Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat

Unrolling his mat is something Kai Lung does very often (usually under a mulberry tree), to tell his tales.

Kai Lung comes home one day to meet his wife, but finds everything in a state of disarray. An elderly neighbour tells him that the village has been devastated by Ming Shu. Kai Lung goes in the direction of Ming Shu. Along the way, he meets barbarians, a poor farmer named Thang, a bandless captain in the city of Chi-U, and finally (disguised as Mang-hi, a foreigner from the land of Kham) Ming Shu himself.

A sage, finding sleep to be an unwelcome obstruction to his pursuit of enlightenment, cuts off his eyelids and throws them away. At the spot where his eyelids land grows a shrub whose leaves look like his eyelids. Later, during a famine, the shrub is rediscovered and used to make a potion that soon becomes famous enough to catch the attention of the emperor, who subsequently bestows great honors on Wan.

A case of two people with the same fingerprints creates difficulties which are resolved by the mandarin Wong Tsoi.

A ring of thieves realizes that its members don't need to take the trouble to steal to make a living, if they exact a tribute from everyone in the town in return for a promise not to give them any trouble.

Lin Ho, an ugly boy, is orphaned and sent to live with his rich uncle, who employs him as a slave. Lin Ho has been taught to do the best he can and not worry about the reaction to his actions, so he accepts this lot stoically. Then, one day, his uncle decides to get rid of him by sending him to make an offering at a shrine, giving him a lunch that contains a poisoned onion. At the foot of the hill containing the shrine, Lin Ho meets a proud warrior named Lam-Kwong, who, on the pretense that one cannot speak to the gods with onion breath, takes his onion, devours it greedily, and then dies—but not before killing Lin Ho with a stone directed at his head. Lin Ho goes to heaven, but the beings there are not quite ready to receive him, and so, as a reward for the virtuous life he has led so far, he is allowed to reënter his body. However, once he comes back to earth, he sees his own body lying beside that of Lam-Kwong, and decides that it would be much nicer to inhabit the forbidding body of a warrior than to resume his original post. This, however, poses a problem, for now he needs to work out what is expected of him…

The apprentice to an ivory-carver, who works diligently but without much reward, wanders into the woods one day, and sees a tree, a pagoda, and a young woman, all of perfect proportion…

Some years later, Kai Lung tells a story to an unwilling listener, a suitor of one of his daughters.

At an early mythical period of imagined history, a young man redeems his word to cut a crescent off the moon, in order to win a young lady's hand.

Kai Lung is informed by his neighbors that he has received official honorable recognition, though he is displeased when he discovers it is for rumored skills he does not possess, rather than for his real accomplishments.

The last scion of a deposed dynasty overthrows a corrupt monarch and finds happiness, and a prophecy comes true, though not in the expected way.