The Taiping Guangji, sometimes translated as the Extensive Records of the Taiping Era, or Extensive Records of the Taiping Xinguo Period, is a collection of stories compiled in the early Song dynasty under imperial direction by Li Fang. The work was completed in 978 and printing blocks were cut but it was prevented from publication on the grounds that it contained only xiaoshuo and thus "was of no use to young students." It survived in manuscript until it was published in the Ming dynasty. It is considered one of the Four Great Books of Song. The collection is divided into 500 volumes and consists of about 3 million Chinese characters. It includes about seven thousand stories selected from over three hundred books and novels from the Han dynasty to the early Song dynasty, many of which have been lost. Some stories are historical or naturalistic anecdotes, each is replete with historical elements, and were not regarded by their authors as fiction, but the topics are mostly supernatural, about Buddhist and Taoist priests, immortals, ghosts, and various deities. They include a number of Tang dynasty stories, especially chuanqi, that are famous works of literature in their own right, and also inspired later works. Pu Songling was said to have been inspired by Taiping Guangji; the short story "A Sequel to the Yellow Millet Dream" parallels one of Taiping stories.
Several collections of translated Taiping Guangji stories were published in English and other western languages, But the text was never fully translated into those languages. The shows that about 125 English translations were made for Taiping Guangji stories so far, making less than 2% of the total number of Taiping Guangji stories. Three full translations into modern Chinese were published so far:
What seems to be a Google translatemachine translation into English of the Shi Ming Chinese translation was published as a soft-copy in 2019. Stories out of Taiping Guangji are still being actively translated into English, Hebrew and modern Chinese, and are published in several blogs on a regular basis.
