Chinesische Volksmärchen

China's oral tradition stretches back millennia, and these aren't the sanitized fairy tales of Western adaptation. Richard Wilhelm, the pioneering sinologist who spent decades living in China, gathered these stories directly from the voices of storytellers, scholars, and ordinary people. Here you'll find talking animals and mischievous spirits alongside emperors and peasants, but the boundary between the magical and the mundane never quite solidifies. In the Chinese imagination, dragons still guard celestial secrets, ghosts pursue justice, and transformations between human and animal form carry the weight of moral consequence. These tales range from brief fables to longer narratives that blur into myth and legend, reflecting a culture where the wondrous has never been exiled to a separate realm of 'fantasy.' Wilhelm's collection captures something essential: the way storytelling in China has always served as a vessel for philosophy, social wisdom, and spiritual insight, wrapped in narratives that unfold with elegant simplicity and surprising depth. For readers seeking to understand a civilization through its oldest stories, this collection remains an unmatched portal.