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A gentle Chinese bedtime story for a snowy day. A chicken, a dog, a duck and a horse walk across the new snow, and every step leaves a picture, with no brush and no paint. By evening the snow covers it all, and everybody goes to sleep. Short sentences, a soft ending, and the old children’s song about the little painters in the snow.

A gentle Chinese bedtime story for a snowy night. A hungry rabbit finds two radishes, eats one, and quietly leaves the other for a friend. That friend passes it on to another, and the radish walks all the way around the hill and comes home. Short sentences, a soft ending, and the old winter saying: if you have two, give one away.

A gentle Chinese bedtime story about the moon and a patient tailor. The moon keeps growing round and then thin, so no dress ever fits. At last the tailor stops worrying and measures her a little every day. Short sentences, a soft ending, and the old idea that the moon changes shape because she keeps trying on new dresses.

A gentle Chinese bedtime story about a boy on a bamboo bed under the jujube trees. His grandmother fans him and tells him to count to a hundred, and he tries to count the stars instead. Short sentences, a soft ending, and the old summer custom of sleeping outdoors under the sky.

Lin Xiaoman is a nurse in a county hospital. Zhang Lei repairs cars in the provincial capital. They have been together four years. Then her mother writes one number on a page torn from an account book, and the two families stop speaking. A story about bride price, face, and a sentence one woman heard at her own wedding thirty years ago.

In the middle of the night a rooster crowed, and two young men got up to practise swordplay instead of going back to sleep. One of them later marched on the north; the other never came home. This is the Chinese idiom 闻鸡起舞.

A cook carved an ox for a king, and his knife had not needed sharpening in nineteen years. The king watched him work and learned how to live. This is the Chinese idiom 庖丁解牛, from the book of Zhuangzi.

An old man at the frontier lost his horse. His neighbours came to comfort him, and every one of them was wrong. This is the Chinese idiom 塞翁失马 – the two-thousand-year-old story behind “a blessing in disguise”.

A fugitive prince promised a king that if their armies ever met, he would retreat ninety miles first. Years later he kept that promise on a battlefield – and it won him the war. This is the Chinese idiom 退避三舍.

A powerful king offered fifteen cities for a single jade disc. A nobody named Lin Xiangru was sent to close the deal – and found out the offer was a trap. This is the Chinese idiom 完璧归赵, the story of how one man walked out of the strongest court in China with the treasure whole.