THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
The Classic of Regions Beyond the Seas: West gives the people of Qigong a single arm and three eyes apiece, the eyes divided into yin and yang, and mounts them on patterned horses; Guo Pu's commentary identifies the mount as the jiliang, a white horse with a scarlet mane and eyes like gold.
Their fame rests on their hands. Zhang Hua's Bowuzhi (3rd century) calls them master builders of ingenious devices who take birds with mechanical traps, and tells the story that fixed them in the tradition: they built a flying chariot that rides the wind. In the days of Tang, founder of the Shang dynasty, a west wind blew one such chariot across the sky to Yuzhou in the Chinese heartland. Tang had the machine smashed rather than let his people see it; ten years later, when an east wind rose, he had it rebuilt and sent the stranded travelers gliding home, to a country said to lie forty thousand li beyond the Jade Gate. Modern readers like to cite the episode, half in jest, as the earliest flying machine in a Chinese text.
