Gaizhou Shadow Play (Qing Dynasty collection)

Chinese story-telling dates back to over 2,000 years ago and it is still popular nowadays. It is an important mass entertainment, which sometimes is called "Telling ancient stories", "Telling making-up stories", "Giving Longmenzhen" (Chatting) or "Expounding the text of Buddhism".

Generally Speaking, Chinese Folktales fall into the following categories: Imaginary folktales, life folktales, animal folktales or folk jokes.

Imaginary folktales express good wishes of the people by means of imagination. Usually, there are spirits, magic treasures, immortals, and magic arts in these tales. The representative tales are Seeking Happiness, Snailgirl, Cinderella, Snakeman, Frog Son-in-Law, Dog's Plowing, Wolf Grandmother, Ten Brothers, Leaking House and so on.

Dough Sculpture "Dragon" from Shanxi Volume

Life folktales take people of all walks of life as their characters, depict their personalities through literary techniques and surprising plots, and are characterized by realism, irony and criticism. Such tales include those about landlords and long-term hired hands, bight girls or daughters-in-law, stupid sons-in-law or sons, witty figures and so forth.

Animal folktales take animals as their characters and develop the plots based on imagination and aim to entertain, persuade, educate or explain. Human's virtues such as goodness, industry, honesty modesty, gratefulness, helping others, and defects such as cunningness, laziness, crankiness, dishonesty, ungratefulness or selfishness are projected on these animals. These tales reflect the complexity of interpersonal relations by depicting animals' conflicts. The most well known ones are Feud between the Cat and the Dog, Student Tiger, and Tale of 12 Zodiac Animals.

Folk jokes reflect the contradictions in life in the form of caricature-style language; make people laugh by showing the absurd contrasts between sincerity, beauty, and goodness, and show the story-tellers' criticism on and disapproval of falseness, ugliness and evil. Today, folk jokes are still one of the most popular and widely spread folk literature.