The Lady of the Moon

In the time of the Emperor Yau there lived a prince called Hou I, a mighty hero and a fine archer. Once ten suns came up into the sky all at the same time. They blazed so brightly and burned so fiercely that the people on earth could not bear it, so the Emperor commanded Hou I to shoot at them. Hou I shot nine of the suns out of the sky.

Besides his bow, Hou I owned a horse so fast that not even the wind could keep up with it. One day he rode out on it to hunt, and the horse bolted and would not stop. So Hou I came to Kunlun Mountain, where he met the Queen-Mother of the Jasper Sea, and she gave him the herb of immortality. He carried it home and hid it in his room. But one day, while he was out, his wife Tschang O secretly ate some of it, and at once she drifted up into the clouds. When she came to the moon, she ran into the castle there, and she has lived in it ever since as the Lady of the Moon.

Long afterward, on a mid-autumn night, an emperor of the Tang dynasty sat drinking wine with two sorcerers. One of them took his bamboo staff and tossed it into the air, where it became a bridge to heaven, and the three of them climbed up it together to the moon.

There they saw a great castle with the words “The Spreading Halls of Crystal Cold” written over it. Beside it grew a cassia tree in full bloom, and its scent filled the whole air. A man sat in the tree lopping off the smaller branches with an axe. “That is the man in the moon,” said one of the sorcerers. “The cassia tree grows so thickly that in time it would block out all the moon’s light. So it has to be cut back once every thousand years.”

Then they went into the halls. The castle’s silver stories rose one above another, and all its walls and pillars were made of liquid crystal. Set into the walls were cages and pools in which birds and fish moved as if they were alive. The whole world of the moon seemed to be made of glass.

While they were still gazing about, the Lady of the Moon came up to them in a white cloak and a gown of rainbow colors. She smiled and said to the emperor, “You are a prince of the dusty world below. You are very fortunate to have found your way here!” She called her attendants, who came flying in on white birds and sang and danced beneath the cassia tree, and a pure, clear music floated through the air. Beside the tree stood a mortar of white marble, where a jasper rabbit was grinding herbs; that was the dark half of the moon.

When the dancing was over, the emperor went back down to earth with the sorcerers. He had the songs he had heard on the moon written down, and he had them sung in his pear-tree garden to the music of jasper flutes.

About this story

“The Lady of the Moon” is chapter XIX of Richard Wilhelm’s The Chinese Fairy Book, translated by Frederick H. Martens (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1921), in the section “Legends of the Gods.” One of George W. Hood’s color plates shows the cassia tree beside the moon castle, and Martens’s preface names this tale among the book’s most poetic.

Wilhelm’s note calls the story traditional. He says legend sets the archer Hou I in several different ages and also tells how he once rescued the moon from an eclipse with his arrows. The Queen-Mother is Si Wang Mu. Wilhelm adds that the hare in the moon is a favorite figure who grinds the herbs for the elixir of life, and that a three-legged rain-toad is also placed on the moon; in one version of the story Tschang O herself became that toad.

Read the original: The Chinese Fairy Book (Project Gutenberg)

Best for ages 9–12 — two linked moon legends, from the archer of the ten suns to a visit to the crystal halls.

Reading the story closely

The first episode explains how Tschang O reaches the moon; the second imagines what a visitor finds there. The mood shifts from unbearable heat to crystal cold, and from arrows to music. Those contrasts make the moon a different kind of realm, rather than merely another place on earth.

Draw two columns for the earthly and lunar scenes and collect words of color, light, sound and temperature. Then trace what returns with the emperor: he brings back songs, not a piece of the castle. The story turns a brief visit into lasting art. It does not say the Lady is lonely, so that interpretation should not be presented as the tale’s certain punishment for taking the herb.

Questions to ask

• Why does Hou I have to shoot down the suns? How many does he leave in the sky?
• What does the man in the cassia tree do, and why must he do it?
• If you could visit the moon castle, which wonder would you want to see first?

Related stories

• The Herd Boy and the Weaving Maiden — another sky legend from the same section of Wilhelm’s book
• The Fire-God — another of Wilhelm’s Legends of the Gods