The ancient story of King Goujian of Yue spoke powerfully to millions of Chinese throughout China's turbulent 20th century. Yet many American students of this period (including serious professional scholars) have never heard of Goujian. Paul Cohen calls this remarkable phenomenon "insider cultural knowledge," which he identifies as a kind of knowledge, familiar the world over, that often circulates in the form of stories learned from an early age by the culture's members. Why such stories remain bottled up within a culture, often completely unknown to outsiders, is one of the mysteries explored in this book. Another, only slightly less puzzling, has to do with the relationship between past story and present reality that in China as well as many other societies has exerted such power. Why are peoples, at certain moments in their collective lives, so receptive to narratives--often derived from their own pasts--that resonate closely with their present historical circumstances? This mating of story to history, compellingly demonstrated in the career of the Goujian story in 20th-century China, is what this book is mainly about.