How to Read Chinese Prose in Chinese: A Course in Classical Chinese

This book is at once a guided introduction to Chinese nonfictional prose and an innovative textbook for the study of classical Chinese. It is a companion volume to How to Read Chinese Prose: A Guided Anthology, designed for Chinese-language learners.

How to Read Chinese Prose in Chinese presents more than forty prose works, either excerpts or in full, from antiquity through the Qing dynasty. While teaching readers how to appreciate the rich tradition of Chinese prose in its original form, the book uses these texts to introduce classical Chinese to advanced learners, helping them develop reading comprehension and vocabulary. It offers a systematic guide to classical Chinese grammar and abundant notes on vocabulary, and features an extensive network of notes, exercises, and cross-references. The book includes modern translations of the forty prose works in simplified Chinese, presented alongside the original texts in traditional Chinese. It also includes expert commentaries on each text’s distinctive aesthetic qualities as well as historical and cultural contexts.

The book comprises thirty-eight lessons within eight units, organized chronologically to reflect the emergence of major prose genres. It is a major contribution to the teaching and study of classical Chinese language and literature.

Audio recordings of all forty texts are available online free of charge.

Jie Cui is the coauthor of How to Read Chinese Poetry Workbook (2012).

Liu Yucai is professor of Chinese language and literature at the Center for Chinese Classical Texts at Peking University.

Zong-qi Cai is professor of Chinese and comparative literature at Lingnan University of Hong Kong and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the general editor of the How to Read Chinese Literature series.