The Dragon King's Daughter: Ten Tang Dynasty Stories

The Tang Dynasty (618-907) was a golden age of poetry and short stories. In the brief span of two hundred and ninety years many outstanding poets and story writers appeared, including men like Li Po, Tu Fu, Pai Chu-yi, Li Kung-tso and Pai Hsing-chien, who have left works which will live forever. Over fifty thousand poems and over four hundred stories of the Tang Dynasty are extant today, reflecting glory on China’s ancient civilization and making no mean contribution to world literature. The ten stories in this collection can be divided into three main categories: stories of the supernatural, stories with a political theme or adventure stories, and love stories. The Tang stories arose following the political, economic and cultural upsurge of the period. They continued the Six Dynasties tradition of supernatural tales and, influenced by contemporary art and minstrelsy and by the vernacular Buddhist literature, developed vigorously. The stories in this collection are arranged in chronological order, together with a brief account of the author. These ten tales are a fair sample of the chief types of Tang stories, and from them we can glimpse something of China’s rich and varied literary heritage.