Hand-picked reading paths and genre shelves. Each shelf shows a few favourites; open it to see them all.
A scorned daughter who has the last laugh, a son who sues the underworld for his father, a servant girl who outwits forty thieves, a gentleman-burglar who announces his escape from prison. Start with these eight; every ending lands.
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Hu Siniang胡四娘 · 10 min read
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves阿里巴巴和四十大盗 · 17 min read
Xi Fangping Sues Hell席方平告阴状 · 13 min read
Arsène Lupin in Prison狱中的亚森·罗平 · 28 min read
Hongyu红玉 · 12 min read
The Million-Pound Bank-Note百万英镑 · 38 min read
Shang Sanguan商三官 · 5 min read
The Escape of Arsène Lupin亚森·罗平越狱记 · 31 min read阿里巴巴和四十大盗
A poor woodcutter hiding in a tree hears forty robbers open a cave of treasure with two magic words. Taking a little gold is easy; keeping the secret from his greedy brother and from the robbers who come hunting is not.
狱中的亚森·罗平
A miserly baron in an island castle on the Seine receives a polite letter from the Santé prison: Arsène Lupin wants his paintings, and names the night he will come for them. The police laugh, the baron panics, and a famous detective on a fishing holiday reluctantly agrees to stand guard.
亚森·罗平越狱记
Arsène Lupin announces from his cell that he will not be present at his own trial, and the police intercept secret notes hidden in a cigar and a hollow knife. They set a trap around a prison van, while all Paris waits to see how the gentleman-burglar will keep his word.
小翠
Censor Wang's only son is hopelessly simple, until a mysterious woman leaves her laughing daughter Xiaocui at the door as his bride and never comes back. Xiaocui spends her days dressing her husband up and playing pranks, and one night she rides off in a minister's disguise straight to the gate of Wang's worst enemy.
红发会
A stout London pawnbroker is hired by a mysterious League of Red-Headed Men to copy the Encyclopaedia Britannica for four pounds a week, simply because of his flaming hair. Eight weeks later the office door is locked, the League is dissolved, and Sherlock Holmes suspects something far graver than a prank.
滕大尹鬼断家私
Old Prefect Ni signs his whole fortune over to his grasping elder son, leaving his young concubine and their little boy nothing but a painted portrait and a cryptic promise. Years later, the boy and his mother carry the scroll to a sharp-eyed new magistrate.
阿里·科吉亚的橄榄罐
Before leaving on pilgrimage, a Bagdad merchant hides a thousand gold pieces under the olives in a jar and leaves it with a trusted friend. Seven years later he comes home to find the gold gone, the friend swearing innocence, and the judge on the friend’s side.
蓝色十字架
The great detective Valentin crosses to London hunting Flambeau, the giant master thief of Europe, with no clue at all except to follow anything odd. And London is suddenly full of odd things: salt in the sugar bowl, soup thrown at a wall, and two clergymen, one tall and one short.
胡四娘
A penniless scholar marries the least-regarded daughter of a great house, and the whole family mocks the pair, calling her 'the noble lady' to her face. One maid even bets her eyes that the husband will never amount to anything.
百万英镑
Stranded in London with nothing but rags, an American clerk is handed an envelope by two eccentric old brothers and finds inside a single banknote worth a million pounds. He cannot spend it, cannot change it and cannot explain it, and he has thirty days to survive on it.
倒运汉巧遇洞庭红
Wen Ruoxu fails at everything he tries, and his friends chip in just one tael so he can tag along on a trading voyage. He spends it on a basket of cheap oranges and, stranded on a deserted island, drags back a giant tortoise shell that everyone laughs at.
懒汉王成
Wang Cheng is so lazy his family has sunk into rags, until a lost gold hairpin brings him a fox spirit who once loved his grandfather. She stakes him to make his fortune in the capital, but rain, bad luck and a thief strip him of everything, leaving him with nothing but a single quail.
红玉
A poor scholar's happy marriage is shattered when a retired censor covets his wife, beats his father and carries her off, and every court refuses to hear his case. Then a bearded stranger he has never met walks in and asks why he has forgotten his revenge.
刘东山夸技顺城门
Liu Dongshan, the constable they call 'Chain-of-Pearls Arrow,' heads home with a hundred taels and loudly tells a crowded inn that no bandit alive could rob him. The next morning a charming young rider asks to share the road and wonders aloud how many outlaws the great man has caught.
崔猛
Cui Meng cannot see an injustice without smashing it, and his mother tattoos a vermilion cross on his arm to make him stop. Then a local bully steals a poor man's wife through a rigged gambling debt, right in front of him.
田七郎
A dream tells the wealthy Wu Chengxiu that of all his many friends, only a poor hunter named Tian Qilang would stand by him in trouble. But Qilang's mother wants nothing to do with Wu's gifts, warning that the rich repay with money, the poor with loyalty.
席方平告阴状
When a rich enemy bribes the underworld's jailers to torture his dying father, Xi Fangping lets his soul leave his body and goes down to file a complaint. But the city god, the prefect and the King of the Underworld have all been paid off, and each answers his petition with worse torments than the last.
商三官
When a local bully's servants beat her scholar father to death, sixteen-year-old Shang Sanguan watches her brothers lose their lawsuit and talks them into burying him. The night after the funeral she vanishes without a trace, and half a year later a pretty young actor turns up at the bully's birthday feast.
金玉奴棒打薄情郎
The beggar chief's daughter Jin Yunu pours her family's money into making her penniless scholar husband a success, and the day he becomes an official he starts to resent her low birth. On a moonlit night on the river, he decides there is only one way to be rid of the shame.
向杲化虎
When a rich young bully beats Xiang Gao's brother to death and buys off the court, Xiang vows to kill him on the road. But his enemy now rides with a crack archer at his side, and only a strange storm on the mountain will give Xiang his chance.
苗生
A huge, coarse stranger named Miao forces drinks on a snobbish scholar, then carries the man's sick horse twenty li on his shoulders. When he turns up again at the scholars' picnic on Mount Hua, they insist on reciting their verses and essays to him anyway.
会说话的猫
At a dull English country-house party, a forgettable guest announces that he has taught the household cat, Tobermory, to speak. The guests crowd round to test the marvel, never stopping to ask what a cat who wanders past every bedroom window might have heard.
柳毅传书
On his way home from failing the exams, Liu Yi meets a beautiful woman herding strange sheep in the wilds, cast out by her husband's family. She is the daughter of the Dragon Lord of Lake Dongting, and she begs him to carry a letter to her father beneath the water.
赵城虎
When a tiger kills an old widow's only son, she wails in the county court and refuses to leave until the magistrate issues a warrant for the beast. The drunk constable who volunteered for the job soon learns that every day the tiger stays free costs him a beating.
一小时的故事
A woman with a heart condition is gently told her husband has died in a train wreck. As she retreats to her room, a strange and powerful feeling begins to take hold of her, transforming her grief into something unexpected.
改过自新
A safecracker named Jimmy Valentine leaves prison early, still swearing he never cracked a safe. Back at his old trade, he leaves a trail of immaculate robberies — and a patient detective named Ben Price takes up the chase. In the little town of Elmore, Arkansas, Jimmy becomes Ralph Spencer, a respectable shoe merchant engaged to the banker's daughter. Now Ben Price has found him, and the wedding is only days away.
最后一片叶子
In a cramped Greenwich Village studio, two young artists, Sue and Johnsy, face a crisis when Johnsy falls ill with pneumonia. As she lies bedridden, she becomes fixated on a dying ivy vine outside her window, believing her life is tied to the last remaining leaf. Will her fragile hope survive the stormy night?
麦琪的礼物
With only $1.87 and Christmas approaching, Della faces a dilemma: how to buy a worthy gift for her husband Jim. The story begins with her despair over their poverty and her decision to sacrifice her most prized possession.
