Chang'e stole immortality, and it was the man who grieved
On 20 July 1969, the day Apollo 11 would land, capsule communicator Ronald Evans read the crew the news. One headline asked them to keep watch: "an ancient legend" said a beautiful girl called Chang-O had been living on the Moon for 4,000 years, banished there for stealing the pill of immortality from her husband. "Okay. We'll keep a close eye out for the bunny girl," Michael Collins replied from orbit.
The book where you can read the myth in full is a little over two thousand years old. Liu An, king of Huainan, presumably presented the Huainanzi to Emperor Wu in 139 BCE. The myth takes up a single sentence there. The archer Yi begged the elixir of immortality from Xiwangmu, the Queen Mother of the West, and Heng'e (that is how Chang'e's name is written here) stole it and fled to the Moon.
The one grieving in that sentence is Yi. He is left desolate, as if he had lost something, with no way to replace it, because he didn't know where the elixir came from. The commentator Gao You added that Heng'e was Yi's wife: before he could take the elixir, she ate it, became immortal, and fled to the Moon to become its spirit. Neither the text nor the commentary says a word about banishment.
China later gave her name to its lunar programme, whose first spacecraft launched in 2007. In 2013 Chang'e 3 set down a rover called Yutu, Jade Rabbit, the name Evans said was "not reported". In 2019 Chang'e 4 made the first soft landing on the Moon's far side. Her name is there now too.
Sources
- Huainanzi (淮南子), ch. 6 "Lanming xun" (覽冥訓), with the commentary of Gao You, as quoted in: Lu Xun. Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilüe (A Brief History of Chinese Fiction), 1923, ch. 2. Chinese text: Wikisource.
- Zürn TB. Review of: Queen SA, Puett M (eds.). The Huainanzi and Textual Production in Early China. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Daoism: Religion, History and Society, 2015; 7: 384–393.
- Woods WD, MacTaggart KD, O'Brien F. Apollo 11 Flight Journal. Day 5, part 1: Preparations for Landing. Corrected transcript and commentary, 095:16:09–095:18:15 GET. NASA Apollo Flight Journal, 2009–2025.