Chunyu Fen of Dongping was a knight-errant of the Wu-Chu country — brave, hard-drinking, contemptuous of small rules, rich enough to keep a houseful of swordsmen and guests. He had once held a commission in the Huainan army and lost it by insulting his commander in his cups, and since then he had done nothing but drink under the great old ash tree south of his house at Guangling.
One autumn day his friends held a feast beneath the tree, and Chunyu drank until the world went soft, and two servants laid him in the east hall to sleep it off. He was half awake when two messengers in purple came in and knelt. “The King of Huai’an sends for you, sir.”
He went with them. Outside the gate stood a carriage drawn by four grey horses; they drove through the gate of the city — and the gate, he thought, looked strangely like the hole at the foot of his own ash tree — and on into a kingdom he had never seen. The capital was walled and towered, the streets thronged, and above the palace gate were the words THE GREAT KINGDOM OF HUAI’AN. The king received him as an honoured guest, gave him the second princess in marriage — a girl of fifteen, lovelier than jade — and in time appointed him Governor of the South Bough Province.
For twenty years Chunyu Fen ruled South Bough. He governed well; the people prospered and built shrines to him. His princess bore him five sons and two daughters; his sons married into great families, his daughters were betrothed to princes. He rose until there was no one in the kingdom above him but the king, and then — as it always goes — there began to be whispers. A neighbouring kingdom invaded and he lost a battle; his princess fell ill and died; the whispers grew louder; and at last the king, courteous and cold, sent him home in a plain carriage with two drivers, out of the favour in which he had lived half his life.
The road back seemed to take no time at all. The carriage passed the gate that looked like the foot of an ash tree, and Chunyu Fen woke in the east hall of his own house.
The sun had not yet set. The wine in the courtyard was still warm; the guests had not gone home. He sat up slowly, and told his friends, laughing and shaking, what he had seen, and they laughed too — until he took a spade and led them to the old ash tree, and dug.
There was the kingdom. A great nest of ants filled the hollow at the root, with a palace-chamber of packed earth where the two purple messengers had found their king, and a separate mound — South Bough, where he had governed twenty years — and tunnels running where the armies had marched, and a small side-chamber he knew at once for the princess’s tomb. He stood looking down at the crawling cities of his whole lost life, and had the hole covered over, and that night it rained and washed the kingdom away.
His friends thought the wine had addled him. But Chunyu Fen did not laugh again at the story. He gave up drinking and the company of swordsmen, took up the Tao, and died three years later — and Li Gongzuo, who wrote the tale down, ends it by asking the question that has kept it alive for twelve hundred years: that the ants’ kingdom was a dream we all agree; but who is to say that ours, in which we scheme and rise and grieve for a few decades under our own small sky, is so much more?