Ye Xian

"Ye Xian" (simplified Chinese: ; traditional Chinese: ; pinyin: Yè Xiàn; Wade–Giles: Yeh Hsien; [jê ɕjɛ̂n]) is a Chinese fairy tale that is similar to the European Cinderella story, the Malay-Indonesian Bawang Putih Bawang Merah tale, the Vietnamese Tấm Cám story, and stories from other ethnic groups including the Tibetans and the Zhuangs. It is one of the oldest known variants of Cinderella, first published in the Tang dynasty compilation Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang written around 850 by Duan Chengshi.

Long before the Qin and Han Dynasty, in a small community of cave-dwellers called Wudong, their chief by the name of Wu had two wives by custom and a daughter by each of them. Ye Xian is Wu's daughter of one wife, and she is extremely beautiful, kind and gentle, and gifted in many skills such as pottery and poetry. In contrast, her half-sister Jun-li is plain-looking, cruel and selfish, and both she and her mother, Wu's other wife, envy the attention Wu lavishes upon Ye Xian. Ye Xian's mother died while she was still a baby, so Wu did all he could to raise his motherless daughter.

Unfortunately, Ye Xian's father dies from a local plague, and a new chieftain was appointed to take his place, as Wu had no sons. With her family reduced to poverty, Ye Xian is forced to become a lowly servant and work for her scheming stepmother and envious older sister (in the original tale, it is her younger sister, because of the value of superiority in Chinese culture. But due to later influence, Ye was cast as the youngest child). Despite living a life burdened with chores and housework, and suffering endless abuse at her stepmother's hands, she finds solace when she ends up befriending a beautiful, 10 foot long fish in the lake near her home, with golden eyes and scales. The fish was really a guardian spirit sent to her by her own mother, who never forgot her daughter even beyond the grave.

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