The Ghost King: A Story in Simplified Chinese and Pinyin, 1500 Word Vocabulary Level

The Buddhist monk Tangseng arrives with his disciples at a mountain monastery, and he is visited in a dream by someone claiming to be the ghost of a murdered king.  The ghost claims that the king sitting on the throne is really an evil demon.  Is he telling the truth or is he actually a demon in disguise?  Tangseng's chief disciple, the monkey king Sun Wukong, offers to go to the king's palace and sort things out with his iron rod.  But things do not go as planned...

This is the 13th book in the best-selling The Journey to the West series of stories for students learning to read Chinese. It is based on the epic 16th century novel of the same name by Wu Chen'en.  That novel was inspired by an actual journey by the Buddhist monk Tangseng, who traveled from Chang'an westward to India in 629 A.D. and returned seventeen years later with priceless knowledge and spiritual texts. Over the course of the book Tangseng and his companions face the 81 tribulations that Tangseng had to endure to attain Buddhahood.

The first 13 books in the Journey to the West series have used a total of about 1500 different Chinese words, but only 691 are used in this book. All new words are defined on the page where they are first used. The book uses Simplified Chinese characters and includes pinyin, an English translation, and a full glossary.

An audiobook is available on YouTube's Imagin8 Press channel and on the Imagin8 Press website.