Shen of the Sea
by Arthur Bowie Chrisman
Summary
Arthur Bowie Chrisman invents sixteen short stories written in the manner of Chinese folktales rather than translating any existing ones, each built around a single whimsical premise: why chopsticks came into use, how gunpowder was discovered, how kites first flew, how fine china got its glaze. The stories move fast and lean hard on wordplay and comic misunderstanding, closer in spirit to a tall tale than to a solemn legend, with characters who solve problems through cleverness, luck, or a fortunate accident rather than heroism. Else Hasselriis illustrates the collection with more than fifty silhouette cuttings, black shapes against white that echo paper cutting traditions and give each story its own small, stylized picture rather than a single frontispiece for the whole book.
The tone stays light throughout, aimed at younger readers who want a quick, funny explanation for why the world works the way it does, and the book reads in short sittings, one invented legend at a time, each only a few pages long and easy to finish in a single bedtime. The stories share a shape more than a single character or setting; a curious or clever figure runs into a problem the natural world has not yet explained, and the solution, often silly, sometimes a little sly, ends up accounting for gunpowder, or a kite that will not stay grounded, or why fine porcelain shines the way it does.
Modern readers coming to it should understand plainly what Chrisman himself did not hide, that these are American inventions dressed in a borrowed setting rather than authentic Chinese folklore passed down through generations. Children's literature scholars have since discussed the book as part of a broader pattern in early twentieth century American publishing that used other cultures as costume for stories with no real connection to the tradition they claimed, a pattern worth naming for a modern reader even where the individual stories still land as genuinely funny on their own terms.
Historical Context & Significance
E. P. Dutton published Shen of the Sea in 1925, and it won the 1926 Newbery Medal. No committee citation survives from this era, but a single runner up was named that year, Padraic Colum's The Voyagers, Being Legends and Romances of Atlantic Discovery.
The collection stayed in print across several editions between the 1920s and the 1960s under slightly different subtitles, A Book for Children in some printings and Chinese Stories for Children in others, and it remains available through Wikisource with its original illustrations. Its reputation now sits mostly as a period piece, read more often by scholars tracing how American children's publishing handled other cultures in this era than by children looking for folklore in its own right.