Written in China over 400 years ago, Journey to the West is the ultimate tale of adventure, magic, and myth. It is probably the most famous and best-loved novel in China and is considered one of the four great classical novels of Chinese literature. The original Chinese novel written by Wu Chen’en in the 16th century is over a half million Chinese characters long, and a direct English translation runs over 2,000 pages and has a very large vocabulary.
This book is not a literal translation of the original novel. Rather, it’s a retelling of the story in easy-to-read Simplified Chinese. Unlike other full-text translations, this is written using a restricted vocabulary, simpler sentence structure, and fewer proper nouns. The book also contains full Pinyin (phonetic spelling) and English versions, and a complete glossary of all Chinese words used. A high quality audiobook version is available on Audible, and standard-quality versions are available on YouTube and the Imagin8 Press website.