This is a selection of popular Chinese stories from the 10th to 17th centuries. These stories were written in the spoken language that developed as a literary medium after the emergence of an urban commercial economy in the Song Dynasty (A.D. 960-1279).Originally the manuscripts of ordinary street story-tellers, this genre of fiction -- deriving its material from the life and times of the period, with vivid writing and intricate plots, descriptions that are natural and vivacious -- has now attained a lofty place as literature.The twenty stories in this book were selected from over two hundred in several collections published at the beginning of the 17th century.