清平山堂话本

Printed in the mid-16th century by the Hangzhou book collector 洪楩, whose studio was the 清平山堂. It first appeared as 六十家小说 'Sixty Stories', in six volumes of ten. Only 29 stories survive, found in a Japanese library in the 1920s and in China in the 1930s, and the modern title comes from the studio name printed on their pages.

The stories were printed with little polishing, so they keep the plain language of the Song and Yuan storytellers. Many stock phrases of later fiction already appear in them, such as the birthday wish 福如东海 'fortune as vast as the Eastern Sea'.