The Lady Of The Moon

Hello and welcome to Tales from a World of Firesides once again. I'm Clive Gilson, I'm the managing editor on the project and today we are looking at some tales on the collection of Chinese folk tales and traditional tales. The book they come from is called Tales Told by the Gu Shi Yuan and the tale we're going to be listening to today or watching is the Lady of the Moon. Now this story's been adapted from Richard Wilhelm's version that originally appeared in the Chinese Fairy Book published in 1921 by the Frederick A. Stokes Company of New York. Wilhelm's translations aim to capture the essence of the original Chinese texts whilst making them accessible to English-speaking audiences and his deep understanding of Chinese language and culture shone through in his translations I think allowing readers to appreciate the beauty and the depth of these timeless tales. Now as I always say my intention here is really just to make sure that we don't lose or forget some of these stories and certainly for readers around the world who maybe are not native to the sort of Chinese tradition a lot of these stories may well be quite new so it's a way of sharing culture and maybe making our complex world just a little bit less complex in the understanding. The Lady of the Moon. In the days of the Emperor Yao there lived a prince by the name of Hao Ai who was a mighty hero and a great archer. Once ten suns rose together in the sky and shone so brightly and burned so fiercely that the people on earth could not endure them. So the Emperor ordered Hao Ai to shoot at them and Hao Ai shot nine of them down from the sky. Besides his bow Hao Ai also had a horse which ran so swiftly that even the wind could not catch up with it. One day he mounted it to go hunting and the horse ran away and could not be stopped. Hao Ai eventually came to Kunlun Mountain and met the Queen Mother of the Jasper Sea. She gave him the herb of immortality. He took it home with him and hid it in his room but his wife who was named Chang O once ate some of it on the sly when he was not at home and she immediately floated up into the clouds and when she reached the moon she ran into the castle there and she's lived there ever since as the Lady of the Moon. On a night in mid-autumn an Emperor of the Tang Dynasty once sat at wine with two sorcerers and one of them took his bamboo staff and cast it into the air where it turned into a heavenly bridge on which the three climbed up to the moon together where they saw a great castle on which was inscribed the spreading halls of crystal coal. Beside it stood a cassia tree which blossomed and gave forth a fragrance filling all the air and in the trees sat a man who was chopping off the smaller boughs with an axe. One of the sorcerers said that is the man in the moon. The cassia tree grows so luxuriantly that in the course of time it would overshadow all the moon's radiance therefore it has to be cut down once in every thousand years. Then they entered the spreading halls. The silver stories of the castle towered one above the other and its walls and columns were all formed of liquid crystal. In the walls were cages and ponds where fishes and birds moved as though alive. The whole moon world seemed made of glass. While they were still looking about them on all sides the Lady of the Moon stepped up to them clad in a white mantle and a rainbow-coloured gown. She smiled and said to the Emperor, you are a prince of the mundane world of dust. Great is your fortune since you have been able to find your way here. She called for her attendants who came flying up on white birds and sang and danced beneath the cassia tree. A pure clear music floated through the air. Beside the tree stood a mortar made of white marble in which a jasper rabbit ground up herbs. That was the dark half of the moon. When the dance had ended the Emperor returned to earth again with the sorcerer and he had the songs which he had heard on the moon written down and sung to the accompaniment of flutes of jasper in his pear tree garden. And that's the story of the Lady of the Moon. It is a traditional fairy tale. The Archer Howeye is placed by legend in different epochs but nonetheless he is regularly mentioned. He also occurs in connection with other myths regarding the moon. For one tale for example there are accounts how he saves the moon during an eclipse by means of his arrows. The Goddess of the Ice also has her habitation in the moon as does the Hare who is a favourite figure in Chinese folk tales. The Hare in this case grinds the grains of maturity or the herbs that make up the elixir of life. The Raiden Toad Shan who has three legs is also placed on the moon and according to one version of this particular story Shango took the shape of this toad rather than being the Lady in the Moon. All told I really thoroughly loved investigating Chinese tales over the course of the last few months. It's certainly some really interesting pieces there and the book, although it's not out yet, will be out shortly, certainly later this summer and I'll let everybody know when that happens. So I hope you've enjoyed the story and you're happy to dip into that. If you want to find out more about me and the project Tales from the Lost Firesides then you can go to the website that's indicated on the screen below at clivegilson.com or you can follow the channels that are indicated again at the bottom of the screen. There's new stories and sort of insights into what I do every week so please do like or subscribe. Every like of course helps with the algorithms on things like YouTube and Facebook. But I think that's it for today so thank you for making it this far and keep reading, keep being inspired and we'll catch up soon.