An immersive experience brought about by virtual reality can potentially enhance the appreciation of classical Chinese poetry, which is difficult to describe clearly in everyday language or ordinary media. However, making 3-dimensional illustrations for a 360-degree display in virtual reality is usually a labor-intensive and time-consuming procedure and hard to master for non-professional media creators, such as teachers. Motivated by the homology theory of classical Chinese poetry and painting, we propose an image-based approach of building 2.5-dimensional immersive stories to visualize classical Chinese poetry. Specifically, using Chinese shadow play as a metaphor, we have designed and implemented ShadowPlay2.5D, a sketch-based authoring tool to help novices create 360-degree videos of classical Chinese poetry easily. To ensure coverage of the diverse themes in Chinese poetry and preserve the sense of culture, we build a Chinese ink-painting style image repository of essential poetic elements identified via crowdsourcing. To facilitate construction of 2.5-dimensional scenes, we design features that support puppet-like animation, instancing, and camera organization in a 3-dimensional environment. Through two user studies, we show that ShadowPlay2.5D can help novices make a short 360-degree video in about 10-15 minutes, and the 2.5D stylized illustrations created can bring about a better immersive experience for poetry appreciation.