Reading Notes: Chinese Fairy Tales, Part A

 The story in this section of the Chinese Fairy Tales unit that I've chosen to focus my reading notes on is "The Lady of the Moon."

This story begins with contextualizing the timeline. The setting is in the days of Emperor Yau. 

In this time period, there was a prince who went by the name of Hou I, who was a fantastic archer. There were once 10 suns in the sky and the Emporer ordered Hou I to shoot them, and he shot nine of them down. 

Hou I had other talents as well. He had a horse so fast that the wind couldn't keep up with it. One day he mounted it when hunting and it ran off, due to its speed, he could not catch it. He then went to the Kunlun Mountain and met the Queen-Mother of the Jasper Sea, who gave him the herb of immortality, he hid it and his wife ate some by accident, floating up to the clouds and becoming the Lady of the Moon. 

The story switches focus from the life of Hou I over to an emperor of the Tang dynasty. A sorcerer who was sitting with him at wine took his bamboo staff and threw it into the air, where it turned into a "heavenly" bridge. They climbed the bridge, and it took them to the moon, where they saw a great castle.

Next to the castle stood a cassia tree and there was a man who was chopping off parts of it. The sorcerer identified the man to the emperor, he was the man in the moon and was in charge of maintaining the cassia tree. 

The three entered the castle, describing its magnificence. The Lady of the Moon greeted them, acknowledging how great their earthly fortune must be for them to be able to come there. This comment is coupled with a description of the ethereal things that surround her, I believe the author did this intentionally to contrast it with their seemingly nice things on earth. She then sang and danced beneath the cassia tree. When the dance ended the emperor returned to the earth again with the sorcerers. He wrote down the songs from the moon to remember them and he sang them with flutes in his pear-tree garden.

("The Moon Goddess Change E", Source: Wikimedia)

Note: This isn't the specific Lady of the Moon from the story but this is a Moon Goddess in Chinese Folktales

Bibliography:

"The Lady of the Moon"

Story source: 

The Chinese Fairy Book, ed. by R. Wilhelm and translated by Frederick H. Martens (1921).