Overview
The Wallet of Kai Lung is a collection of linked fantasy tales told in an ornate, deliberately antiquated style that imitates and playfully reinvents the voice of Chinese storytelling. E.
This title is catalogued in Classics & Literature. Its reading profile is Medium and Moderate, with themes including literature, escapism, emotion, fantasy.
One-Page Summary
The Wallet of Kai Lung is a collection of linked fantasy tales told in an ornate, deliberately antiquated style that imitates and playfully reinvents the voice of Chinese storytelling. E. Bramah’s narrator, Kai Lung, is a master of survival through language. He tells stories because storytelling can postpone punishment, escape danger, entertain powerful people, and turn an unpleasant situation into an opportunity. The tales within the tales feature emperors, officials, lovers, criminals, sages, fools, and ingenious schemes, but the real protagonist is the storyteller himself.
Kai Lung survives because he can always produce another story. Bramah mixes adventure with absurdity and uses elaborate politeness as a weapon: characters may insult one another while speaking as though they were exchanging compliments. That verbal contrast creates much of the collection’s charm. The book is also historically interesting because its imagined Chinese setting reflects an early twentieth-century Western fantasy of China, complete with stereotypes and invented cultural details. Modern readers should therefore enjoy the artifice rather than mistake it for ethnography.
The result is a wonderfully strange book about the power of narrative itself. A sword can threaten a person, but a well-told story can sometimes do something more useful: buy time.
Key Themes
Literature: This title is tagged with literature as one of its main themes.
Escapism: This title is tagged with escapism as one of its main themes.
Emotion: This title is tagged with emotion as one of its main themes.
Fantasy: This title is tagged with fantasy as one of its main themes.