Journey to the West

Welcome to the Chinese Lore Podcast, where I retell classic Chinese stories in English.

This is Episode 70 of Journey to the West.

Last time, the pilgrims finally got to the Thunderclap Temple, except it was the Little Thunderclap Temple and not the Great Thunderclap Temple.

And except it was a fake temple and a real trap laid by a demon.

Los cuatro grandes libros de la literatura Ming se escriben durante este periodo.

Viaje al Oeste, una historia fantástica de aventuras sobre un monje que viaja a la India para recuperar textos budistas.

El romance de los tres reinos, una novela épica sobre la fragmentación de China en estados rivales.

A la orilla del agua, una historia sobre un grupo de forajidos que lucha contra la autoridad imperial.

yeah.

Journey to the West.

Very fun.

Really good stuff.

Yep, you needed that.

The Dragon Who Ate a Horse Hello! You're listening to Jana, and I'm here with the next in our Chinese series, The Journey to the West.

A Buddhist monk called Tripitaka is on a long and dangerous journey to India.

His bodyguard is a monkey warrior named Sun Wukong.

One of the hardest games I've ever played.

If you've ever read A Journey to the West, the Chinese parable, it is the adaptation of that book.

It follows Sun Wukong, the stone monkey, and his journey through fighting all the deities in the Chinese lore.

I am currently fighting Er Long Shin, who is considered in the world of video games one of the hardest video game bosses of all time.

Three of the four great classics in Chinese literature, they have a jade theme about it.

Everybody knows about Journey to the West or The Monkey King, you know, where there's the jade emperor in the jade palace, you know, on the jade mountain, etc., etc.

Romance of the Three Kingdoms, you know, a major subplot is about a piece of jade, the one I mentioned earlier.

And Dream of Red Mansions, the hero of it is born with a piece of jade in his mouth.

clothing, watches, cultural products, religious products, all manner of things that people in Chinatown and in Singapore wanted to buy.

And you can see on the right hand side, the famous storyteller of the old days, right? they would set up a little stall here you can see by the Singapore River and there will be a crowd of mostly men who come and gather around to listen to the stories from the Chinese classics like Journey to the West or The Romance of the Three Kingdoms so these kinds of businesses was what made Chinatown so fabulous Was it difficult to do research on this project? Yes and no.

There were some documents.

If you look at the municipal archives, the archives of the municipal commission that used to govern the town, we see that there was a lot of contestation going on over the use of the streets.