Chinese children like reading foreign fairy tales with Grimm's Fairy Tales topping the most popular list, according to a survey released Saturday.

Andersen Fairy Tales and Arabian Nights ranked second and third on the list, showed the survey released in Changsha, capital of Hunan Province.

The survey covered more than 190,000 children in 35 cities nationwide from April to November of 2009.

The first three popular foreign writers were Danish Hans Andersen, Maxim Gorky from Russia and American Mark Twain, the survey said.

The reason that foreign fairy tales were popular in China was that there were few such books in China, said Yang Liu, an organizer of the survey.