Five Hundred Arhats Protect Your Transit Safety
五百羅漢交通平安
Overview
Rights sold: Simplified Chinese
A selected best Taiwanese children’s book for the Bologna Illustrators Exhibition. A tender, loving tale about care that is delicately passed down through generations.
Grandma walks a long way into the mountain to pray for her grandson’s safety and gets him an amulet that will protect him during his travels––an amulet with five hundred strong arhats who will fight against any danger. Ever since then, no matter where the grandson goes––when he almost falls off of the cliff, or almost gets carried away by the sea waves, the arhats shield him with their lives. Gradually, grandson grows into a teenager, and one day, he travels in a train with only one arhat left by his side….
Five Hundred Arhats Protect Your Transit Safety is a warm, humane tale about love that is passed down through generations. Through drawings that bring colors of comfort, writer and illustrator Liu Shu-Gong recounts a family fable on grandparents’ loving dedication and care, a boy’s coming-of-age, and what it means for a child to grow into independence, especially having been shielded by family love. Liu incorporates Taiwanese local religious folklore and belief system, along with gentle touches of thin-lined drawings and simplistic language to render ceaseless protection and support that a child needs upon growing up.
Author(s)
Hsu-Kung Liu (劉旭恭) was born in Taipei in 1973. A graduate of the Civil Engineering Department at National TaiwanUniversity. He started to work in picture book illustration after taking part in the "Lucy Chen Handmade Picture BookClassroom”. He is the author and illustrator of 18 children books so far. He received an honorary mention for Hsin Yi Children’s Literature Prize in 2002 for I Really Want to Eat a Durian, winning the prize in 2006 with his book Excuse Me, Will My Feet Touch the Bottom?. His book Whose Stop Is This? (for kids 0-3 years old) won the Chen Bochui International Prize for Children’s Literature in 2014 and was subsequently selected for the 2015 and 2017 Bologna Illustrators Exhibition. His works have been selected for exhibition at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair. English, Thai, Japanese, French, Swedish,Korean, and Estonian rights have been sold for some of his works.
Awards
Selected for Best Taiwanese Children’s Book for the Bologna Illustrators Exhibition
Rights sold
Simplified Chinese