Kai Lung S Golden Hours Illustrated

'Kai Lung's Golden Hours' is a fantasy novel by English writer Ernest Bramah. The main plot serves primarily as a vehicle for the presentation of the gem-like, aphorism-laden stories told by the protagonist Kai Lung, an itinerant story-teller of ancient China. In this particular work, Kai Lung is brought before the court of the Mandarin Shan Tien on charges of treason by the Mandarin's confidential agent Ming-shu. In a unique defense, Kai Lung recites his beguiling tales to the Mandarin, successfully postponing his conviction time after time until he is finally set free. In the process he attains the love and hand of the maiden Hwa-Mei.

Kai Lung's Golden Hours By Ernest Bramah. Preface: Hilaire Belloc. Man is born to make. His business is to construct; to plan; to carry out the plan: to fit together, and to produce a finished thing. That human art in which it is most difficult to achieve this end and in which it is far easier to neglect it than in any other is the art of writing. Yet this much is certain, that unconstructed writing is at once worthless and ephemeral; and nearly the whole of our modern English writing is unconstructed, The matter of survival is perhaps not the most important, though it is a test of a kind, and it is a test which every serious writer feels most intimately. The essential is the matter of excellence; that a piece of work should achieve its end. But in either character, the character of survival or the character of intrinsic excellence, construction deliberate and successful is the fundamental condition. It may be objected that the mass of writing must in any age neglect construction. We write to establish a record for a few days; or to send a thousand unimportant messages;or to express for others or for ourselves something very vague and perhaps very weak in the way of emotion, which does not demand construction and at any rate cannot command it. No writer can be judged by the entirety of his writings, for these would include every note he ever sent round the corner every memorandum he ever made upon his shirt cuff, But when a man sets out to write as a serious business, proclaiming by the nature of his publication and presentment that he is doing something he thinks worthy of the time and place in which he lives and of the people to whom he belongs, then if he does not construct he is negligible. Yet, I say, the great mass of men today do not attempt it in the English tongue, and the proof is that you can discover in their slipshod pages nothing of a seal or stamp. You do not, opening a book at random, say at once;This is the voice of such and such an one. It is no one's manner or voice. It is part of a common babel. Therefore in such a time as that of our decline, to come across work which is planned, executed and achieved has something of the effect produced by the finding of a wrought human thing in a wild, It is like finding, as I once found, deep hidden in the tangled rank grass of autumn in Burgundy, on the edge of a wood not far from Dijon, a neglected statue of the eighteenth century. It is like coming round the corner of some wholly desolate upper valley in the mountains and seeing before one a well cultivated close and a strong house in the midst. It is now many years, I forget how many it may be twenty or more, or it may be a little less since The Wallet of Kai Lung was sent me by a friend, The effect produced upon my mind at the first opening of its pages was in the same category as the effect produced by the discovery of that hidden statue in Burgundy, or the coming upon an unexpected house in the turn of a high Pyrenean go

Kai Lung is an itinerant story-teller in ancient China. "I spread my mat," he says, "wherever my uplifted voice can entice together a company to listen," and his powers of enchantment are abundantly revealed in this volume. He incurs the enmity of a sinister figure called Ming-shu, who is the confidential agent of the Mandarin, Shan Tien, and has to defend himself in the Mandarin's court against a series of treasonable charges. Kai Lung's defence takes the original form of inducing the Mandarin to listen to a recital of the traditional tales of China, and so well does he beguile the capricious tyrant that he secures one adjournment after the other and, finally, his freedom--as well as the love of the maiden Hwa-Mei.

Only at one point along the straight earth-road leading from Loo-chow to Yu-ping was there any shade, a wood of stunted growth, and here Kai Lung cast himself down in refuge from the noontide sun and slept.When he woke it was with the sound of discreet laughter trickling through his dreams. He sat up and looked around. Across the glade two maidens stood in poised expectancy within the shadow of a wild fig-tree, both their gaze and their manner denoting a fixed intention to be prepared for any emergency. Not being desirous that this should tend towards their abrupt departure, Kai Lung rose guardedly to his feet, with many gestures of polite reassurance, and having bowed several times to indicate his pacific nature, he stood in an attitude of deferential admiration.

Kai Lung's Golden Hours is a fantasy novel Ernest Bramah. It was first published in hardcover in London Grant Richards Ltd. in October, 1922, and there have been numerous editions since. The first edition...