The Wallet of Kai Lung
core collection 1900 Kai Lung
Record
| First published | 1900 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | collection |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.52 (214 ratings, collected 2026-08-27) |
| Page count | 180 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781587152085 |
| Internal chronology | 1 |
Synopsis
The Wallet of Kai Lung, published in 1900, is a collection of fantasy tales framed as stories told by Kai Lung, an itinerant Chinese storyteller who travels the countryside earning his keep by entertaining audiences with elaborate, often moralistic narratives. Rather than following a single continuous plot, the book gathers the tales Kai Lung recounts at various points along his travels, each one a self-contained story told in an ornate, mock-classical style that affectionately parodies the conventions of Chinese storytelling as understood by English readers of the period. Kai Lung's own circumstances, as a wandering storyteller navigating the demands and whims of those he entertains, provide a loose framing device that connects the otherwise independent tales, establishing the character and style that would carry through the later volumes of the series.
Where it sits
- Universe: Kai Lung
- Series: The Kai Lung Stories core; position 1 of 4 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Ernest Bramah
Notes
- From the series record (The Kai Lung Stories): Four completed story collections following the storyteller Kai Lung in an invented, deliberately fanciful chinoiserie setting; a foundational Edwardian-era pulp fantasy series, complete since the author's death in 1942.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings, but they resolve to the exact same sequence for this book, so one combined line is shown instead of two identical ones.
- Reading order, within the series The Kai Lung Stories: position 1 of 4: next Kai Lung's Golden Hours (1922)
Sources
- Wikipedia: Kai Lung
- Project Gutenberg: The Wallet of Kai Lung
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wallet_of_Kai_Lung
← Kai Lung dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.