China's Tiger Story And Tiger Culture

This essay studies stories about tiger in narrative novels in Chinese ancient times, especially written in the ancient Chinese language, and hope to reveal the important role of tiger stories play in tiger culture and its evolvement trace and characteristics by comprehensive review of the specific genre of tiger stories including definition, classification and analysis. By analyzing almost all available documents and references both manually and electronically, the essay proves that tiger stories are one of the most complicated and sophisticated animal stories in ancient China based on over 800 stories selected from more than 100,000 references. The essay also makes classified study on the relationship between human beings and tiger stories written in ancient Chinese language based on those evidences.The first chapter explains the culture and art nature of tiger. First summarizes the animal nature of tiger that people are concerned with, which determines the initial image of tigers in the culture. Second the chapter discusses the status of tiger in myth, and then tries to analyses tigers in a imago or symptomatic way. Finally, the essay divides tiger stories in ancient China into fifteen classifications in accordance with the closeness of the relationship between stories and human.The second chapter analyzes and discusses tigers in tiger stories in ancient China as an animal. Tiger stories involved in this chapter almost all represent conflicts between humans and tigers. Through the records of human fighting with tigers using both hands and brains, we will see some extraordinary wits and spirits. In addition, this chapter also has tiger stories that are not impersonated.The third chapter analyzes various situations after impersonation of tigers, and among them stories that tigers turn into humans dominate. Tigers in these stories are personalized to the largest scale, yet at the end of a story, animal always return to its animal nature rather than fulfilling its transformation. Man yearns for certain nature of tigers while at the same time resist the original nature of them. After classification and analysis tiger stories, the essay tries to discover why tiger stories stand still in Tang Dynasty.In the appendix, the essay sorts out items, origins and situations of tiger stories that close to humans relatively in order to exhibit general idea these types of tiger stories.Since references gathered are limited in some sense, while on the other hand tiger culture cover various things, further studies are unlikely. The essay only conduct some preliminary studies and the results and conclusion drawn is expected to be helpful for further exploration.