“The best English edition of the classic Chinese fantasy novel I have ever read.” ―Minjie Chen
Los Angeles Review of Books A Penguin Classic Before there was The Lord of the Rings there
was China’s Monkey King . The title character also known as Sun Wukong is a shape-shifting
trickster on a kung-fu quest for eternal life beloved by fans of the anime Dragon Ball and the
video games League of Legends and Black Myth: Wukong . For raiding Heaven’s Orchard of Immortal
Peaches the Buddha pins Monkey King beneath a mountain and frees him only five hundred years
later to protect the pious monk Tripitaka on a fourteen-year journey to India in search of
precious Buddhist sutras. Accompanied by two other fallen immortals—a rice-loving pig able to
fly with its ears and a depressive man-eating river-sand monster—Monkey King undergoes
eighty-one trials doing battle with all manner of dragons ogres wizards and femmes fatales
in this rollicking adventure that not only stands as the most popular of China’s Four Great
Classical Novels but also gave us one of world literature’s most memorable superheroes.
