The Remarkable Journey of Prince Jen

Lloyd Alexander
2014-03-08T18:28:01-08:00

After reading Lloyd Alexander’s early book the remarkable journey of Prince Jen, I found that the story itself was very interesting, so as a reader, let me give a brief summary about the book. In the beginning, Young Lord Prince – our main character Jen was given a mission to seek the way to rule well from the king of T’ien-Kuo, Yuan-Ming. To please the wise ruler, Jen had taken six valuable gifts to bring with him and of course, brought his loyal servant Mafoo. With the six items – a sword, a kite, a bowl, a saddle, a paint box and a flute, Prince Jen started toward the kingdom of T’ien-Kuo with Mafoo and General Li Kwang among his soldiers to protect the future wise ruling king of Tang....... From my description, sure you have got a brief idea about the story, but now just to let you learn more about the book, you should hear some of my opinions to have a clearer picture of the book. To summarize my overall opinions about this novel, I would say that it was pretty fun to read, there were some interesting cultural universals about early China that was explored in different ways. From the passages in the book, you could get a general idea about the government, the education and the fundamentals of early China. Just to support my opinions, I liked this book because it explained things about early China. I could tell that the author put in a lot of effort into learning Chinese cultures. He clearly examined the bureaucracy had on early China’s devolvement. Also, he described the basics of Chinese, he knew that Chinese wore cotton cloth and lived in wooden house, and he talked about the Chinese diet of fish and rice. Last of all, he even mentioned the fact that Chinese was educated to respect their parents and care for their children. I could claim that the remarkable journey of Prince Jen was a great book because it thoroughly explained early China’s cultural universals.