![]() Here are translations of two others, out of over 50 fairy tales that modern literary scholar Wang Quangen has identified in the book. The most famous among them is Ye Xian, one of the oldest known variants of the Cinderella story. Written in the early ninth century by Tang scholar Duan Chengshi, this collection of legends, chilling ghosts stories, and notes on botany and zoology also contained many short stories that Zhou classified as fairy tales. One of China’s earliest folklorists (and brother of writer Lu Xun), Zhou Zuoren, disputed a common idea in the 1930s that ancient China did not have any fairy tales, naming The Miscellany of Youyang (《酉阳杂俎》) as proof. China’s ancient storytellers had no lack of imagination: from the fantastical fourth century BCE atlas Classic of Mountains and Sea (《山海经》), to the ninth century supernatural anthology Tales of the Marvelous(《传奇》), and numerous folk tales and legends in between.
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