Read the real Chinese classics

Lu Xun's first story collection — 狂人日記, 孔乙己, 阿Q正傳 and the other stories that started modern Chinese literature.

The second collection — 祝福 (New Year's Sacrifice), 傷逝 and nine more stories of disillusion after the May Fourth movement.

Ten warm, sharp memoir essays about childhood in Shaoxing — the gentlest entry point into Lu Xun's prose.

Twenty-three prose poems — short, dark, and strange. The most literary and most challenging collection here.

Lu Xun's last fiction collection — eight myths and histories retold deadpan: Nüwa patching the sky, Yi shooting down the suns, Yu taming the flood, Zhuangzi arguing with a skeleton he just revived.

Xiao Hong's lyrical last novel — a childhood in a small Manchurian town, told in seven chapters and an epilogue.

The novel that made Xiao Hong's name, published under Lu Xun's wing with his preface — peasant life in a Manchurian village, then what the Japanese occupation did to it. Seventeen short, unsparing chapters.

Nine stories of exile, poverty and thwarted desire from the most confessional voice of the May Fourth generation — 沉淪 (Sinking) scandalised 1921 and made his name.

Forty-odd prose miniatures — parables, sketches and aphorisms, most of them a page or less. Alongside 朝花夕拾, the gentlest way into the library.

The greatest of the Qing novels — the Jia family's slow ruin and Baoyu's doomed love for Daiyu, in one hundred and twenty 回. The last forty are traditionally credited to 高鶚.

The Ming-dynasty classic — Monkey, Pigsy and the monk Tripitaka's journey west, one 回 per chapter, all one hundred of them.