In the age of Yao, ten suns rose in the sky at once, and the earth burned, and the crops died, and the people had nothing to eat.
So Yi the archer took his bow. He shot nine of the ten suns out of the sky and left one, and the world cooled, and the rains came back. Then he went through the provinces and killed the monsters that were eating the people — the great serpent, the man-eating bird, the boar with tusks like spears — until the roads were safe again.
And when he had done all that, he asked the Queen Mother of the West, on her mountain, for the medicine of deathlessness.
She gave it to him. He took it home.
And his wife Chang’e drank it.
She went up — out through the roof of the house, up past the clouds, all the way — and came to rest in the moon.
That is the whole of the oldest version: fifteen characters, and a single word of commentary at the end, desolate, as though something had been lost and could not be continued.
Later ages could not leave it there. They gave her motives — ambition, fear, revenge. They gave Yi a second, worse character: a tyrant who oppressed the people and beat his wife, so that her theft became a rescue. They gave the moon a palace, a cassia tree, a white hare pounding medicine with a pestle, a toad, and a lonely man named Wu Gang who chops at a tree that heals itself every night and is told to go on chopping.
But the earliest telling has none of that. It has a hero who saved the world and then lost the thing he brought home, and a woman who has become immortal and is, at the end of the only sentence that describes her, desolate.
Two details are worth keeping. The first is that the elixir was not hers to steal: it was the reward for his labour, and she is the one who gets it, which is why every retelling has to decide whether she is a thief or a survivor. The second is that nobody in the oldest version chases her or punishes her. Yi does not go after her. There is no thunderbolt, no judgment, no court. She simply goes up, and she stays there, and once a year the Chinese look at the moon and think about her.
Of all the myths in this library, this is the one that has been rewritten most often and understood least. The fifteen characters at its centre are not about a crime. They are about a woman who took the only way out of the house, and found that there was no way back down.