Butterfly Lovers
Chinese legend of the tragic romance between Liang Shanbo (梁山伯) and Zhu Yingtai (祝英臺), whose names form the Chinese title of the story
The Butterfly Lovers is a Chinese legend centered around the tragic romance between Liang Shanbo (梁山伯) and Zhu Yingtai (祝英臺), whose names form the Chinese title of the story. The title is often abbreviated as Liang Zhu (梁祝).
The story is a part of Chinese folklore and was selected as one of China's Four Great Folktales by the "Folklore Movement" in the 1920s—the others being the Legend of the White Snake (Baishezhuan), Lady Meng Jiang, and The Cowherd and the Weaving Maid (Niulang Zhinü).
Six cities in China collaborated in 2004 on a formal application for the Proclamation of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity on the legend at UNESCO, submitted in 2006 through the Chinese Ministry of Culture.
Legend
The legend of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai is set in the Eastern Jin dynasty (266–420 AD).
Zhu Yingtai is the ninth child and only daughter of the wealthy Zhu family of Shangyu, Zhejiang. Although women are traditionally discouraged from taking up scholarly pursuits, Zhu manages to convince her father to allow her to attend classes in disguise as a man. During her journey to Hangzhou, she meets Liang Shanbo, a scholar from Kuaiji (present-day Shaoxing). They chat and feel a strong affinity for each other at their first meeting. Hence, they gather some soil as incense and take an oath of fraternity in the pavilion of a wooden bridge.
The public source identifies “Butterfly Lovers” as chinese legend of the tragic romance between Liang Shanbo (梁山伯) and Zhu Yingtai (祝英臺), whose names form the Chinese title of the story. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Butterfly, Lovers and Chinese.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1328936. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2004 and 2006.
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This entry incorporates text from “Butterfly Lovers” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.