The Three Beautiful Daughters: A Story in Simplified Chinese and Pinyin, 1200 Word Vocabulary Level

The river-dwelling monster Sha Wujing was once the Curtain Raising Captain, but was banished from heaven by the Yellow Emperor for breaking an extremely valuable cup during a drunken visit to the Peach Festival. Later, the band of pilgrims arrive at a beautiful home seeking a simple vegetarian meal and a place to stay for the night. What they encounter instead is a lovely and wealthy widow and her three even more lovely daughters. This meeting is, of course, much more than it appears to be, and it turns into a test of commitment and virtue for all of the pilgrims, especially for the lazy and lustful Zhu Bajie. This is the 9th book in the best-selling The Journey to the West series of stories for students learning to read Chinese. It is based on the epic 16th century novel of the same name by Wu Chen'en. That novel was inspired by an actual journey by the Buddhist monk Tangseng, who traveled from Chang'an westward to India in 629 A.D. and returned seventeen years later with priceless knowledge and spiritual texts. Over the course of the book Tangseng and his companions face the 81 tribulations that Tangseng had to endure to attain Buddhahood. The first 9 books in the Journey to the West series have used a total of about 1200 different Chinese words, but only 630 are used in this book. All new words are defined on the page where they are first used. The book uses Simplified Chinese characters and includes pinyin, an English translation, and a full glossary. An audiobook is available on YouTube's Imagin8 Press channel and on the Imagin8 Press website. In the main body of the book, each page of Chinese characters is matched with a facing page of pinyin. This is unusual for Chinese novels but we feel it's important. By including the pinyin, as well as a full English version and glossary at the end, we hope that every reader, no matter what level of mastery they have of the Chinese language, will be able to understand and enjoy the story we tell here. Careful readers will notice that the English translation sometimes doesn't exactly match the Chinese. This is because we've tried to express the story in both languages in the most natural style, and sometimes it's just not possible (or desirable) to translate word-for-word from one language to the other. Complete audiobooks of all books in this series are available on YouTube and can also be downloaded from the Imagin8 Press website.