Chinese Tales — Part 2: The Fox and the Tiger · The Fox and the Raven · The Spirits of the Yellow River · The Dragon-Princess · Fox-Fire
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Season 104 · Episode 2 — the Chinese shelf of KacheliTV World Classics continues: tales from China, read aloud in the English translation printed in 1921.
THE BOOK BEHIND THIS EPISODE
The Chinese Fairy Book, edited by Dr. R. Wilhelm and translated after the original sources by Frederick H. Martens (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1921). Wilhelm lived and worked in China for many years and gathered these tales from Chinese sources; Martens's translation carries them into English. Every tale in this programme was read in full and screened under this shelf's content rule before anything was built. Five more tales from the book's two folk sections are told here: the two short fox fables from the nursery tales, and three from the nature and animal tales, among them the Dragon-Princess, the longest tale of the shelf so far. The book's legends of the gods, its tales of saints and magicians, its ghost stories, and its historic and literary pieces stand benched by name for later parts; the tales in which harm is done are excluded by name in the shelf register, and no completeness is claimed for the book.
IN THIS EPISODE
0:35 Introduction
1:54 The Fox and the Tiger — a fox borrows the tiger's terror and walks the broad highway ahead of him, while the travelers flee from them both.
3:43 The Fox and the Raven — a fox praises a raven out of the meat in his beak, and leaves him a lesson about flattery.
5:24 The Spirits of the Yellow River — the river-kings of the Yellow River, who love a play above all things, and the little golden snake who watches the performance from the altar bowl.
18:38 The Dragon-Princess — the emperor's messengers descend to the dragon-castle beneath the Sea of Dungting and trade gifts with the princess who guards the Dragon-King's pearls.
29:01 Fox-Fire — a farmer steals a fox's ball of fire and prospers by it for thirty years, until the fox comes back for its treasure.
Narration: Mira. Music: the instrumental theme "Golden Monologue" is heard at the opening and at the close, and in a short excerpt between the stories; there is no music under the narration.
