Kai Lung

This is a collection of Kai Lung's entertaining tales, told professionally in the market places as he travelled about; told sometimes to occupy and divert the minds of his enemies when they were intent on torturing him.

As with other Kai Lung novels, the main plot serves primarily as a vehicle for the presentation of the gem-like, aphorism-laden stories told by the protagonist Kai Lung, an itinerant storyteller of ancient China. In Kai Lung's Golden Hours, he is brought before the court of the Mandarin Shan Tien on charges of treason by the Mandarin's confidential agent Ming-shu. In a unique defense, Kai Lung recites his beguiling tales to the Mandarin, successfully postponing his conviction time after time until he is finally set free. In the process, he attains the love and hand of the maiden Hwa-Mei.

The third in Bramah's Kai Lung series of fantasy novels. Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat, like the others in the series consists of thinly connected stories related by Kai Lung, concerning the adventures of the storyteller and his lady love Hwa-Mei versus the wicked but ever-smooth Mandarin Shan Tien and his despicable accomplice Ming-Shu. Kai Lung's adventures are related with humor and irony, his shrewdness and wisdom conveyed in euphemisms, paradoxes and parables. Bramah's droll writing style went a long way toward making the Kai Lung series so popular.

This early work by Ernest Bramah Smith was originally published in 1911. „The Moon of Much Gladness Related by Kai Lung" is the fourth book in the Kai Lung series. The China which Kai Lung inhabits has numerous features of the fantasy Land of Fable, and many of the embedded tales are fantasy; all are told in an ornate manner which ironically, often hilariously, exaggerates the old Chinese tradition of understatement and politesse. Ernest Bramah was born was near Manchester in 1868. He was a poor student, and dropped out of the Manchester Grammar School when sixteen years old to go into the farming business. Bramah found commercial and critical success with his first novel, „The Wallet of Kai Lung", but it was his later stories of detective Max Carrados that assured him lasting fame.