A heavy price for a paperback, you may be tempted to say, but then it is a fairly massive one of 1,200 pages. It reaches hack to the beginnings of Chinese writing and Chinese writing began early goes through the various great dynasties, and stops in 1911.of Li Bo and Du Fu, but there were great poets writing in Chinese centuries earlier. Poetry in fact rather dominates this bulky volume, hut plays (which flowered under the invading Mongols) are well represented too, including the famous Peony Pavilion. Although, there are plenty of prose pieces and ex tracts, more from the great novels would have been welcome and would have given a rather more equitable balance to the anthology overall.