Lady Meng Jiang, the tears that toppled the Great Wall

"Meng Jiangnü Weeps at the Great Wall" (孟姜女哭长城) is one of China's "Four Great Folk Legends". It exists in countless versions; this is the form that became the most common, set under the First Emperor, Qin Shi Huang (秦始皇):

• soon after the wedding, Meng Jiangnü's (孟姜女) husband, called Wan Xiliang (万喜良), Fan Xiliang or Wan Qiliang depending on the version, is pressed into building the Great Wall;

• when winter comes and she has heard nothing from him, she sets out over mountains and rivers to bring him warm clothes;

• at the Wall she learns that he has died of the work and been buried under the wall;

• she weeps so bitterly that a stretch of the Wall collapses, uncovering heaps of bones; to find her husband's, she pricks her finger, and her blood sinks only into his bones;

• the emperor, struck by her beauty, wants to marry her. She sets her conditions and wins a solemn funeral for her husband, then curses the tyrant and throws herself into the water, the sea or a river depending on the version.

Yet this tragic tale began as an anecdote with no tears and no wall.

The story goes back to the Zuo Zhuan (左传), a chronicle of the Spring and Autumn period. In 550 BCE, the 23rd year of Duke Xiang of Lu, Duke Zhuang of Qi (齐) attacked Ju (莒), and one of his officers, Qi Liang (杞梁), was killed. On his way back the duke met the widow outside the city and sent someone to offer his condolences. She refused them: if her husband had been guilty, he did not deserve the honour; if not, his family still had a house, and a woman like her did not receive condolences out in the open country. So the duke went to offer them at her home.

That is all: no tears, no falling wall. Qi Liang's wife is a model of ritual propriety here, and the Liji reports that Zengzi (曾子) cited her as a woman who "knows the rites".

Even the heroine's name comes from that world. At the time, Meng (孟) meant the eldest son or daughter, and Jiang (姜) was the family name of the ruling house of Qi: "Meng Jiang" was therefore a very common name for women of Qi, and Meng was not originally a family name.

Later texts gradually add what is missing. In the Liji (礼记), in the "Tangong" chapter, the widow goes out to meet the coffin and weeps over it in great grief. In the Shuoyuan (说苑) of Liu Xiang (刘向), a Confucian scholar of the Han, she turns towards the city wall and weeps, and a corner of the wall crumbles.

In his Biographies of Exemplary Women (列女传, Lienü zhuan), Liu Xiang tells the whole story. Qi Liang's wife has no children and no relatives. She goes to weep at the foot of the ramparts, beside her husband's body, and not one passer-by can hold back tears. After ten days the city wall collapses. After the funeral she finds she has no father, no husband and no son left, and throws herself into the Zi river (淄水). The book still praises her as faithful and knowing the rites.

For the historian Gu Jiegang (顾颉刚), the change is telling: a woman weeping in public over her husband's body goes against the rites that the Zuo Zhuan wife embodied. He concluded that Liu Xiang had taken in stories from villagers without seeing what they implied.

It was under the Tang that Qi Liang's wife took the name Meng Jiang, that the story moved to the Qin, and that the husband became a man conscripted to build the Great Wall. The historian Arthur Waldron, cited by English Wikipedia, links the change to the wars and wall-building that came before the dynasty; French Wikipedia explains the legend's popularity at the time by the many conscriptions, which reminded people of their own sorrows.

A poem by the monk Guanxiu (贯休), "Qi Liang's Wife", preserved in the Quan Tangshi anthology, shows the turn. Chinese Wikipedia sees it as the first text to set the story under the Qin and to bring down not a city wall but the Great Wall. At the widow's first cry, the wall collapses; at the second, Qi Liang's bones come out of the ground.

Among the manuscripts found at Dunhuang, ballads bring other elements of the modern version: songs in which the wife brings winter clothes, and the blood test that lets her recognize her husband's bones.

The First Emperor was not always part of the story. According to English Wikipedia, he only really enters it in Song versions, by which time he had become a stock villain; French Wikipedia dates the link back to the Tang. Again according to English Wikipedia, Ming versions have the heroine throw herself into the ocean.

French Wikipedia counts eight places that claim to be her birthplace, and temples in several provinces, but it is the Temple of Meng Jiangnü (孟姜女庙), also called the "Temple of the Faithful Woman" (贞女祠), in Qinhuangdao, Hebei, that is regarded today as the "orthodox" site. It stands on a hill behind the village of Wangfushi (望夫石, "the rock where a wife watches for her husband"), about 6 km east of the town of Shanhaiguan (山海关), near the eastern end of the Ming Great Wall; her statue there looks out to sea. Its origins are sometimes traced back to the Song or earlier; it was built or rebuilt in 1594, under the Ming. Sacked during the Cultural Revolution, it has since been rebuilt.

These stages were pieced together in the 20th century by the historian Gu Jiegang (顾颉刚, 1893-1980), one of the founders of folklore studies in China. In 1924 and 1925 he published a major study of the legend in Peking University's Folksong Weekly, in nine special issues bringing together songs, pictures, inscriptions and religious texts. With his students he was the first to connect the Zuo Zhuan anecdote, Liu Xiang's story and the Meng Jiangnü of the Tang and Song. They read the legend as the triumph of feeling over ritual, of women over power and of the common people over the elites. Their work made Meng Jiangnü, in the 1920s, the first of China's great folk legends.

Its fortunes then followed politics. During the Cultural Revolution, when Mao Zedong identified himself with the First Emperor as China's great unifier, Meng Jiangnü was denounced as the emperor's enemy and a friend of Confucius. The legend is celebrated again today: in 2006 it was put on the first national list of intangible cultural heritage.