Hou Yi

Before Hou Yi shot the suns, some old texts say there were ten suns in the sky, the sons of Dijun and Xihe, who lived in the Fusang tree in the Valley of Hot Water and took the sky in turn, each rising in its order.

The Huainanzi says instead that in the reign of Yao the ten suns suddenly rose together, so that crops and plants were scorched, and that the Yayu, the Zaochi, the Jiuying, the Dafeng, the Fengxi and the Xiushe all came out to prey on the human world at the same time.

In the Huainanzi tradition, Dijun — some say Diku — gave Hou Yi a bow and arrows and sent him down to rid the people of these evils, both to shoot down the extra suns and to cut off the beasts and serpents that were ravaging the land.

Hou Yi took the charge, shot upward at nine suns, and the golden crows in them fell one after another, leaving one in the sky to go on turning. He then killed the Yayu and the five other scourges in turn and freed the people from them.

Another account has it that although Hou Yi shot the suns for Yao and for the people, he angered heaven by killing the sons of the heavenly emperor and was demoted to mortal rank, never to return above, and had to live out his days in the human world.

On Chang’e and the elixir the Huainanzi says: Hou Yi obtained the elixir of deathlessness from the Queen Mother of the West, and before he could take it his wife Heng’e — Chang’e — stole and swallowed it, whereupon she became light and rose into the moon palace.

A different later account says that Hou Yi’s disciple Feng Meng broke into the house with a weapon and demanded the elixir, and that Chang’e in her extremity swallowed it on the spot and so flew to the moon. This does not agree with the Huainanzi’s account of a theft and is a later version.

Another says that Chang’e swallowed the elixir not out of self-interest but to keep it from Feng Meng’s hands. The accounts of her motive differ, and there is no settled version.

On Hou Yi’s death the old texts say something else again: his disciple Feng Meng, believing he had learned all his master could teach and full of envy, struck him down with a peachwood club when he was off his guard. This is preserved in traditions cited by the Mencius and the Huainanzi, and does not belong to the same thread as Chang’e’s flight.

This identity was added by later web fiction and is not a single account found in the old texts.

In that thread, the great witch Kuafu chased the ten golden crows, drank whole rivers dry and could not slake his thirst, and fell at last under the burning sun; the staff in his hand fell and became a peach grove.

Hou Yi came to the place where Kuafu had fallen, took bow and arrow, and shot along the paths the golden crows flew. Nine of them came down one by one, and only the last was left in the sky.

When word of the nine dead sons reached the Yao Heavenly Court, Dijun and Xihe hurried to the Valley of Hot Water and found only one son left in the Fusang tree. The Yao clan called up its troops at once and the Wu clan gathered its people to meet them.

Hou Yi returned to the Wu camp and stood watch with his bow on the earth’s side. How the Wu–Yao war went on from there is told differently in different Honghuang novels: some keep him in the field with the army, and some write nothing of him after the shooting.

Others keep the old ending in which Feng Meng kills him, leaving Hou Yi in the human world after the shooting; still others have him die on the Wu–Yao battlefield. The two endings do not join.

The thread of Chang’e swallowing the elixir is often joined to the Honghuang story too: the moon palace is cold, with only the cassia tree and the jade hare for company, while Hou Yi stays in the world below, the two of them divided between heaven and earth.