A nameless man
His careless wife, also nameless
Their faithful and beautiful but nameless daughter
Their ugly white horse
Once upon a time, in the reign of the mythical emperor Dìkù (reign 1a6) 帝喾 (2436-2366 BC), people were still very savage, and rival tribes raped young girls and robbed travelers and kidnapped each other’s elders for fun and profit with little to stop them. One man was kidnapped while traveling on a strong, but rather ugly, white horse. His wife and daughter waited and waited for his return, and their anxiety became even greater when the horse, very tired and looking even uglier than usual, limped home.
The neighbors were horrified, but they knew that things like this could happen in troubled times while savagery still reigned. The man’s wife was heartbroken, but she too knew that things like this could happen in troubled times while savagery still reigned. Her daughter, much younger and not yet inclined to fatalism, spent days and nights sobbing and simpering about the tragic loss of her father.
She lost her appetite and began to grow wan and sickly, which was a shame because she was far more beautiful than the other village girls, and such great beautify seemed a terrible thing to waste.
Finally her mother had an idea. She would offer her daughter’s hand in marriage to whoever would locate the missing man and bring him back home. Everyone knew it was a dangerous project with little chance of success, so no one was willing to try.
Meanwhile the ugly white horse had recovered and become spry again. Every day he kicked at the ground and pulled at his reins, and finally he broke the rope and ran off. Not many days later, the horse came back, with the old father riding astride him. Everyone was filled with joy.
Over the next days the horse became more and more agitated, as though it wanted something which it did not have. Suddenly the mother remembered the promise she had made that whoever returned her husband should marry their daughter.
The father was shocked at the promise, and at the foolishness of his wife in saying “whoever,” which could include horses, rather than “whatever man.” But promise or no promise, he was not about to let his daughter marry a horse. The wife was chagrined, but agreed. So did all the villagers. (The daughter, like any other prospective bride, was not consulted.)
The horse did not agree, and behaved so badly that the father killed him and cut off his hide to make clothes. As the hide was drying in the courtyard, the girl walked past carrying laundry. Suddenly the hide jumped up and wrapped itself around her, and before she knew what was happening, it carried her high into a mulberry tree.
For some days the girl’s parents looked for the girl and the valuable horse hide, worried that they had been carried off by the same pesky kidnappers who had previously made off with her father. But one day they heard odd noises coming from the tree and discovered that she had been transformed into an odd, horse-headed creature, with a body like a big worm, and that she was chewing on the leaves of the tree. Because they knew she was their daughter, even though transformed into a fat worm with the head of a horse, they tended her kindly, and provided her each day with lots of mulberry leaves.
One day, in a blaze of rainbow-colored light, accompanied by celestial fairies, she floated down from a cloud, looking like herself once more, and told them that because of her great filial piety (not to say her great beauty) the Jade Emperor had taken her as a court lady in the Ninth Palace of Heaven, so they should no longer worry about her. Instead they should continue to cultivate the horse-headed mulberry-tree worms, which would provide them with wonderful fibers to make clothes, much better clothes than could be made with horse hide. With that, she ascended back into the sky with her celestial fairies and her rainbow.
Because it likes to wrap (chán 缠) itself in a cocoon, a silk worm is called a called cán 蚕, which sounds similar. But because the mulberry tree reminds people of the loss of a beautiful girl because of her mother’s foolish promise, the tree (sāng 桑) is pronounced like “funeral” (sāng 丧).
The daughter, in addition to being a court lady to the Jade Emperor, is worshipped to this day as the goddess of silk and patron of silk workers and is represented as a beautiful young woman but with the head of an ugly horse. She is called “Horse Head Girl” (Mǎtóu Niáng 马头娘) or “Horse Head Goddess” (Mǎtóu Shén 马头神), because nobody knows her name.