

One day the old man’s strength gave out altogether. He toppled into the cask and died. At once the money vanished, and the whole cask began filling itself with dead grandfathers. The man had to haul every one of them out and have them buried, and to pay for all those funerals he had to spend every bit of the money the cask had given him. When he had finished, the cask cracked, and he was just as poor as he had been at the start.

About this story

“The Magic Cask” is chapter V of Richard Wilhelm’s The Chinese Fairy Book, translated by Frederick H. Martens (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1921), one of the short nursery tales that open the book. Wilhelm’s source tale is only a few short paragraphs long.

Wilhelm notes that the tale was told by word of mouth. His note describes the ‘cask’ as a large open-topped container of earthenware or stone. This retelling uses an earthenware jar; it does not generalize the note into a claim about every container used in northern China. The story’s turn comes from what falls into the jar: a brush, a coin, and finally the grandfather the greedy grandson worked too hard.

Read the original: The Chinese Fairy Book (Project Gutenberg)

Reading guidance: older readers; adults should preview before sharing. An elderly man is worked beyond his strength, dies in the jar, and his body is magically multiplied for repeated burials.

The jar repeats; the grandson chooses

The cask follows the same rule with brushes, money and bodies. It has no visible change of intention. What changes is the grandson’s use of it: even unlimited money does not persuade him to let his exhausted grandfather rest. The burial costs reverse his wealth, but cannot repair the death.

Draw three panels showing each new thing that enters the jar. Put a decision the family could make beside each panel. At what point would stopping work be enough, and at what point is the damage irreversible?

Talk about it

• How does the jar decide what to fill itself with?
• How does the grandson treat his grandfather, and what happens because of it?
• Why do you think the jar breaks at the very end?

Related stories

• How Greed for a Trifling Thing Led a Man to Lose a Great One — another Wilhelm nursery tale about greed
• The Favorite of Fortune and the Child of Ill Luck — the next nursery tale but one, about luck and wealth
• The Miserly Farmer — a stingy man taught a lesson by magic