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Mythos Atlas

Chinese PantheonRealm

Guanghan Palace

Illustration of Guanghan Palace, a realm of the Chinese Pantheon
Illustrative imageIllustration of Guanghan Palace. Generated with an AI image model; not a historical artifact. About our images

The Palace of Cold Vastness on the moon, where Chang'e lives in eternal solitude after drinking the elixir of immortality. She is accompanied only by the Jade Rabbit and the woodcutter Wu Gang.

About Guanghan Palace

Guanghan, Chang'e's quiet house

The Guanghan Palace is the moon court where Chang'e lives after stealing (or keeping) the elixir, with the jade rabbit pounding medicine and Wu Gang chopping a self-healing tree. The Huainanzi gives the flight to the moon; later verse and festival tale furnish the palace. Mid-Autumn offerings are folk practice around the story, not a Han state liturgy of Guanghan. The palace is loneliness given architecture.

Sources and further reading

Source notes

These references are recorded in the catalog. Their passage wording and translation have not been checked, so quotations are not displayed here.

  • Huainanzi, Lanming xun

    Catalog date: c. 2nd c. BCE

About this entry

By Elizabeth Stein for Mythos Atlas. . Editorial notes are grounded in the site's cited sources and can be challenged through the contact page.

Coordinates mark where the myths place a site, or where the tradition locates it today. Mythic realms are left off the map or marked as symbolic placements.

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