In this way, both Confucianism and Taoism provide the necessary balance in the Chinese value scale.  It is said that when a Chinese is successful in a peaceful world he embraces Confucian ideas as an upholder of all the moral virtues in the system, but when he finds the world in turmoil he becomes a Taoist and retreats to nature for a peaceful mind.  Liu Ling clearly belongs to the Taoist type, although he did not choose to live in the mountains but behaved in a peculiar way to shock the people around him.

Quite different from all the other four tales mentioned above, which deal mainly with the intellectual elite, the traditional pillars of Chinese society, “A Pair of Magic Candles” is a fantasy which came down through the centuries in an oral tradition and finally found its way into written literature; therefore it is impossible to trace its date.  Also, in its oral form the story has come down in a number of different versions, varying from one locality to another depending on their narrators.  As each narrator adds his interpretation to the story according to his own philosophy or viewpoint, over the years of retelling, the length of the story has been stretched longer and longer.

For centuries China has been an agricultural society.  Even today more than 80 percent of the Chinese people still live and work in the countryside.  In the past the Chinese overworked the land so that it became barren and unproductive, while many natural and human disasters, such as floods, droughts, famines, wars, and poverty, added to the peasants’ plight.  Often, life continued for generations without any major improvement in the peasants’ lot.

When we begin reading “A Pair of Magic Candles” our sympathy goes with the poor farm couple whose lives, like those of generations of their ancestors, seem to have been condemned to eternal poverty.  Somehow they deserve a better life, something that only a miracle can bring, and it seems that Heaven is about to come to their rescue in the story.  But in a highly moralistic Confucian society greed is an intolerable sin, a sharp departure from the “doctrine of the mean” promoted by the sage.  Thus in this fantasy, the moral is clear: Be satisfied with whatever fate has bestowed upon us.  Excesses will bring misfortune.  This is the backbone of Chinese traditional agricultural society.

The five stories translated here, all quite well known to the Chinese, represent only a small segment of the vast body of Chinese traditional tales.  They by no means represent all of the various genres that have come down through the ages.