"Journey to the West" is the first ancient Chinese romantic episodic novel about gods and demons. The earliest version of "Journey to the West" was "Newly Engraved Official Board Characters of Journey to the West" by Shide Hall in Jinling in the 20th year of the Wanli reign of the Ming Dynasty, without the author's name. Lu Xun, Dong Zuobin, and others ultimately determined the "original work of Wu Cheng'en" based on the records in "Huai'an Prefecture Annals" and "Wu Cheng'en's Journey to the West".
The novel mainly tells the story of Sun Wukong, who was born, followed Bodhi Patriarch to learn art and caused chaos in the Heavenly Palace. He met Tang Monk, Zhu Bajie, Sha Monk, and White Dragon Horse, traveled westward to obtain Buddhist scriptures, went through hardships, conquered demons and monsters, experienced 981 difficulties, and finally arrived in the Western Heaven to meet the Buddha, and finally the Five Saints came true. The novel is based on the historical event of Xuanzang's pilgrimage, and through the author's artistic processing, it deeply depicts the social and living conditions during the Ming Dynasty.
Journey to the West "is a classic work of Chinese fantasy novels, reaching the peak of ancient romantic novels. It is also known as one of the Four Great Classical Novels of China, along with" Romance of the Three Kingdoms, "" Water Margin, "and" Dream of the Red Chamber. Since its publication, Journey to the West has been widely circulated among the people, with various versions emerging one after another. There are six types of editions in the Ming Dynasty, seven types of editions and copies in the Qing Dynasty, and thirteen types of lost editions recorded in classics. After the Opium War, a large number of classical Chinese literary works were translated into Western languages. "Journey to the West" gradually spread to Europe and America and was translated into English, French, German, Italian, Western, sign language, Esperanto, Swahili, Russian, Czech, Romanian, Polish, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and other languages.
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