In China, as you know, the Emperor is Chinese, and all the people are Chinese, too. The story you're about to hear happened a long time ago, but even after all this time it hasn’t been forgotten, and that’s why I can tell it to you now.

The Emperor lived in the most marvelous palace in the world. It was made completely of porcelain, just like fine cups and saucers. All the walls and floors and tables and chairs were porcelain, and they were so thin and breakable that you had to be extra-specially careful when you touched them.

The Emperor’s garden was filled with the rarest and most beautiful flowers. Each one had a little silver bell tied to it. Whenever you walked past a flower, its bell would tinkle so that you'd be sure to notice it.

The garden stretched out so far and so wide that even the Chief Imperial Gardener had no idea where it ended. If you kept walking past the flower beds, you finally came to a magnificent forest, with tall trees and clear lakes. The forest stretched all the way to the sea, which was deep enough so that large ships could sail right in under the branches of the trees.

In this forest near the seashore there lived a nightingale. Her song was so lovely that even the fisherman, who was busy pulling in his nets in the moonlight, would stop and listen to her. He looked up into the treetops, and a smile lit up his face. “Ah, how beautiful that is!” he said to himself. But then he had to get back to his work, and he stopped listening.

But the next night, when the nightingale sang again, he listened again and said to himself, “Ah, how beautiful!”

From every country in the world, travelers came to China, and they went “Ooh!” and they went "Ahh!” at the Emperor's great city and at his palace and at his garden. But as soon as they heard the nightingale, they all said the same thing: “That is the loveliest of all.”

And when they returned home from their travels, they had many stories to tell, and the cleverest among them wrote many books about the city and the palace and the garden, and about how magnificent they were. But they always saved the nightingale for last, because she was the loveliest of all. And all the poems that the poets wrote were about the nightingale in the forest by the sea.

These books made their way through the whole world, and in time some of them reached the Emperor. There he sat on his golden throne, reading and reading. Now and then he smiled and nodded his head. He was very pleased that everyone admired him so much and had such wonderful things to say about his city and his palace and his garden.

And then he read: “But the nightingale is the loveliest of all.”'