In the mid-1950s, Kyoto University was gifted a manuscript entitled Xiaozi zhuan 孝 子傳 “Accounts of Filial Children” that once had belonged to the private Funahashi 船橋 Library. In 1959, the great Sinologist Yoshikawa Kōjirō 吉川幸次郎 published a book entitled Kōshiden 孝子傳, which contained a photographic copy of this manuscript, along with Yoshikawa's translation of the text. Happily, I came across this book in Berkeley's East Asian Library. Later in 1992 while studying Japanese in Yokohama, I heard about another Xiaozi zhuan at Kyoto's Yömei Library (Yōmei bunko 陽明文庫). I telephoned the director of the library and begged him for a photocopy of the text. He was only willing to send me one because I knew Fujieda Akira 藤枝晃, the famed Dunhuangologist. A xerox copy of the text arrived the day before I left Japan. After reading both manuscripts, I realised just how closely related they were: each contains the exact same 45 filial piety accounts in the exact same order, the wording of the tales is similar as well. Even though the two texts share many resemblances, unexpectedly, they also have several noteworthy variations.