The Woman Who Flew to the Moon

Long before satellites and space probes bore her name, Chang'e was a beautiful woman married to Hou Yi, the greatest archer in the heavens. The world she lived in was burning — not metaphorically, but literally. Ten suns had risen together into the sky, scorching the earth and bringing ruin upon the people below. It was Hou Yi who ended the catastrophe, shooting down nine of the ten suns and sparing humanity from destruction.

For this feat, Hou Yi was rewarded with a rare and precious substance: the elixir of immortality, given in two portions. He might have taken it himself and lived forever, but he refused to do so without his beloved wife by his side. Unwilling to ascend without her, he held onto the elixir and eventually entrusted it to Chang'e, waiting for the right moment when they might share it together.

That moment never came peacefully. While Hou Yi was away hunting, his own apprentice, a man named Fengmeng, broke into their home and tried to force Chang'e to hand over the elixir for himself. Rather than let it fall into his hands, Chang'e made a desperate choice — she swallowed both portions herself. In an instant, her body lifted past the heavens, and she chose the Moon as her new home, drawn to it because she still loved her husband and wished to remain as close to him as her new immortal state would allow.

When Hou Yi returned and learned what had happened, grief overtook him. Feeling responsible for the fate that had separated them forever, he laid out the fruits and cakes his wife had once loved to eat, an offering to her memory, before taking his own life. In older versions of the tale, the story is darker still — Chang'e does not act to protect the elixir from a thief, but steals it from her own husband and flees to the Moon so he could never follow her.

On the Moon, Chang'e is said to dwell in the Guǎng Hán Gōng, the 'Vast-Cold Palace,' accompanied only by her pet, the Jade Rabbit, Yu Tu. Her story became one of the foundational myths behind the Mid-Autumn Festival, and for centuries afterward, poets found in her a mirror for their own solitude. The Tang dynasty poet Li Shangyin wrote of her directly, sensing in the moonlit goddess a loneliness that matched his own. Over hundreds of poems, Chang'e slowly became less a deity of the ten suns and more a universal symbol of nostalgia and isolation.