Master story-teller Laurence Yep took his inspiration for his magical version of the Beauty and the Beast fairy-tale from a traditional Chinese tale with a Southern Chinese setting. His The Dragon Prince (HarperCollins, 1997) has some satisfying twists and turns in the narrative and an impressive dragon in the role parallel to the Beast: visually too, thanks to Kam Mak’s powerful illustrations. We just love the noble, enormous, golden dragon, and completely empathised with Beauty/Seven’s inherent trust in the beauty she finds in him, that goes deeper than the fear – even when the Dragon insists, “But you really should be afraid” – yes, Little Brother especially loved that line!

Seven is set apart from her older sisters from the start: while they work in the fields, she does beautiful embroidery, which is then sold at the market, thereby providing the family with the sustenance the rocky ground cannot. The symbolism of this carries the narrative through to its conclusion (it’s a fairy tale so it’s irrelevant to question the point of the other sister’s activities, farming land on which nothing will grow). Three is jealous of Seven – and never more so than when, instead of suffering a terrible fate after agreeing to marry a firece dragon in return for her father’s life, Seven arrives on a visit to her family on a ‘chair of gold and coral’ and with all her maids behind her, descending from the sky in a ‘glittering procession’.

Three therefore tricks Seven and takes her place, preparing the Dragon Prince for a change in his wife’s appearance by saying she’s been ill – which makes for an interesting take on Beauty and the Beast: the Prince “didn’t care. In that short time, Seven had come to mean everything to him, not for her beauty but for her kindness.”

So do they live happily ever after? Well, I highly recommend you get hold of this great story and find out for yourself, and enjoy some cultural nuances along the way. For example, one bit that made me chuckle and served to show the Dragon Prince’s state of mind as he searches deperately for Seven: he buys at a market “without bargaining”!

Gathering Books also featured The Dragon Prince earlier this year, as part of a wonderful series of in-depth posts about Chinese fairy-tales – in case you missed them, here are the other links; they’re definitely worth a read: Lon Po Po: A Red-Riding Hood Story from China (which Little Brother read for our Reading the World Challenge in 2008) and Yeh-Shen: A Cinderella Story from China (which I have also featured as a Book at Bedtime in the past)…

I can’t believe this book was first published 25 years ago: but Yeh-Shen: A Cinderella Story from China, retold by Ai-Ling Louie and illustrated by Ed Young, is just as fresh today – and of course, being a fairy-tale, it is timeless anyway. It makes a lovely bed-time story – and would work well, too, as a class story-time readaloud.

The story will be familiar in its essence to most children and this is a lovely variation. Or perhaps I should say that the Cinderella story we all know and love follows the pattern of this lovely story: on the book’s dedication page, there is a salient quotation from Iona and Peter Opie’s The Classic Fairy Tales (now a bit of a classic itself). This dates the story of Yeh Shen to The Miscellaneous Record of Yu Yang, which first appeared during the T’ang Dynasty (618-907AD), about 1,000 years before the oldest European version.

The major elements are all there: the rags and chores, the wicked step-mother, the party and the magic slippers. The main difference is that the fairy god-mother figure in the story is actually a magic fish. The fish is Yeh-Shen’s only friend until it is killed by the step-mother. Yeh-Shen learns of its magic powers and gathers up the bones, which can now grant her special wishes. At first, her requests are bound up with survival as she asks for food to eat; but then, as the party approaches:

“Oh, dear friend,” she said, kneeling before the precious bones, “I long to go to the festival, but I cannot show myself in these rags. Is there somewhere I could borrow clothes fit to wear to the feast?” At once she found herself dressed in a gown of azure blue [and] on her tiny feet were the most beautiful slippers she had ever seen. They were woven of golden threads, in a pattern like the scales of a fish…

The fish is also the motif for Ed Young’s stunning illustrations throughout: each image from the story is set against an enormous, carp-like fish, to the extent that sometimes the characters are even enclosed within its gaping mouth. The backgrounds are starkly white but the pages are divided up into red-bordered, screen-like frames, which also help to convey the magic at work, since the fish’s bulk simply moves across them. Young’s shading is beautiful… and I would love to know how many colors he actually used!