All of them are a stringing together of many isolated Chinese stories, but in the first one they all tie up together. They are still good stories but the joins are easier to pick. (if you carefully read some of the background information about the empire between Bridge of Birds and Story of the Stone you will deduce that more than 100 years have elapsed, and then by Eight Skilled Gentlemen we appear to have progressed from the Tang to the Ming Dynasty (approx 700 years at the minimum). Within 3 months there were about six copies in circulation as the people that borrowed it usually went out and purchased their own copy then loaned it on.Īs a bit of a history stickler I found the temporal distortions in the next two hard to swallow. Someone sitting nearby my desk brought their copy in one day and I quizzed them about how they were enjoying it, and recommended it to another freind in the branch and loaned them my copy. I bought it just before I started working in a part of the Australian Bureau of Statistics that was full of young graduates from all over the country. I loved Bridge of Birds - it was the defining book of my early working years.
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