ABSTRACT
Introduction While storytelling as a professional art of performing lengthy secular tales [shuohua, later shuoshu] has an impressively long history in China, the modern genres that constitute the continuation of this art into our own time can seldom claim more than a few centuries of authentic historical evidence. This apparently paradoxical situation is due to the fact that we know little about the dialectal and local traditions of the storytelling arts before the Qing dynasty (16441911), while the modern arts are characterized and divided into sub-genres exactly by such criteria as dialect and local performance characteri stics. The various dialectal areas have developed (or perhaps always had) their specific forms of storytelling, dependent on linguistic as well as geographic and social differences.
