Magic Mountain (Mo Shan), a fairytale written by renowned playwright Liao Yimei and two co-authors, Shi Yihang and Zhang Qiyi, was published in early January.

At the same time, a children's drama under the same title, directed by Liao's husband Meng Jinghui, will premiere in Beijing on January 20.

Just as Meng is famous for his creative reinventions of Western classics such as Faust, Waiting for Godot, and Mayakovsky's Soviet classic The Bedbug, Liao also fills her plays with insightful literary and cultural references that touch on the predicaments of Chinese modernity.

Although the latest offering from the leading avant-garde theatre duo deals with a simpler subject than those of their previous works, it has attracted enough attention over the years.

Arguably China's most popular children's play, Magic Mountain is estimated to draw an audience of more than 60,000 children.

The book, priced at 18 yuan (US$2.2), is expected to benefit from the play's popularity and be a hit on the market.

The Jieli Publishing House, the book's publisher, is famous for publishing many best-selling children's books.

Confident of the book's prospects of becoming a bestseller, the publishing house ordered an initial batch of 30,000 copies.

The authors said that writing the book brought them an enormous but exciting challenge.

"It is a first attempt and big challenge to rewrite the script into a fairy tale novel. We have done our best to make it readable for our young readers," Liao said.

According to her, the fairy tale tries to convey the meaning of love and friendship to children. The main characters of Magic Mountain belong to a tribe of white bears. For years they have been hibernating during winter. But a small bear named Pai Pai, the book's mischievous hero, plays a trick on its fellow bears and unexpectedly, puts them in danger.

(China Daily January 17, 2006)