"Ho, illustrious passers-by!" says Kai Lung as he spreads out his embroidered mat under the mulberry-tree. "It is indeed unlikely that you could condescend to stop and listen to the foolish words of such an insignificant and altogether deformed person as myself. Nevertheless, if you will but retard your elegant footsteps for a few moments, this exceedingly unprepossessing individual will endeavour to entertain you." This is a collection of Kai Lung's entertaining tales, told professionally in the market places as he travelled about; told sometimes to occupy and divert the minds of his enemies when they were intent on torturing him.

Kai Lung's Golden Hours By Ernest Bramah. Preface: Hilaire Belloc. Man is born to make. His business is to construct; to plan; to carry out the plan: to fit together, and to produce a finished thing. That human art in which it is most difficult to achieve this end and in which it is far easier to neglect it than in any other is the art of writing. Yet this much is certain, that unconstructed writing is at once worthless and ephemeral; and nearly the whole of our modern English writing is unconstructed, The matter of survival is perhaps not the most important, though it is a test of a kind, and it is a test which every serious writer feels most intimately. The essential is the matter of excellence; that a piece of work should achieve its end. But in either character, the character of survival or the character of intrinsic excellence, construction deliberate and successful is the fundamental condition. It may be objected that the mass of writing must in any age neglect construction. We write to establish a record for a few days; or to send a thousand unimportant messages;or to express for others or for ourselves something very vague and perhaps very weak in the way of emotion, which does not demand construction and at any rate cannot command it. No writer can be judged by the entirety of his writings, for these would include every note he ever sent round the corner every memorandum he ever made upon his shirt cuff, But when a man sets out to write as a serious business, proclaiming by the nature of his publication and presentment that he is doing something he thinks worthy of the time and place in which he lives and of the people to whom he belongs, then if he does not construct he is negligible. Yet,I say,the great mass of men today do not attempt it in the English tongue, and the proof is that you can discover in their slipshod pages nothing of a seal or stamp. You do not, opening a book at random, say at once;This is the voice of such and such an one. It is no one's manner or voice. It is part of a common babel. Therefore in such a time as that of our decline,to come across work which is planned, executed and achieved has something of the effect produced by the finding of a wrought human thing in a wild, It is like finding, as I once found, deep hidden in the tangled rank grass of autumn in Burgundy, on the edge of a wood not far from Dijon, a neglected statue of the eighteenth century. It is like coming round the corner of some wholly desolate upper valley in the mountains and seeing before one a well cultivated close and a strong house in the midst. It is now many years,I forget how many it may be twenty or more, or it may be a little less since The Wallet of Kai Lung was sent me by a friend, The effect produced upon my mind at the first opening of its pages was in the same category as the effect produced by the discovery of that hidden statue in Burgundy, or the coming upon an unexpected house in the turn of a high Pyrenean gorge.

The third in Bramah's Kai Lung series of fantasy novels. Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat, like the others in the series consists of thinly connected stories related by Kai Lung, concerning the adventures of the storyteller and his lady love Hwa-Mei versus the wicked but ever-smooth Mandarin Shan Tien and his despicable accomplice Ming-Shu. Kai Lung's adventures are related with humor and irony, his shrewdness and wisdom conveyed in euphemisms, paradoxes and parables. Bramah's droll writing style went a long way toward making the Kai Lung series so popular.

Kai Lung Beneath the Mulberry-Tree

A new collection of 'Kai Lung' stories by Ernest Bramah, including four previously unpublished stories. Related by Kai Lung, an itinerant story-teller, these stories, set in an Ancient China that never was, entertain with their wonderful use of language, and readers will frequently find their 'gravity displaced' by a particularly apt turn of phrase. This collection of eleven stories includes four previously unpublished stories. Of the remaining stories, six were published in 'Punch' and in a very limited edition colection, 'Kai Lung: Six', and the seventh has only appeared once before, in 'The Specimen Case'.