The Five Ancestors

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please help improve this article or replace this tag with a more specific message. This article has been tagged since June 2006. (help, talk)

The Five Ancestors is a children's series written by Jeff Stone about five, young Chinese warrior monks who are the only survivors of the destruction and raid of their home: the Cangzhen Temple. Each of the warriors specializes in an animal kung fu and possesses a Cantonese animal name: Fu (tiger), Malao (monkey), Seh (snake), Hok (crane), and Long (dragon). The warriors must seek their past and fight their former brother Ying (eagle).

There will be 7 books in total, the first three of which are already released. They are: Tiger (named after Fu), Monkey (named after Malao), Snake (named after Seh), Crane (named after Hok), Dragon (named after Long), Eagle (named after Ying) and Praying Mantis (named after Tonglong).

[edit] Storyline

Cangzhen (Secret truth) is a martial arts temple, founded by Shaolin monks, resembling Shaolin but not as big.

The Five Ancestors are Fu, Malao, Seh, Hok and Long, each named in Cantonese on their mastered animal kung fu. All of these are children and animal Kung Fu masters. They are all orphans who must seek out their pasts, find their families and defeat their former temple "brother" Ying.

Ying was raised to be an Eagle fighter, though his father was killed by the Grandmaster of the temple. Both Grandmaster and Eagle's father are Dragon fighters. Ying grows angry of being robbed of his true name, Saulong (Vengeful Dragon) and being raised of something other than a Dragon. He joins the Emperors army and destroys Cangzhen with his troops. He kills everyone in the temple, including Grandmaster, but the five ancestors manage to escape.

As they ran away from the temple ruins, Fu makes friends with villagers from a nearby village and teaches each kid he befriends a diffrent move, Monkey helps his brother Hok bury Grandmaster (Hok is really a girl, though females aren't allowed into Cangzhen, Hok is an exception. By book 3, Snake; Fu, Malao, and Seh all know her secret), Seh finds his father and joins a group of bandits who he hopes can help him in his quest and Hok spies on Ying and his army.

In Ying's army there is a man who looks like Snake and is possibly his brother. This man is Tonglong, Cantonese for praying mantis. He is apparently looking for the secret dragon scrolls (Each animal style has scrolls that teach the students to become masters of the style. Ying destroyed all the scrolls apart from the dragon scrolls and now, by book 3, Ying has one, Angangseh has 2, and Seh has 1. The one Seh has turns out to be a map that nobody recognizes.) and is helping Seh mother, who is his father's wife. The two are called Python (Mong) as the father, and Cobra (Angangseh). The release date for book 4, Crane is February 27, 2007.