What are the ten most important Chinese books?

Journey to the West

File: 3ro5q.jpg (3MB, 3393x3598px) Image search: [Google]

3MB, 3393x3598px

>>8274961
I mean RotTK, Outlaws of the Marsh/Water Margin, A Dream of Red Changers and Journey to the West are the easy answers. The Spring and Autumn Annals are cited everywhere. The Good Earth, although not written in Chinese by a Chinese was written by an extremely sympathetic daughter of long term missionaries. Lu Xun is mandatory. Jin Yong if you like Kung Fu. Gao Xingjian and Mo Yan for contemporary lit. The Blood Merchant is recent and well loved.

>>8275033

Thanks a bunch, that's pretty helpful.

Does anyone know about the essay in the OP though? I remember hearing that the author of it also didn't believe in ghosts or spirits.

>>8275033
What fucking idiot made this picture and included no poetry whatsoever

>>8274961

The Chinese are very fond of using small numbers to describe categories: "the six this", "the seven that", "the eight the other thing", etc.

Examples of this which have already been partly covered in the thread are the items mentioned. But specifically, the classic texts belong to a few different "small-number-phrase" categories. It's simplest to check wiki to see which is which:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Books_and_Five_Classics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Great_Classical_Novels

If you keep poking around wiki, for example, you can find even more of this "small-number" convention for categories of Chinese culture, not limited to literature. The above categories cover various classic novels and Confucianism.

I realize that the intent of the above helpful image is to cover chinese /lit/ in the most common understanding of the word, but I don't see Mao's little red book. Let me recommend a read-through of that short text as well, for cultural context and also because it's short and easy. To toot my own horn, I summarized the text on wiki years ago, and my treatment is mostly extant:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_Tse-tung

If you wish to read this dry/breezy piece of Chinese communism, its text is available here:

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red-book/index.htm

>>8276661
Probably someone with no knowledge of it. I havent looked too hard, but in my years, Li Po and Tu Fu are the only ones ive really come across

>>8276722

Much appreciated, thanks. Copied into a text document for later eventual listening to.

>>8275504
That sounds like Wang Chong
http://www.iep.utm.edu/wangchon/

>>8278681

THANK YOU

>>8276661
It's been the standard to not include translated poetry on the national literature charts.