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The oldest Chinese image of the Queen Mother of the West is not a kindly lady with peaches: she has a leopard tail, tiger teeth, loose hair, and she governs plagues and executions on Jade Mountain in the far west. She holds the only elixir of deathlessness in the world, and one king who traveled to drink with her at the Jade Pool sang a song about coming back in three years and never came.

In the age before fire, people ate their meat raw and the smell of blood made them sick. A man walked south until he reached the Land of Bright Fire, where he watched an owl strike a dead branch and send a spark flying, and understood that fire was not in the sky but inside the wood. He drilled two sticks together, carried the fire home, and was made a king.

After she mended the sky, the goddess Nuwa sat down by a river and found the world empty. She shaped the first people out of yellow clay in her own image and breathed life into them, and when the work grew too heavy for one pair of hands, she dipped a rope in the mud and swung it, and every drop that landed stood up as a person.

The torturer Zhou Xing explained how to make a prisoner confess inside a heated jar. Then Lai Junchen invited him to step into it. This is the Chinese idiom 请君入瓮, from the Comprehensive Mirror.

He wrote for ten years while everyone laughed, and when the rhapsody appeared, the whole capital fought to copy it. This is the Chinese idiom 洛阳纸贵, from the History of Jin.

Han Xin put a river at the backs of his own soldiers, and then dared them to lose. This is the Chinese idiom 背水一战, from the Records of the Grand Historian: to fight a battle with no way out.

A hungry tiger caught a fox, and the fox talked his way out by walking in front. This is the Chinese idiom 狐假虎威, told at the court of Chu by the minister Jiang Yi: the fox borrows the tiger’s might.

His own son helped murder the ruler of Wey, and the old minister Shi Que would not bend the law for him. This is the Chinese idiom 大义灭亲, from the Zuo Commentary: to place the great right above your own kin.

A gentle Chinese bedtime story about the osmanthus tree that grows on the moon. Every night a man named Wu Gang sweeps the small yellow flowers that fall. When he is tired he leans on the trunk and falls asleep to the sweet smell, while the fragrance drifts down to every windowsill and every little bed below. Short sentences and a warm, glowing moon.

A gentle Chinese bedtime story about one tiny dandelion seed. The wind lifts it over tall grass, a low stone, a sleeping sheep, a shining river and a little village. It lands on a warm sunny patch of soil, slides down into the soft earth, and sleeps all winter long. In spring it becomes a new yellow flower. Short sentences and warm light.