The Story of Kua Fu Chasing the Sun

At a Glance

• Central figures: Kua Fu, a giant of immense strength who sets out to chase and capture the sun to relieve his people’s suffering.
• Setting: Ancient China, in a time of relentless drought and scorching heat; the story draws from early Chinese mythological tradition.
• The turn: Kua Fu drains the Yellow River and the Wei River trying to slake his thirst, but neither is enough to sustain him against the sun’s heat.
• The outcome: Kua Fu collapses and dies before reaching the northern mountains, his quest unfinished.
• The legacy: In his final moments Kua Fu threw down his wooden staff, and from it grew a forest of peach trees that gave shade and fruit to the people of that land.

Kua Fu was a giant. His strides covered distances that would take an ordinary man days to cross, and his thirst, when it came, could empty a river. The sun blazed without relenting. The soil cracked. The rivers dropped in their banks. The people suffered from the heat and could do nothing about it. Kua Fu looked at the sky and decided he would chase the sun down and bring it under control - that the world would cool, the droughts would end, and the people would have relief. The task was impossible by any reasonable measure. He set out at dawn anyway.

The Giant and His Stride

Kua Fu began running east as the sun rose, matching its pace across the sky with his great legs. Where the sun arced, he followed. The distance between them shrank slowly - or seemed to. Hours passed. The heat pressing down on him increased with every li he covered, because the faster he closed the gap, the more fiercely the sun’s rays struck him.

He ran through morning and into the high heat of midday. His determination did not waver. He had made a promise, and Kua Fu was not a creature given to turning back. The people watching from villages and fields saw a giant shape crossing the horizon, a dark figure against the glare, moving always toward the sun.

The Yellow River

By the time Kua Fu reached the Yellow River, his throat was burning and his legs, enormous as they were, had begun to feel the toll of the chase. He knelt at the river’s edge and drank. The Yellow River is wide and ancient and holds more water than most rivers of the world - but Kua Fu drank it down in moments. He lifted his head. The thirst remained.

He stood and kept running.

The Wei River

The Wei River lay not far ahead. Kua Fu came to it and drank that too, every drop of it, the whole river gone in the time it takes to tell. The Wei was no small stream. It fed fields across the plain and had done so for generations. Now its bed was dry mud and stones.

Still the thirst did not break. The sun’s heat had gone deep into his body, past the reach of river water. Kua Fu understood, somewhere in the running and the drinking, that this was not a thirst that could be quenched by what he had already found.

The Road to the Northern Mountains

He had heard there were great waters in the north - lakes and rivers beyond the mountains, cold and deep. If he could reach them, he might drink enough. His legs were failing now. Each stride was shorter than the last. The sun had moved on ahead of him, indifferent to the pursuit, dropping toward the western horizon as it always did.

Kua Fu pressed toward the northern mountains. He did not stop. He had drained two of the greatest rivers in China and was still moving, which was itself a thing that had never been done before and would not be done again. But the distance to the mountains was too great, and what was left in him was not enough.

He collapsed before he reached them.

The Peach Forest

As he fell, Kua Fu took his wooden staff - the great staff he had carried through the entire chase - and threw it away from him. It hit the ground some distance off, and from it, without delay, peach trees grew. Not one or two. A forest of them, spreading across the land where he had fallen, their branches full and their fruit heavy, their canopy giving shade to the dry ground beneath.

Kua Fu had not captured the sun. He had not cooled the earth or ended the droughts by force. But the peach forest remained after him - shade for travelers, fruit for the hungry, a cool place in the heat of the day. The staff he no longer needed had become something the people could use. The sun continued its course across the sky, as it had always done, and the rivers he had emptied slowly filled again.