"Hua ben" is the script that storytellers use in performance. "Hua" means story, and "ben" means scripts. "Shuo hua", storytelling, is a skill born during the Tang and Song Dynasties, and people performing the skill are called storytellers. As a technical name, the word "Shuo hua" appeared in the Tang Dynasty, though the art of storytelling and singing had existed long before that. With development of storytelling, the script for storytelling gradually became a brand-new literary genre in the Song Dynasty.
The storytelling of the Song Dynasty originated from that of the Tang Dynasty. With urban economic development, establishment of fork art performance places, growing of storyteller population and support from people, storytelling unfolded professionalized and commercialized characteristics. The storytellers all have their own specialized techniques. There are four schools in storytelling, namely short stories, historical stories, Buddhist scriptures and jokes, among which the first two are most important. Short stories are mainly about romance, spirits, legends and legal cases; historical stories talk about rising and declining of previous dynasties and wars of the past.
The scripts for storytelling have two sources, oral instruction and guild compilation. With emergence of folk art performance places and professional performing artists, people specialized in compiling scripts for storytellers and opera players came on the scene. In the Southern Song Dynasty, the guild to protect the interests of those people appeared. Later, with the development of book fairs and typography, the scripts for storytelling were printed and widely spread, and these were the first vernacular novels in the literary history of China. Generally, the existent scripts for storytelling can be divided into three categories: First, storyteller's scripts that have rough stories and language, such as Annals of the Three Kingdoms; Second, scripts that record and rearrange storytellers' stories, that are coherent, meticulous and comprehensive in language, and may be written by intellectuals or people specialized in compiling scripts for storytellers and opera players, such as Mistakenly Behead Cui Ning and Nianyu Kuanyin; Third. Popular readers that were adapted from history books, unofficial history records, and classical Chinese novels, etc, such as Incidents of Xuanhe Period.
The scripts for storytelling of the Song and Yuan Dynasties are extensive in materials and rich in contents. Unlike novels of the Six Dynasties and legends of the Tang Dynasty which depict life of the upper circles or scholar bureaucrats, the scripts for storytelling of the Song and Yuan Dynasties extensively reflect complicated contradictions in real life and ways of the world of that time, and fully show life interests and aesthetic consciousness of common people. Existent scripts for storytelling can be generally divided into three classes as far as their subjects and contents are concerned, namely romance, legal cases, and god and spirits. Those about love, marriage and legal cases have the largest number, highest achievements and greatest influences, such as Nianyu Kuanyin and Mistakenly Beheaded Cui Ning.
The scripts for telling historical stories of the Song and Yuan Dynasties are also called "ping hua". Most existent works of this kind compiled in the Song Dynasty but published in the Yuan Dynasty or those compiled in the Yuan Dynasty are marked as "ping hua", such as Annals of the Three Kingdoms and King Wu Conquered the Terrain of King Zhou.