ABSTRACT
Because of the refinement and reworking by storytellers through the ages, these four parts have been highly enriched and developed compared to the original work. The volume of the work has grown to about ten times that of the original, constituting a most precious heritage of Chinese oral literature in the long fiction genre. In 1959 the famou s Yangzhou storyteller Wang Shaotang (1889-1968) had his oral version of 'Wu Song ' edited [zhengli] and published as Wu Song, followed posthumously by Song Jiang (1985). Under the influence of ' leftist' trends some parts of the contents were unnece ssarily removed. The aim of the present new editions is to preserve the origin al shape in a most complete way. The edited versions of Shi Xiu and Lu Junyi were published for the first time in 1995.
