Chang'e Flies to the Moon

After Hou Yi shot down nine of the ten suns and saved the earth from destruction, the Jade Emperor was furious. Though Hou Yi had acted to save humanity, he had killed the Emperor's nephews (or sons, in some versions). As punishment, both Hou Yi and his beautiful wife Chang'e were stripped of their immortality and banished from Heaven to live as mortals on Earth.

Hou Yi, once a god, now grew old like any man. He felt his strength slowly fading, his joints stiffening, his eyesight dimming. Chang'e, too, felt the weight of mortality pressing upon her. She had given up everything for her husband, and now she was to grow old and die.

Desperate to regain what they had lost, Hou Yi set out on a perilous journey to Mount Kunlun, the paradise of Xi Wangmu, the Queen Mother of the West. After overcoming countless obstacles, he reached her jade palace and begged for the elixir of immortality.

Xi Wangmu took pity on the hero. She gave him a single dose of the elixir - enough for two people to live forever, or enough for one person to ascend directly to Heaven. "Share this with your wife," she warned, "and you will both live eternally on Earth. If one drinks it all, they will return to Heaven alone."

Hou Yi carried the precious elixir home, intending to share it with Chang'e. He hid it in a cabinet, waiting for an auspicious day.

What happened next is told differently in different versions of the tale.

In one telling, Chang'e discovered the elixir while Hou Yi was away hunting. Consumed by desire to return to Heaven, she drank it all herself, abandoning her husband to mortality.

In another version, one of Hou Yi's apprentices, a wicked man named Feng Meng, learned of the elixir. When Hou Yi was away, Feng Meng broke into the house to steal it. Chang'e, knowing that such a man should never gain immortality, swallowed the entire elixir to keep it from him.

In the most sympathetic telling, Chang'e accidentally drank too much, not realizing the single dose was meant for two.

The elixir coursed through her body like fire and ice. She felt herself becoming lighter than air, her feet leaving the ground. She cried out for her husband, but she was already rising through the roof, ascending into the night sky.

Chang'e rose higher and higher, until she reached the moon. There she stopped, for the moon was as far as her guilty heart would let her go - close enough to see Earth, but forever separated from it.

On the moon, she found only cold loneliness. Her sole companions became the Jade Rabbit, who endlessly pounds the elixir of immortality in a mortar (though for whom, no one knows), and later Wu Gang, condemned to eternally chop at a self-healing osmanthus tree.

Chang'e took up residence in the Guanghan Palace (Palace of Cold Vastness), where she weeps and gazes down at the earth, regretting her separation from the husband she loved.

On Earth, Hou Yi was devastated. He set up an altar in the garden facing the moon and laid out Chang'e's favorite fruits and sweets as offerings. The villagers, learning of his faithful devotion, began to do the same.

This became the Mid-Autumn Festival, celebrated on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, when the moon is fullest and brightest. Families gather to eat mooncakes, admire the moon, and remember the lady who dwells there.

It is said that on this night, Chang'e's figure can be seen dancing in the lunar light. And perhaps, for just one night, the distance between the moon and Earth seems a little less vast.