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The Lake That Fell From Heaven: Fifteen Folk Tales from Zhejiang
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Aug 21 2026
Pages: 116
Weight: 0.36
Height: 0.24 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
A white snake who spent eighteen hundred years learning to be good, and the monk who could not forgive her for what she was. A woodcutter who stopped to watch two old men finish a game, and came down the mountain a hundred years late. A king who lined five hundred crossbowmen along a riverbank and shot at the incoming tide.
Zhejiang is a province the size of Ireland, folded between the East China Sea and a wall of green mountains. People have been telling stories here for two thousand years - and the particular pleasure of them is that they are not set in a vague once-upon-a-time kingdom. They are set there, at that bridge, by that well, and the local people will point.
What makes this collection differentEvery tale ends with a section called Where this story lives: the real place it is pinned to, what is there now, how to get to it, and - where the versions disagree - which telling was chosen and why. The Broken Bridge is five minutes from the north shore of West Lake. Leifeng Pagoda really did collapse, in 1924, and more than one writer noticed the story had come true. The peak that flew is limestone in a district that is otherwise sandstone, which is why the story exists at all.
Inside- The Lake That Fell From Heaven - how West Lake was made
- The White Snake - the Broken Bridge and Leifeng Pagoda
- The Peak That Flew - Feilai Feng and the disgraceful monk Ji Gong
- The Dragon of the Well - how Longjing tea got its name
- The King Who Shot the Tide - Qian Liu and the Qiantang bore
- The Butterfly Lovers - three years of not being recognised
- The Guanyin Who Would Not Leave - the founding of Mount Putuo
- The Girl Who Washed Silk - Xi Shi, and the fall of Wu
- Yu, Who Did Not Go In - three times he passed his own gate
- Daughter's Red - the wine buried on the day a daughter is born
- The Swordsmith and the Seven Stars - Ou Yezi at Longquan
- The Two Brothers and the Cracked Glaze - how celadon crackle was invented
- The Rotted Axe Handle - the most quietly devastating story in Chinese folklore
- The Silkworm Mother - the strangest tale here, and the one believed hardest
- The Lake at the Top of the Mountains - a whole range named on the evidence of birds
It is not a scholarly edition, and it does not pretend the tales are settled. Folk stories do not have an authoritative version; they have a hundred cousins. Where the tellings conflict, this book says so rather than quietly picking one. It is also not a sanitised children's collection - several of these stories are about people being used, and they are told that way.
Who it is forReaders who like myth and folklore told properly. Travellers to Hangzhou, Shaoxing, Ningbo, Putuo, or the mountains of the south who want to know what they are looking at. Anyone who has ever wondered why a Chinese lake has a pagoda on one end of it and a story attached to the other.
Fully illustrated throughout, with notes, a short glossary, and a guide to the province by region.
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