Houyi Shoots Down the Nine Suns

In the time of Emperor Yao, ten suns rose into the sky on the same day.

In ordinary times, only one sun came up at a time. There were ten brothers in all, and they took turns. They lived together with their mother in a great mulberry tree at the edge of the eastern sea, and each morning their mother bathed one of them and put him in the chariot of the dawn, and that one rode across the sky from east to west, and the next morning it was a different brother's turn. So the world had one sun a day, and a night between, and the seasons went around evenly.

But ten brothers, who had been waiting for their turn for so long, grew bored. One morning, when no one was watching, they all climbed into the chariot together. They rose into the sky in a row, all ten of them at once.

It was terrible. The light burned. The crops shriveled in the field as soon as they sprouted. The rivers dried. The fish baked in the dust where the rivers had been. The forests caught fire. The animals, the ones that did not burn, came out of the woods and attacked people in their fear. Monsters that had been kept in check by the heat of one sun came out into the heat of ten and roamed the country eating whatever they found. The people of Yao began to die.

Yao prayed up to heaven for help. The Lord of Heaven, the great Di Jun, was the father of the ten suns and the husband of their mother. He did not want to kill his own children. But he could not refuse to help. He sent down to earth a divine archer named Houyi, with a red bow and a quiver of white arrows. He told Houyi to frighten his sons back into order, only to frighten them. He did not say to kill them. Houyi understood otherwise.

Houyi came down to earth and walked through the burning country. He saw the dead fish in the dry rivers and the burned villages and the people lying still by the roads. He drew his bow.

The first arrow went up. One of the suns flickered, fell, and came down to the earth as a great three-legged crow with golden feathers. It died on the bare ground.

Houyi shot a second arrow. A second sun fell. A third arrow. A third sun. He shot until he had shot down nine of them. Nine three-legged golden crows lay dead.

Yao was watching all this from his palace. He grew worried. He sent a man to slip into Houyi's quiver and steal one arrow back. He thought: if Houyi shoots all ten suns out of the sky, we will be in another kind of trouble. He had been right. When Houyi reached for his next arrow, he felt the empty place in the quiver. He looked up at the sky.

The last sun was alone there. He was the youngest. He was terrified.

Houyi let down his bow. The world had one sun left, and one sun was what they needed. The temperature dropped. The crops in the field, the few that had survived, began to grow again. The rivers had been so deep that water still came back into them after the heat eased. The world cooled.

The last sun, the one who had been spared, climbed humbly into the chariot of the dawn each morning, alone, and crossed the sky carefully. He never gathered with brothers again, because he no longer had brothers. He was the only one. That is the sun we still see now.

But the Lord of Heaven did not forgive Houyi. Houyi had killed nine of his sons. Di Jun took away the divine archer's place in heaven. He banished him from heaven and made him an ordinary mortal man on earth, with a mortal man's lifespan. Houyi was no longer a god.

This was a heavy punishment. Houyi had a wife, Chang'e, who had also been a god. She was punished alongside him for being his wife. They lived together as humans. He grew old. He hunted. He missed the sky.

That is another story, the one about how Chang'e ended up living on the moon with only a rabbit for company. But the story of the suns ends here, with one sun in the sky, and the people of Yao alive, and the bow and arrows of Houyi laid up against a wall in a small house, and the great heat of the ten brothers gone out of the world.