- A princess with ill luck married a beggar with good luck in hopes of one day finding splendor
- He left to find his fortune and returned after 18 years an emperor, so they lived happily for 18 days until the wife died while the husband lived on many years
- A father was furious with his wife for feeding their daughters the duck eggs he found so he took two of them out to the forest and left them there
- They stumbled upon a cave full of treasures and jems belonging to a fox and wolf, so they trapped them in the kettle and took all of the treasures for themselves
- Could change the story so that the fox or the wolf escaped and actually captured the girls, but then realized they were friendly and frightened and they all live together
- A panther devoured a mother and son and then, wearing her clothing, posed as the mother to the two daughters left at home
- They managed to scare the panther away for a little while but were on their doorstep crying for their mother and brother
- A needle-vender, a scorpion-catcher, an egg-seller, a turtle dealer, and a man selling clubs all stopped by and gave the girls a gift of each of their trade to scare the panther off with
- Could rewrite the story so that only one of the gifts was given to the girls and they had to fight the panther off with that alone
- A man and wife lost their lucky ring and all of their wealth so the cat and dog planned and ventured to acquire the ring and bring it back home
- After they got the ring back, the cat beat the dog back to the house because it was able to run over the roof and the cat was rewarded for the ring while the dog was beaten for not assisting
- Oerlang, a shapeshifter, was fetching his mother water when he returned to her dead corpse and he realized that her magic powers had failed her and the sunlight had killed her
- Oerlang avenged her death by killing 9 of the 10 suns but he did not kill the last one so that the earth could live and he was honored as a god after
- It would be interesting to change the story so that Oerlang did kill all of the suns and the world went into complete darkness
- Hou I was given an herb of immortality and his wife ate some of it when he was not home, floated up to the clouds, and became the Lady of the Moon in the castle there
- The emperor and two sorcerers created a bridge to the moon and saw the castle of the lady, which was filled with beautiful music that the emperor had transcribed when he returned to earth
- A girl vowed to marry her horse if it could return her father to her from a long journey and when it did, she and her father instead slew the horse and hung the hide up
- One day, the hide swallowed the girl and carried her to a tree where she became wrapped in a cocoon and spun beautiful silk
- Could change the story so that she actually did have to marry the horse and she falls in love with him and they live happily ever after
The God of War
- Guan Yu was a faithful and brilliant warrior who fought the evil Tsau Tsau but was caught into an ambush with his son where they were both slain
- He visited a monk and asked for his head to be restored, but the monk answered that it would not be fair to all those that Guan Yu had killed to not have their own heads restored.
- Afterwards, he became very spiritually active and worshipped as the God of War
- A bonze asked a farmer for a pear but was not given one, so an artisan bought one for him
- He ate the pear and planted it, watered it, and it grew into a magnificent tree from which he passed out many pears
- The farmer realized after the bonze left that the pears he passed out had actually been his all along and the tree came from the wooden axle of his cart, but the bonze was nowhere to be found for him to confront him
- A scholar lived in a haunted house where a hundred knights the size of ants galloped in to hunt with horses the size of flies
- They prepared a beautiful banquet, sang, and danced until the small knight in the scarlet hat made fun of his kingly status as compared to the scholar's poor status, so the scholar shooed them out and smoked them out of the ants' nest
- It would be fun to write more from the perspective of everyday life and struggles of the small knights in their own world and how it differs from the regular, life-sized world
The Chinese Fairy Tales are a selection of stories from Wilhem's Chinese Fairy Book.
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