The Butterfly Lovers (梁山泊与祝英台) is a well-known folklore in the Chinese history, along with The Legend of White Snake (白蛇传), Meng Jiangnu’s Bitter Weeping (孟姜女), Cowherd and Weaving Maid (牛郎织女), these four ancient love stories play an important part in Chinese literature.
I was a kid when I had my first exposure to The Butterfly Lovers. Flipping through a simple Mandarin Chinese storybook, the beauty of the story had me in awe, and also the relentless bugging of my mum with the question, “did they really turn into butterflies?”
