About the book
Thunder is a ministry. So are the waters, fire, epidemics, medicine and exorcism, each with a president, a staff and a jurisdiction; a dragon-king can be taken to court and usually loses. E. T. C. Werner spent thirty-three years as a British consul in China, retired to Peking and stayed, and he translated these myths from Chinese sources rather than from other Europeans. This first volume prints the eight chapters in which he sets out that divine order — the creation of the world from P’an Ku’s body, the archer who shot down nine of the ten suns, the ministries of the natural world, the Eight Immortals, and a war in heaven — complete and unaltered. The four long legend cycles (Kuan Yin, the Guardian of the Gate of Heaven, Monkey and the fox-spirits) are held for volume two, and the book says so on its first page rather than on its last. Around the text: an introduction, an introduction to each chapter, a register of the nine celestial ministries assembled from the printed chapters because Werner’s own catalogue of them is not in this selection, a glossary of twenty-five figures whose chapter references were produced by searching the text, a note on the Wade-Giles romanisation, a chronology and an index of subjects. The 1922 colour plates are not reproduced: no source names their artist, so they cannot be cleared. 108 pages, 6 × 9 in.
