Cinderella Around the World: 7 Dated Versions of ATU 510A

A gold shoe in ninth-century China

Duan sets the story before the Qin and Han dynasties. A cave chief named Wu has two wives, and one dies, leaving a clever daughter, Ye Xian. When Wu dies too, the stepmother sends Ye Xian to cut wood on steep slopes and draw water from deep wells. Ye Xian raises a small fish in a pond, until the stepmother puts on the girl's clothes, calls the fish, kills it, eats it and hides the bones under the dung heap.

A man with loose hair and rough clothes comes down from the sky. He tells her to pray to the bones for whatever she needs. At the cave festival she wears a kingfisher-green jacket and gold shoes. When her stepsister seems to know her, she runs home and leaves one shoe behind.

躡金履……遂遺一隻履

"She wore shoes of gold … and so she left one shoe behind." (Translation: Where Tales Began)

The shoe is sold to Tuohan, an island kingdom, and its king has the women of his country try it on. Duan says it was an inch shorter than the smallest foot, and so light that it made no sound on stone. The king finds Ye Xian, the shoe fits, and he makes her his chief wife. The stepmother and her daughter are killed by flying stones.

Duan ends by naming his source: Li Shiyuan, a former servant of his household from the cave settlements of Yongzhou, who knew many strange tales of the south. English Wikipedia's Youyang Zazu entry calls Li a native of present-day Nanning, and its entries date the book to around 850 (Ye Xian) and 853 (Duan Chengshi). The Chinese Wikisource author page gives Duan's dates as 803 to 863, so this page dates the text only as "before 863."

The Wikisource transcription quoted here does not name the printed edition it follows. In English, Arthur Waley's article "The Chinese Cinderella Story" appeared in Folklore in 1947.

What makes a story ATU 510A?

Folklorists sort tales with the Aarne–Thompson–Uther index, a numbered catalogue of folktale types. As English Wikipedia's entry on the index summarizes it, Antti Aarne published it in 1910, Stith Thompson revised it in 1928 (1927 in some accounts) and 1961, and Hans-Jörg Uther revised it again in 2004. Type 510A is the one called Cinderella. English Wikipedia's Cinderella entry gives a female persecutor as the type's defining trait.

That rule leaves Rhodopis outside. Strabo's Geography (17.1.33), written between 7 BC and AD 23 by English Wikipedia's dating, reports the story as a tale people tell: "an eagle snatched one of her sandals from the hands of her female attendant and carried it to Memphis," in Hans Claude Hamilton and William Falconer's 1854–57 translation. The king searches the country for the sandal's owner and marries her, but no stepmother or sister appears. D. L. Ashliman's ATU 510A index, which opens with Rhodopis, notes the same gap.

Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy's "Finette Cendron," listed as "Finette" in the contents of the 1698 Paris printing of her Contes des fées, is also left out of the count. English Wikipedia classes it as a mix of ATU 327A and 510A, and as of 2026-10-18 the 1698 pages are not transcribed on French Wikisource, so the tale could not be quoted from that printing.

Inside the type, the seven texts differ at the same points in the plot. This page calls each such difference a motif drift: a difference between recorded versions of the same tale type at the same point in the story, with no claim that one version turned into another. The grid marks six of those points.

Table data: cinderella-motif-drift.csv, with the edition, source and link for every row.

Basile's cat Cinderella, 1634

The earliest dated European text among the seven is Giambattista Basile's "La gatta cennerentola," the sixth tale of the first day of his Neapolitan Lo cunto de li cunti, printed after his death in 1634, as English Wikipedia notes. Its heroine, Zezolla, is no simple innocent. Her governess teaches her to kill her stepmother with the falling lid of a clothes chest, then has Zezolla talk her father into marrying the governess. The new stepmother brings out six daughters of her own, and Zezolla is sent to the kitchen as Gatta cennerentola, "the cinder cat" (Translation: Where Tales Began).

Her help comes from the fairies of Sardinia, not from a dead mother. When her father sails there, she asks only to be remembered to the fairies' dove; he forgets, his ship cannot leave port, and he goes to the fairies' grotto. A fairy sends her a date to plant, a golden hoe, a golden bucket and a silk towel. In four days the plant grows as tall as a woman, and a fairy steps out with a rhyme that dresses and undresses her.

At three feasts the king sees her. Twice she escapes his servant by throwing down gold coins and then pearls and jewels; the third time, as her coach races off, she loses a chianiello, which Benedetto Croce's 1891 notes explain as a pianella, a slipper.

The king holds a banquet for all the women of the land, and the slipper leaps onto Zezolla's foot "comme lo fierro corre a la calamita," as iron runs to a magnet (Translation: Where Tales Began). The stepsisters slip home to their mother. The tale closes on a proverb: "Ca pazzo è chi contrasta co le stelle," he is mad who fights the stars (Translation: Where Tales Began).

Perrault's glass slipper, 1697

Perrault's "Cendrillon, ou la petite pantoufle de verre" fills pages 117 to 148 of Histoires ou contes du temps passé, printed in Paris by Claude Barbin in 1697, 63 years after Basile's tale. Here the helper is a godmother who is a fairy, "sa Maraine, qui estoit Fée." She turns a pumpkin into a gilded coach, six mice into horses, a rat into a coachman and six lizards into footmen. She sends Cinderella to two balls with a warning to leave before midnight, and on the second night Cinderella forgets the hour and drops one of her slippers as she runs.

In the English text of Andrew Lang's The Blue Fairy Book (1889), the godmother "gave her a pair of glass slippers, the prettiest in the whole world." The slipper is tried on princesses, then duchesses, then the whole court, and Cinderella fits it and takes the other one from her pocket. Her stepsisters beg her pardon. She forgives them, lodges them in the palace and marries them that same day to two great lords of the court.

Was the slipper glass or fur? Perrault's printed text says glass. In the 1697 text the slipper's material is named four times, counting the title, and each time it is verre, by this page's count; vair, a fur, does not appear.

The fur reading is argued in Honoré de Balzac's Sur Catherine de Médicis (1841, by English Wikipedia's dating): in Katharine Prescott Wormeley's English translation, "Cinderella's slipper, which was no doubt of vair (the fur), is said to have been made of verre (glass)." Balzac names no earlier text that reads vair, and English Wikipedia's Cinderella entry reports a scholarly view that the glass was Perrault's own deliberate invention.

The Grimms' hazel tree, 1812 and 1857

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm printed "Aschenputtel" as no. 21 of their Kinder- und Haus-Märchen in 1812 and kept revising it. The seventh edition of 1857, which German Wikisource labels the brothers' final edition, prints it under the title "Aschenbuttel." The two texts follow the same plot but differ at many points, so this page counts them as two dated versions.

Do the stepsisters lose their eyes in every version? Not among the seven dated texts here. The 1812 text ends with the prince taking the true bride home, while in Margaret Hunt's 1884 English translation of the 1857 text "the pigeons pecked out one eye of each of them" on the way into church and the other eye on the way out.

The second edition of 1819 already has both the hazel twig and the blinding. Perrault's stepsisters are forgiven, Basile's go home, and Ye Xian's stepmother and stepsister are killed by flying stones.

The Grimms knew both earlier European texts compared here. Their 1812 notes to no. 21 name Perrault's "Cendrillon," Madame d'Aulnoy's "Finnette Cendron" and Basile's "Cennerentola" (Pentamerone 1, 6), which they call unvergleichbar schöneren, "incomparably more beautiful" (Translation: Where Tales Began).

Help from a dead mother has a close match outside the type. In "Vasilisa the Beautiful," no. 104 in Alexander Afanasyev's Russian folktales as printed in the 1984–85 Nauka edition, the dying mother gives her daughter a doll ("оставляю тебе вот эту куклу"); in Leonard A. Magnus's 1915 English translation she says, "I will leave you my mother's blessing and this doll." English Wikipedia reports that Russian scholarship files that tale under SUS 480В* (with a Cyrillic В) and Jack Haney under AT 480B*, not 510A. The doll and the grave tree are set side by side here as matching motifs only; the Baba Yaga entry follows Vasilisa to the witch's hut.

Versions recorded elsewhere

Two dated 19th-century texts from the north and west of Europe also turn on a lost shoe. "Katie Woodencloak," a Norwegian tale from Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe's collection, is quoted here from George Webbe Dasent's English translation, Popular Tales from the Norse, in the second edition, dated 1859 in D. L. Ashliman's bibliography. Its helper is a dun bull with a food-giving cloth in its ear. Katie goes to church three times, and the third time the prince has pitch poured in the porch and keeps one of her gold shoes.

The shoe seems to fit Katie's stepsister until a bird sings:

A bit off her heel, And a bit off her toe; Katie Woodencloak's tiny shoe Is full of blood—that's all I know.

"Fair, Brown, and Trembling," printed by Jeremiah Curtin in Myths and Folk-lore of Ireland (1890), has no stepmother at all. Trembling is kept in the kitchen by her own older sisters, Fair and Brown, because she is the most beautiful of the three. An old henwife dresses her for Mass on three Sundays, and on the third Trembling asks for "shoes for my feet with the toes red, the middle white, and the backs and heels green." The prince of Omanya grabs her foot as she rides off and keeps the shoe; English Wikipedia classes this first part as ATU 510A and the rest of the tale as ATU 403.

A version written down before 863 by a man who heard it from a teller from Yongzhou, and another printed in Paris in 1697, are two separate records. None of the sources read for this page traces a written route from one to the other, so the map shows places only.

One number, 345 variants, and what neither proves

A much larger count comes from Marian Roalfe Cox's Cinderella: Three Hundred and Forty-five Variants of Cinderella, Catskin, and Cap o' Rushes, published for the Folk-Lore Society in London in 1893. The 345 variants in her title cover more than one story. Her preface (pp. xxv–xxvi) sorts them into Cinderella, marked by an ill-treated heroine and recognition by a shoe; Catskin, marked by an unnatural father and the heroine's flight; Cap o' Rushes, marked by a King Lear judgment; and two further groups of indeterminate stories and hero tales. Her table of contents starts the Cinderella abstracts on page 1 and the Catskin abstracts on page 53.

The records hold no original Cinderella story. They hold an earliest dated text among those that can be read and classed, and here that is Duan Chengshi's Ye Xian, written before 863. Rhodopis is older but outside the type. The sources checked for this page hold no earlier text of the type.

Andrew Lang's introduction to Cox's volume (p. viii) is cautious about shared incidents. He judged that so many combinations of incidents can make a story that looks like Cinderella that he would treat stories as borrowed only when the order of incidents keeps close to one model, such as Perrault's. The ATU number makes no such test. It groups tales by a shared plot, and a shared number is not by itself evidence of a shared ancestor, as the Aarne–Thompson–Uther index entry explains.