The Emperor's New Clothes

• 4 minute read
• Ages 6-10
• Moral Stories

There was an emperor who cared about clothes more than about anything else, including governing.

Two swindlers came to the city and said they were weavers of a very special kind of cloth. It was beautiful beyond description, and it had one further property: it was invisible to anyone who was stupid, or unfit for their position.

The emperor commissioned a suit immediately. This cloth would let him see which of his ministers were fools.

The empty looms

The two men were given a room, gold thread, silk, and money.

They set up two looms and worked at them all day, and the looms were empty. They put nothing on them at all. They mimed, and talked about the pattern, and pocketed everything they were given.

The emperor sent his oldest and most trusted minister to see how the work was progressing.

The minister went in and looked at the looms.

There was nothing on them.

He looked harder. He took off his spectacles and put them on again. And what went through his mind was not that the men were frauds. It was: am I stupid? Am I unfit for my post? Nobody must find out.

"It is exquisite," he said. "The colours. The pattern. I shall tell the emperor at once."

Everybody

A second official was sent and did exactly the same thing.

Then the emperor went himself, with his whole court.

He stood in front of the empty looms and saw nothing whatsoever, and felt the floor go out from under him, and thought: I cannot be unfit. I am the emperor.

"Magnificent," he said. "We are very pleased."

And the entire court agreed loudly, because every one of them was seeing exactly the same nothing and thinking exactly the same thing about themselves.

The procession

The suit was finished in time for the great procession.

The swindlers mimed dressing him, and he turned in front of the mirror, and the courtiers held up the train that was not there.

And the emperor walked through the city under a canopy with the whole population lining the streets, wearing nothing at all.

And everyone cheered, because everyone had heard about the cloth, and nobody was going to be the one who could not see it.

The child

Then a small child said, in an ordinary voice, to his father:

"He hasn't got any clothes on."

His father told him to be quiet.

But somebody had heard, and repeated it to the man next to him, and it went along the street the way that sort of thing does, and within a minute the whole crowd was saying it out loud, and then laughing.

The emperor heard every word.

And he thought: they are right.

And then he thought: the procession must go on.

So he straightened his back and lifted his chin and walked the rest of the route with nothing on, in front of everybody, all the way to the end.