The Emperor's New Clothes

7-9 min read
16 pages

The emperor's new clothes by Hans Christian Andersen, to read aloud. Two weavers sell him a cloth that only clever people can see.

There was an emperor who cared about nothing except clothes. He had a coat for every hour of the day, and when people asked where he was, the answer was usually that he was dressing.

Two men came to the city and said they were weavers, and that they could weave a cloth so fine that it was invisible to anyone who was stupid or unfit for his office.

The emperor paid them a great deal of money at once and gave them a room, and they set up two looms and began to work at nothing whatever, and asked for silk and gold thread, which they put into their own bags.

After a week the emperor sent his oldest and most sensible minister to see how it was coming along.

The minister went in and looked at the looms. There was nothing on them. He opened his eyes wider and looked again, and there was still nothing.

«I cannot be stupid,» he thought. «And I certainly cannot be unfit for my office.» «Exquisite,» he said aloud. «The pattern. The colours. I shall tell the emperor exactly what I have seen.»

A second official was sent, and the same thing happened to him, and he said much the same words on the way out.

In the end the emperor went himself, with his whole court. He stood in front of the empty looms.

«How is this?» he thought. «I see nothing at all. That is dreadful. Am I stupid? Am I not fit to be emperor?» «Magnificent,» he said. «We are delighted.» And the court behind him said magnificent too, and nodded, and nobody looked at anybody.

The weavers worked all night by candlelight with their scissors in the air, cutting cloth that was not there, and sewing with needles that had no thread, and in the morning they said it was finished.

They dressed him. They held up nothing and he put his arms through it, and they knelt behind him to carry a train that did not exist, and the whole court agreed that it fitted him perfectly.

So he walked out under the canopy into the street, where the whole city had come to watch.

And the whole city said it: beautiful, marvellous, the best he has ever had. Because nobody wanted to be the one person who could not see it, and everybody could see everybody else admiring it.

Then a small child said, quite clearly, «But he hasn't got anything on.»

«Listen to the innocent,» said the child's father, in the voice of a man who has just been told something and would rather not have been. And the sentence went along the street from one person to the next, and it got louder, and then everybody was saying it.

The emperor heard it. He thought: they are right. And then he thought about the procession, which had another half mile to go, and he put his chin up and walked the whole of it, and the two chamberlains walked behind him holding up nothing at all.

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Text source: Plot by Hans Christian Andersen, public domain. The text was written anew for Marytale — it is not a reprint of anyone else's version.

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The Emperor's New Clothes

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