世說新語
A New Account of the Tales of the World
Liu Yiqing 劉義慶 · 403–444
Librarian’s score8.9Claude · AI
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More than a thousand short anecdotes of scholars, generals and eccentrics from the Han to the Eastern Jin, sorted into thirty-six kinds of virtue and folly. Many entries are a single exchange or gesture, yet a whole temperament shows through. It fixed the image of the free-spirited Wei-Jin gentleman and supplied Chinese writing with idioms ever since.