Monkey King: Journey to the West

One of the greatest classics of Chinese literature, in a new translation by the award-winning Julia Lovell One of China’s Four Great Classical Novels, Monkey King was written anonymously during the Ming dynasty and is most commonly attributed to Wu Cheng’en, the son of a silk-shop clerk from east China. It recounts a Tang-dynasty monk’s quest for Buddhist scriptures, accompanied by an omni-talented kung-fu Monkey King called Sun Wukong; a rice-loving divine pig; and a depressive man-eating river-sand monster. Comparable to The Canterbury Tales or Don Quixote, the tale is at once a comic adventure story, a humorous satire of Chinese bureaucracy, a spring of spiritual insight and an extended allegory in which the group of pilgrims journeys towards enlightenment.

Author Biography

Wu Ch’eng-en (Author) Very little is known about Wu Ch-eng-en (c. 1505-80). He was a Chinese novelist and poet of the Ming Dynasty, and is considered by many to be the author of Journey to the West (Monkey King), one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. Julia Lovell (Translator) Julia Lovell is the translator of The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China- The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun, and is the author of Maoism, for which she won the 2019 Cundhill History Prize, and The Opium War, for which she won the Jan Michalski Prize. She is Professor of Modern China at Birkbeck College, University of London, and writes about China for The Guardian, Financial Times, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. She lives in Cambridge.