Sun and Moon

The heavens, as observed by the peoples of antiquity and transformed by their rich imaginations, appear in many ancient myths, legends, and artistic creations. Among celestial images, primacy of place naturally goes to the sun and the moon, characteristically represented by the Chinese as associated with corresponding human and animal figures.

Figures related to the sun include Hsi Ho, Hou Yi, and the Golden (or Metal) Crow. Hsi Ho is said originally to have been an official astronomer in charge of observing the skies and regulating the calendar during the Hsia dynasty of the early 2nd millennium B.C. He was later mythologized into the wife, half-human and half-dragon, of the Emperor Chun of Yin. This wife gave birth to ten suns, which rested on the great Fusang tree in the T'ang (Hot Water) Valley. Nine of the suns were shot down by the archer Hou Yi to save the world from conflagration.

The concept of the Golden Crow, the spirit of the sun, may well have arisen from the ancients' observation of sunspots; its form as a bird, from the sun's daily "flight" across the sky from east to west. The Golden Crow is actually, in fact, black, as though charred by blazing fire, but, unlike other crows, it has three legs. Ancient representations often show the Golden Crow inside the circle of the sun or simply picture the sun itself as a round-bellied bird. That the Golden Crow depicted on a silk painting unearthed from an early Han dynasty. (206 B.C.--219 A.D.) tomb near Changsha, Hunan, has but two legs reflects the kind of variation that may be produced in a legend during the course of its transmission across time and space.

Figures related to the moon include Ch'ang Hsi, Ch'ang O, the ch'anch'u or Lunar Toad, the Jade Rabbit, and the lunar cassia tree. Ch'ang Hsi was another wife of Emperor Chun, who gave birth to the moon. Ch'ang O, who fled to the moon after stealing her husband's elixir of immortality, is now envisioned as a dazzling beauty. But in "Ch'ang O Flies to the Moon," a stone relief from the Han dynasty, she is still half dragon, to express her divinity.

The figures of the Toad and the Rabbit in the Moon most likely came from the appearance to the ancients of lunar shadows. Ancient myths already mention a jade rabbit that grinds the elixir of immortality beside the Queen Mother of the West, but the story of the lunar cassia tree endlessly chopped by Wu Kang is a later creation. Ancient representations of the moon, like those of the sun, often contain figures--Ch'ang Hsi holding the Lunar Toad, or the rabbit and toad inside the moon together.

The Han dynasty stone relief shown here, called "The Sun and the Moon Devour One Another," depicts the sun as a Golden Crow with a round belly, inside which is a ch'anch'u toad. The overlapping of the figures represents a solar eclipse.