THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
The Classic of Regions Beyond the Seas: North tells the whole chase in thirty-seven characters. Kuafu raced the sun and ran straight into its setting glare; parched, he drank the Yellow River and the Wei dry, and when they did not suffice he headed north for the Great Marsh. He died of thirst on the road. His fallen staff became the Deng Grove, which Guo Pu's commentary and the Liezi both identify as a forest of peach trees. The same chapter records a Land of Bofu peopled by giants who grip a green snake in the right hand and a yellow snake in the left.
The Classic of the Great Wilderness: North preserves a different death: there Kuafu is the grandson of Houtu, a man who 'overrated his strength and chased the sun's shadow', and he is killed by the winged dragon Yinglong after that dragon has slain Chiyou. The two incompatible endings sitting in one book are a textbook case of the Shanhaijing's layered compilation. The Liezi retells the chase and adds that the peach grove spread over thousands of li. 'Kuafu chasing the sun' survives in Chinese as a double-edged idiom, mocking overreach and honoring the doomed, magnificent attempt in the same breath.
