Tsukigo is still improving.
Stories and poems from the classics.
西游记
6 works
Wu Cheng'en's sixteenth-century novel, in which a monk travels to India for the Buddhist scriptures and a monkey with a staff and a temper is sent to protect him. Six episodes retold for learners, from the Monkey King's birth and his wrecking of heaven to the day a demon copies his face and nobody can tell which one is real.
三国演义
8 works
Luo Guanzhong's novel of the warlords who divided China after the Han, and the most quoted book in the language — its scenes are where a great many ordinary Chinese phrases come from. Eight episodes retold for learners, from three men swearing brotherhood in a peach garden to a general who holds a city by opening its gates.
红楼梦
6 works
Cao Xueqin's novel of a wealthy family's slow decline, read in China as the finest prose in the language and studied as its own academic field. Six episodes retold for learners, each one a household scene: a poor relative's first visit, a girl burying fallen flowers, a beating in the front hall.
水浒传
5 works
Shi Nai'an's novel of a hundred and eight outlaws driven out of ordinary life and into a marsh stronghold. Five episodes retold for learners, including the two everyone knows: a monk uprooting a willow with his bare hands, and Wu Song meeting a tiger on the road with wine in him.
儒林外史
4 works
Wu Jingzi's satire of the imperial examinations and the men who spent their lives sitting them. Four episodes retold for learners — a candidate who passes at last and loses his mind with joy, a dying miser holding up two fingers nobody can interpret.
