In the Library
Journey to the West
Wu Cheng'en, 1592
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 6.5 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Timothy Richard (1913)
- Chapters
- Chapters 100
- Length
- Length 87k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Although not grown on a tree, I grew from a stone.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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One Thousand and One Nights
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About the book
A monkey born from a stone hurls himself at heaven, eats the peaches of immortality, drinks the wine of the gods, and is finally pinned beneath a mountain by the Buddha until a monk comes to free him. Wu Cheng'en is the traditional author of this hundred-chapter novel, completed in 1592 during the late Ming and based on the seventh-century pilgrimage of the monk Xuanzang to India in search of Buddhist scriptures. The Tang monk, renamed Tripitaka, travels with three disciples: Sun Wukong the trickster monkey, Zhu Bajie the gluttonous pig, and Sha Wujing the river demon, crossing eighty-one trials of demons, kings, and shape-shifting kingdoms. The book holds Daoist alchemy, Confucian piety, and Buddhist parable inside its picaresque frame. Chinese fiction has been writing in its shadow ever since.