Chang'e and Hou Yi, the Moon goddess and the archer

Chang'e (嫦娥) is the goddess who lives on the Moon. Her husband is Yi (羿), the archer who shot down the suns, now usually called Hou Yi (后羿). Two stories are attached to the couple: Yi shooting down the suns, and Chang'e flying to the Moon with a stolen elixir of immortality. They are told in short texts from different periods, which do not always connect them, so this page follows them text by text and says each time where a version comes from.

Her oldest name is not Chang'e. Han texts write Heng'e (姮娥), and bamboo slips found in a Qin tomb write 恒我, another spelling of the same name. The change is explained by a taboo: 姮 was pronounced like 恒 (héng), the personal name of Emperor Wen of Han, Liu Heng (刘恒), so it was replaced by 嫦 (cháng). Yet the Han texts that have come down to us, such as the Huainanzi, still write 姮娥.

There are also two Yis. One lives under the mythical ruler Yao (尧) and shoots down the suns. The other, Yi of Youqiong (有穷), seizes power from the Xia before being killed by his protégé Han Zhuo (寒浞). Pre-Qin texts rarely tell them apart; later scholars separated them, but popular tradition merges the two, and the sun-shooting feat is known as 后羿射日, "Hou Yi shoots the suns".

Where do the suns come from? The Shanhaijing (山海经, the "Classic of Mountains and Seas") answers in a few lines. Xihe (羲和), wife of Di Jun (帝俊), "gave birth to ten suns" (chapter "Dahuang nan jing", 大荒南经). They bathe in the Tang valley (汤谷), where a huge tree grows, the Fusang (扶桑): "nine suns stay on the lower branches, one sun on the upper branch" ("Haiwai dong jing", 海外东经). The same book says that Di Jun gave Yi a red bow and white arrows "to help the world below" ("Hainei jing", 海内经).

The disaster itself is told in the Huainanzi (淮南子), a compendium presented to Emperor Wu of Han in 139 BCE, in the chapter "Benjing" (本经训). In the time of Yao, "ten suns came out together": they scorched the crops and killed the plants, the people had nothing to eat, and monsters preyed on them. Yao sent Yi, who killed or captured the monsters and, "above, shot at the ten suns". The rejoicing people made Yao the Son of Heaven.

The Huainanzi as it has come down to us does not say that one sun was spared. The number nine appears in the commentary that Wang Yi (王逸) wrote in the 2nd century CE on the "Heavenly Questions" (天问) of the Chuci: quoting the Huainanzi, he says that Yi hit nine suns, that the nine crows living in them died and lost their feathers, "and so one sun was left". The sun crow is also found in the astronomer Zhang Heng (张衡, 78–139 CE), for whom the sun takes the shape of a crow "with three feet".

In the ancient texts, the flight to the Moon takes a few lines at most. Here are the main witnesses.

• The Guicang (归藏), a divination book lost long ago, whose age is debated. Around 500 CE the critic Liu Xie (刘勰) faulted it for its oddities: it tells, he says, that "Yi shot down ten suns and Heng'e fled to the Moon". In 1993 a Qin tomb excavated at Wangjiatai (王家台), in Jiangling (Hubei), yielded bamboo slips that their editors identified as the Guicang. One broken fragment reads: "Long ago, Heng'e (恒我) stole the [medicine] of no-death… fled to the Moon". Later quotations from the same book add that she took the no-death medicine of the Queen Mother of the West (西王母) and became the spirit of the Moon.

• The Huainanzi, in the chapter "Lanming" (览冥训), does not tell the story: it uses it as a comparison. "Yi asked the Queen Mother of the West for the medicine of no-death; Heng'e stole it and fled to the Moon." Yi is left dismayed, with no way to replace it, because he did not know where the medicine came from. The lesson the text draws: better to have the means to make your own fire than to beg for fire. The Eastern Han commentator Gao You (高诱) adds that Yi had not yet taken it.

• Zhang Heng says more in his astronomical treatise, the Lingxian (灵宪, c. 120 CE): before leaving, Heng'e has her fate read by a diviner, Youhuang (有黄), who answers "auspicious"; she "lodges her body in the Moon" and becomes a toad (蟾蜍). Under the Qing, the scholar Yan Kejun (严可均) thought this passage came from the Guicang.

Modern tellings join the two stories and fill the gaps, in several versions that do not agree.

• A well-known version is summarised in Lihui Yang's Handbook of Chinese Mythology, as quoted by the English Wikipedia. After shooting down nine suns, Yi receives the elixir from an immortal. Not wanting to live forever without Chang'e, he gives it to her to keep. On the 15th of the eighth month, while Yi is out hunting, his apprentice Feng Meng (逢蒙) breaks in to seize it; rather than hand it over, Chang'e swallows it and rises into the sky. She chooses the Moon so as to stay close to her husband. Yi lays out the fruit and cakes she liked as an offering, and the people follow him: the story thus explains the moon offerings of the Mid-Autumn Festival.

• In another version, Yi becomes a tyrant after his victory over the suns, and Chang'e drinks the elixir to stop him from ruling forever.

• Others draw on the "Heavenly Questions", attributed to Qu Yuan (屈原), which accuse Yi of shooting the river god Hebo (河伯) and taking his wife: Yi then becomes an unfaithful husband.

Feng Meng himself comes from a much older text. In the Mencius (孟子), he "learned archery from Yi and mastered all his art", then, thinking that only Yi was still better than him, killed his master. Mencius comments: "Yi too was to blame."

Chang'e is not alone on the Moon. Her companions appear in texts from different periods.

• The toad and the hare. The "Heavenly Questions" already ask why a 顾菟, a word understood as "hare", sits in the Moon's belly. On the silk banner from tomb no. 1 at Mawangdui (马王堆), painted in the 2nd century BCE, the Moon carries a toad and a hare, and a woman shown near them may be Chang'e. In Zhang Heng, the essence of the Moon "takes the shape of an animal, like a hare", a few lines before Heng'e becomes a toad. Han poets speak of the Jade Rabbit (玉兔); later it is given the task of pounding the elixir of immortality in a mortar, and it becomes Chang'e's companion.

• Wu Gang (吴刚). He appears under the Tang, in the 9th century, in the Youyang zazu (酉阳杂俎) of Duan Chengshi (段成式): "It was said of old that in the Moon there are a gui tree (桂) and a toad." The tree, five hundred zhang high, is forever being hacked by a man, "and the cuts close up at once. The man is called Wu Gang, from Xihe; he committed a fault while studying to become an immortal, and was banished and made to fell the tree." The gui is translated either as osmanthus or as cassia. The phrase 吴刚伐桂, "Wu Gang fells the gui tree", now describes endless toil.

Chang'e also lives in a palace, the Guanghan gong (广寒宫, "Palace of Vast Cold"). In the novel Journey to the West (西游记), the future Zhu Bajie (猪八戒) is banished from heaven for harassing her.

Chang'e is the figure of the Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节), on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month, a night of full moon. Her story is told as the origin of the moon offerings, although the festival itself only became popular under the Tang (see the page on the festival). In Tang poetry she also stands for loneliness: the poet Li Shangyin (李商隐) writes that "Chang'e must regret stealing the elixir: jade-green sea, blue sky, her heart night after night".

Her name has also gone to the Moon. In 1969, just before Apollo 11 landed, mission control told the crew to watch out for "a lovely girl with a big rabbit", Chang-o, banished to the Moon for stealing the pill of immortality. China's lunar programme bears her name, the Chang'e Project (嫦娥工程), and so do its probes:

• Chang'e 1, launched on 24 October 2007, went into orbit around the Moon;

• Chang'e 3 landed on 14 December 2013 and set down the rover Yutu (玉兔, the "Jade Rabbit");

• Chang'e 4 made the first landing on the far side of the Moon on 3 January 2019, with the rover Yutu-2 (玉兔二号);

• Chang'e 5 brought back lunar samples in 2020, and Chang'e 6, in 2024, the first samples from the far side.