Tsai Chih Chung

Tsai Chih Chung (蔡志忠) is a world-renowned cartoonist and popularizer of Chinese classics whose books have sold more than 40 millions copies worldwide. He first came to prominence through his award-winning animated movies and his immensely popular daily comic strips. When he turned his hand to the classics after a prolonged period of self-education, they were acclaimed by critics and shot to the top of the bestsellers lists.

Starting from the 1980s, Tsai created a series of Chinese comic books on ancient Chinese classics, like huangzi Speaks: The Music of Nature, Zen Speaks: Shouts of Nothingness, Confucius Speaks: Words to Live by, Sunzi Speaks: The Art of War, and The Tao Speaks: Lao Tzu's Whispers of Wisdom. Confucius, Lao Tzu, Zhuangzi, and Sunzi are widely credited as sages whose thoughts have played an important role in China's development. Tsai put his unique understanding and feelings of ancient thoughts into his cartoons, and added a modern interpretation of them, making boring ancient philosophies quite amusing as well as understandable. His works won a large number of adult readers for comic books, a market predominantly children-targeted. This series of comic books has hoarded great applause from readers both in Taiwan and Chinese mainland, with 4 million copies sold in Taiwan.

Differing from most Chinese parents, Tsai has a unique way of bringing up his daughter, stressing independence and self-reliance. His daughter even traveled to Japan by herself at the age of 12.With the influence of her father, his daughter has also become fond of cartoons. Her creativity and originality is comparable to that of her father, and many of her cartoons have been published as well. Tsai once made a comparison between human beings and wolves, stating that a parent wolf never teaches its children the necessary skills of survival, leaving the child with the challenge of acquired these skills on their own.