Yang Oerlang

Once the second daughter of the Ruler of Heaven came down to earth and secretly married a mortal man named Yang. After she went back up to Heaven, she gave birth to a son. The Ruler of Heaven regarded the marriage as a dishonor and became furious. He sent his daughter away to the earth as a punishment and buried her beneath the Wu-I hills.

Her son was called Oerlang. Being of the Ruler of Heaven’s own family, he was born with wonderful gifts. By the time he was a grown man, he had mastered the magic of seventy-two transformations. He could turn invisible whenever he liked, or take the form of any bird or beast, of grass or flowers, of snakes or fish. He also knew how to drain whole seas dry and how to pick up mountains and set them down somewhere else.

So Oerlang went to the Wu-I hills, freed his mother and carried her off on his back. After a while they stopped to rest on a flat shelf of rock.

“I’m so thirsty,” his mother said.

Oerlang climbed down into the valley to bring her some water, and it took him quite a while. When he came back up, she was gone. He looked everywhere, but on the rock lay only her bones and a few spots of blood.

You see, in those days there were still ten suns in the sky, blazing and burning like fire. The Daughter of Heaven was a goddess by birth, but because her father was angry with her and had banished her to earth, her magic had left her. On top of that, she had been shut up in the dark under the hills for so long that when she suddenly came out into the dazzling light, the suns burned her up.

When Oerlang thought of his mother’s sad end, his heart ached. He heaved two mountains onto his shoulders and went chasing after the suns. Whenever he caught one, he crushed it flat between the two mountains, and each time he crushed a sun he picked up a new mountain. In this way he destroyed nine of the ten suns until only one was left.

Oerlang chased that last sun without mercy, and in its terror the sun hid under the leaves of a little purslane plant. But an earthworm lying nearby gave away its hiding place. “Here it is! Here it is!” the worm kept calling.

Oerlang was just about to grab the sun when a messenger from the Ruler of Heaven came flying down from the sky with an order. “The sky, the air and the earth need sunshine,” said the messenger. “You must let this one sun live, so that every living creature can live. And because you rescued your mother and proved yourself a good son, you are to become a god. You shall be my guard in the Highest Heaven, you shall rule over good and evil in the world of mortals, and you shall have power over all devils and demons.” When Oerlang heard this command, he rose up to Heaven.

Then the sun crept out from under the purslane leaves. Because the little plant had saved its life, the sun thanked it with a gift: it would bloom freely and never need to fear the sunshine. The tale imagines tiny white pearls beneath purslane leaves as drops of sunlight left from this hiding place. It also imagines the sun pursuing and drying the earthworm in revenge for revealing its hiding place.

The telling ends by describing Yang Oerlang as a god. He has slanting, sharply drawn eyebrows, and in his hand he holds a sword with two edges and three points. Two servants stand at his side, one with a falcon and one with a hound, for Yang Oerlang is a mighty hunter. The falcon is the falcon of the gods, and the hound is the hound of the gods. When animals get hold of magic powers, or when demons torment people, he uses his falcon and his hound to bring them under control.

About this story

“Yang Oerlang” is chapter XVII of The Chinese Fairy Book, edited by Richard Wilhelm and put into English by Frederick H. Martens (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1921). Wilhelm calls the little plant a “portulacca”, known in English as purslane.

In his note Wilhelm says the falcon and hound show that Oerlang is a huntsman, and that his “divine, biting hound” recalls the hound of the Indian god Indra. He links the ten suns to another myth, set in the reign of Yau, in which the archer Hou I shoots nine of them down; here the hero crushes them between mountains instead, which Wilhelm calls a Titan motif.

The mother dies after her rescue. The tale offers both a heroic achievement and a loss that the final reward cannot reverse; its plant and animal explanations are imaginative, not natural history.

Read the original: Richard Wilhelm, The Chinese Fairy Book, 1921 (Project Gutenberg #29939)

Reading guidance: older children with adult discussion. Includes a parent’s cruel punishment, a mother’s death and a son’s destructive grief. The ending does not bring his mother back.

Reading the story closely

Rescue, revenge and protection become three different tasks. Moving the mountains frees the mother, but cannot keep her alive; destroying the suns expresses grief, but threatens other lives; sparing the last sun protects the world. The ruler who first punished the mother later rewards her son, a tension the story leaves for readers to question.

Draw three panels for those tasks and write whose needs matter in each. Then compare the two hiding places: the mountain that confines the mother and the small plant that shelters the sun. How does scale alter the apparent power of each?

Talk about it

• Why did the Ruler of Heaven make Oerlang a god, even though he had destroyed nine suns?
• The messenger says every creature needs the last sun. What might have happened if Oerlang had crushed it too?
• The purslane is rewarded and the earthworm punished. Do you think the worm deserved it? Why or why not?

Related stories

• The Lady of the Moon — the archer Hou I, whom Wilhelm links to the myth of the ten suns
• The Herd Boy and the Weaving Maiden — another daughter of the Ruler of Heaven who marries a mortal man
• The Three Ruling Gods — another legend from Wilhelm’s book about how gods came to be worshipped