Who was Confucius, and why has his influence lasted for more than two thousand years? This biography, written in easy-to-read Simplified Chinese, introduces readers to the life and ideas of Confucius (Kongzi), one of the most influential thinkers in Chinese history. Born during a time of political conflict and social instability, Confucius developed a philosophy centered on ethics, learning, family, and responsible leadership. Although he faced challenges in his own lifetime and struggled to find…

Everyone (well, almost everyone) knows the story of Chang’e, the young woman who fell from heaven, married Hou Yi the Archer, drank some magic elixir, and flew up to the moon to become the Moon Goddess. But whatever happened to Hou Yi after his wife left? This book tells the story of Chang’e from his perspective, and covers the events in his life afterwards. The book is available on Amazon.com and many other ebook stores,…

We just released the second book in our new series, Heroes of Ancient China. It’s called Chang’e the Moon Goddess, and it’s written by the best-selling team of Jeff Pepper and Xiao Hui Wang. Here’s the back cover blurb: Chang’e, eldest daughter of a powerful sky god, makes a foolish mistake and is exiled from the heavenly world, condemned to live out her days as an earthbound mortal. The archer Hou Yi dives through the…

Many of our readers are interested in selecting books based on the total number of different Chinese words used to tell the story. So I thought it would be useful to list all our fiction books and show the Chinese vocabulary total for each. The list is at the bottom of this post. There’s quite a range in vocabulary size, from our beginning reader “Twenty Three Cats” with just 101 words, up to the complete…

We just published our first totally new story in almost a year. It’s the classic Chinese legend The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl (牛郎织女). This is a wonderful story, told using fewer than 500 Chinese words, most of which are in the HSK3 vocabulary list. While most versions of this story are short, our version comes in at 15,000 Chinese characters, which works out to about 10,000 words. The book is 225 pages long. As usual, the…