True Love Brings Down the Great Wall
(Mèng-Jiāng Nǚ Kūdǎo Chángchéng
孟姜女哭倒长城)

The First Emperor of Qín 秦 or Qín Shǐ Huáng 秦始皇 (reign 05a-1) decided to join together the defensive walls of north China into the single Great Wall (cháng chéng 长城) that we know today in order to keep out the barbarians who lived to the north.

At that time, there lived a lad named FÀN Xǐláng 范喜良, who was everything the hero of a love story should be: he was filial and industrious, pale and bookish, and even handsome and smart. He lived with his parents and devoted himself to their welfare and to his studies.

Nearby, in the garden of a family named MÈNG 孟, a melon vine was growing, which somehow grew over the wall into the adjacent garden of a family named JIĀNG 姜, where it produced a melon. When the melon ripened, the two families agreed to split it. But when they cut it open, they found a beautiful little girl, who came to be known as “the Mèng-Jiāng Girl” or Mèng-Jiāng Nǚ 孟姜女, although some people think of her as having the surname Mèng and the personal name Jiāngnǚ. Mèng-Jiāng Nǚ grew to be the very model of a storybook heroine: filial and industrious, shy and virtuous, but also very smart and adept at writing poems and essays. Oh yes, and beautiful.

To complete his wall, the emperor of Qín had conscripted hundreds of thousands of laborers and sent them to the north, where work was hard, injuries many, and deaths frequent. Fàn Xǐláng lived in dread of being conscripted, not because he feared hard work, misery, or death, but because his father had no other son to carry on the family line. One day soldiers came looking for more laborers, and Fàn Xǐláng ran from the compound, broke into the garden, and hid.

As it happened, he took refuge in the garden of the Mèng family, where he was discovered when the Mèng-Jiāng girl and her maid Lovely Fragrance (Měixiāng 美香) came out to walk among the flowers. She was horrified, or would have been if he had not been handsome and well-spoken and pale enough that he was a clearly an aspiring scholar. In the end the Mèng family agreed to conceal him and to let him work as a gardener, much increasing their daughter’s interest in flowers. After a short time, Old Man Mèng decided that Fàn Xǐláng would be an appropriate son-in-law, and consulted with the two young people, who readily agreed. So a date was set for the wedding.

Some say it was the night of their wedding, some that it was three days later, but suddenly soldiers appeared and seized Fàn Xǐláng. Because he had evaded them earlier, he was to be sent to particularly burdensome and dangerous work on the wall, in the vicinity of its eastern terminus, where it met the sea at Shānhǎiguān 山海关.

(Some people say that Mèng-Jiāng Nǚ had another, prior, suitor, whom she didn’t care for, but who had already made plans to marry her, a crass creature named ZHĀNG 张, and that when she married Fàn Xǐláng, Zhāng in a fit of pique tipped off the emperor’s soldiers that Fàn was available to be sent to work on the wall.)

Mèng-Jiāng Nǚ had a white jade hairpin, and as they dragged her husband from the house, she broke it in two so that each of them would have a reminder that her heart was also pure and white.

Days stretched to weeks and weeks to months, and Mèng-Jiāng Nǚ heard nothing from Fàn Xǐláng, while tales continued to trickle back from the wall of thousands of deaths from the inhumane conditions. As winter came on, Mèng-Jiāng Nǚ remembered that Fàn Xǐláng had been abducted with only the summer clothes on his back. Some say she saw him in a nightmare, crying, “Cold, cold!” She resolved to carry warm clothes to him at the wall.

Her journey was long and difficult, and she suffered a great deal. Some even say that she was close to death, but was aided by a fairy who nursed her back to life in a little house beside the road, and then vanished, house and all. People also say that on the road she lost her way and was guided back to the right route by a flock of wild geese. And some say that as she walked along, she was swept up into a cloud, which carried her to the Great Wall and gently set her down there.

Eventually she reached the work site and after extensive inquiries she found her husband’s work group, where she learned that her husband had died of exhaustion and starvation a month or two earlier and had been buried, with many others, in the wall itself because no-one had the strength to dig them graves. A kind old man led her to the spot, where she screamed and wailed inconsolably for several days.

She was so pathetic that all who heard her were affected. The wall itself was perhaps moved by her, or by the forces of the land and the sea, or by heaven itself. In any case, suddenly the earth trembled and a gigantic portion of the wall collapsed, and out tumbled the bones of those who had been interred within.

Mèng-Jiāng Nǚ remembered that her mother had told her that the blood of the living can identify the bones of the dead, so she pricked her hand and let blood fall upon the bones of the dead until she found one body that reacted differently from all the others, absorbing her blood while the others shed it. Still sobbing, she scooped up Fàn Xǐláng’s remains to carry them out for proper burial.

Meanwhile the First Emperor of Qín had got word that somebody’s hysterical wife was disrupting work at the wall, so he sent to have her arrested.

But when he laid eyes on her, beautiful as she was even in her grief, the emperor’s plan to punish her evaporated into lustful desire, and he decided to make her another of his many wives. How could she marry the man responsible for the death of her husband? But how could she resist the command of the emperor? So she persuaded him to agree to three conditions. First, a state funeral for her husband. Second, the First Emperor himself as a humble mourner. And third, a three-day excursion on the Bóhǎi 渤海 sea. The emperor at length agreed, for she was so very beautiful. So a funeral was held and Fàn Xǐláng was buried in an elegant grave, with the emperor himself walking as a humble mourner.

But during the excursion on the sea, Mèng-Jiāng Nǚ suddenly jumped into the turbulent waters, where she was swallowed up by a great wave and never found again. Some people say the wave was sent by the daughters of the Dragon King 龙王, who governs the sea, and that Mèng-Jiāng Nǚ was carried away to dwell in the Dragon Palace (Lónggōng 龙宫), but most people doubt that.

But for some storytellers, the tale does not end there. The emperor was furious, they say, and he himself beat the sea with his Great and Terrible Whip for its rash temerity in depriving him of his new bride. In his rage, he whipped and whipped. The whipping troubled the Dragon King, always rather touchy about disturbances to his realm, so he sent one of his daughters to appear in the form of Mèng-Jiāng Nǚ and try to steal the Great and Terrible Whip.

When he saw the false Mèng-Jiāng Nǚ suddenly appear on the shore, the emperor was astonished, and his rage was instantly replaced with lust once again.

For a hundred days and nights the Dragon King’s daughter, looking like Mèng-Jiāng Nǚ, tickled and snuggled and giggled with the emperor until at last she had an opportunity to steal the whip. Then she plunged back into the sea and dutifully brought it to her royal father, leaving the horrid emperor sad and puzzled, and eager to find some other pretty girls to occupy his palace.

At Shānhǎiguān today there is a little temple to Mèng-Jiāng Nǚ’s memory, built in the Northern Sòng 宋 dynasty (period 15b), twelve hundred years later, for no-one could forget the woman whose wailing brought down the dreaded wall, and who used her own blood to identify her husband’s bones.