Chang'e, the Chinese Moon Goddess: Story and Legends

Who is Chang'e?

Chang'e is the goddess of the moon in Chinese mythology. In the best-known story she is the wife of Hou Yi, a great archer who shot down nine of the ten suns that were burning the earth. Yi was given a medicine of immortality by the Queen Mother of the West. Chang'e took it, her body became light, and she floated up to the moon, where she still lives in a cold, bright palace with a rabbit who pounds herbs in a mortar.

That short version hides a long history. The oldest surviving text, the Huainanzi of the second century BCE, tells the story in one sentence and calls her Heng'e. An astronomer later recorded that she turned into a toad, Tang poets pictured her alone and full of regret, and modern retellings make her a heroine. This page goes through each layer with the original texts and our own translations.

The name: Heng'e, Chang'e and Changxi

In the earliest texts the goddess is called Heng'e. Heng means lasting or constant, and the character used for it here is the ordinary word with a woman radical added. Chang also means constant, and the character for her later name is again the plain word with a woman radical. In other words, the name was swapped for a synonym. Both forms are pronounced with a rising tone on each syllable; in English Chang'e sounds roughly like chahng-uh.

Why the change? The usual explanation is that Heng was the personal name of Emperor Wen of Han, Liu Heng, who reigned from 180 to 157 BCE, and the personal names of emperors could not be written by their subjects. Writers therefore used chang instead. This is later tradition: it is widely repeated, but no Han dynasty text says so, and both spellings stayed in use for centuries. Old editions show the overlap; the modern edition of the Book of the Later Han notes that its base text wrote Heng'e with the plain heng, and the editors corrected it.

A third name comes up whenever people ask who the first moon goddess was. The Shan Hai Jing, the ancient Classic of Mountains and Seas, describes a woman washing the moons:

Changxi's twelve moons match the twelve months of the year. The same book says that another wife of Di Jun, Xihe, gave birth to the ten suns. Some scholars suggest that Changxi and Chang'e grew out of the same figure, since the names sound so close, but the texts never connect them.

Hou Yi and the ten suns

Chang'e's story cannot be told without her husband. Yi, often called Hou Yi, is the great archer of Chinese myth. The Huainanzi tells how, in the age of the sage king Yao, all ten suns rose into the sky at once:

The text says he shot the ten suns. Later tradition settled on nine, so that one sun was left to light the world.

The monsters in the list have their own afterlives. A local legend around Dongting Lake says the Long Snake was the giant elephant-eating serpent of the Shan Hai Jing, whose bones piled up into a hill; you can read that creature's original entry on our Bashe page. The ten suns themselves come from the Shan Hai Jing too, which says they rest in a great tree in a valley at the eastern edge of the world.

The oldest story: stealing the elixir

The first surviving mention of Chang'e is short and comes in the middle of an argument about something else. The Huainanzi is making a point about people who use things without understanding where they come from, and it reaches for a familiar example:

The verb is steal, with no excuse given. The text does not explain who Heng'e is; it assumes readers already know the story. Later readers always took her to be Yi's wife. The elixir comes from the Queen Mother of the West, who in the Shan Hai Jing lives on the slopes of Mount Kunlun, at the western edge of the known world. And the moral is about Yi, not Chang'e: he lost the medicine because he did not know how to make it himself.

Chang'e the toad: Zhang Heng's version

The strangest version comes from an astronomer. Zhang Heng, who lived from 78 to 139 CE and is famous for building an early seismoscope, wrote a short treatise on the heavens called Lingxian, The Spiritual Constitution of the Universe. The full book is lost, but a long passage survives because the sixth-century commentator Liu Zhao quoted it in his notes on the Treatise on Astronomy in the Book of the Later Han. In the middle of explaining why the moon shines, Zhang Heng tells this:

Here Chang'e is not a beautiful goddess but a toad, and the passage already places a hare in the moon. Both animals are older than Zhang Heng. A silk banner from a Han tomb at Mawangdui, buried around 168 BCE, shows a crescent moon with a toad and a hare on it. For centuries the toad was as much a symbol of the moon as the rabbit.

The diviner's words borrow from the Book of Changes: the maiden going to her new home is one of its hexagrams, used for a bride leaving her family. The oracle promised Chang'e a good future. It did not mention the toad.

Other versions of Chang'e's flight

Later storytellers kept the elixir and the flight and changed almost everything else. The main versions are:

• The thief. In the Huainanzi she simply steals the elixir and flees. No reason is given.
• The toad. In Zhang Heng's account she steals it, consults a diviner, flies to the moon and becomes a toad.
• The protector. In the best-known modern version, Yi brings the elixir home and hides it. While he is away, his pupil Peng Meng, also spelled Feng Meng, breaks in to take it by force. To keep it out of his hands, Chang'e swallows it herself and floats up to the moon. Peng Meng is an old name: the philosopher Mencius already mentions him as the pupil who learned archery from Yi and then killed him.
• The tyrant's wife. Some versions say Yi became a cruel ruler after his victory, and Chang'e took the elixir so that he could not reign forever.
• The exiled gods. Some modern retellings say Yi and Chang'e were gods sent down from heaven. The suns he shot were the sons of the god Di Jun, who punished him by making the couple mortal, and the elixir was their way back.

Most modern versions add a tender ending. Yi, grieving, sets out his wife's favorite fruits and cakes in the garden under the full moon, and tradition says this is how the custom of moon offerings began. In these tellings Chang'e is no longer a thief but a loyal wife who chose loneliness.

Life on the moon: the Guanghan Palace, the Jade Rabbit and Wu Gang

Chang'e lives in the Guanghan Palace, the Palace of Vast Cold. The name stresses what the moon was believed to be: cold, pale and still, the essence of yin. Later tales say that Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang dynasty visited the moon on a magical journey and saw the name Vast Cold written over a palace gate. These tales are late, but the name stuck.

Her companion is the Jade Rabbit, a white hare that pounds the elixir of immortality with a mortar and pestle. As Zhang Heng's text shows, a hare was already connected with the moon in the Han dynasty, and poems of the period speak of a white hare pounding medicine. Many people see the shape of a rabbit in the dark patches on the full moon. Later tradition also links it with a Buddhist tale from India about a hare placed in the moon as a reward for its self-sacrifice. In most modern versions the rabbit is simply Chang'e's pet.

The third resident is Wu Gang, a man condemned to cut down a tree that never falls. His earliest record is in a ninth-century collection of curiosities by Duan Chengshi:

The moon tree is often called the laurel in English, and breaking off a cassia branch in the moon became a stock image for passing the imperial examinations. The toad is still in the moon in this text; it later faded from the popular picture, leaving the trio we know today: Chang'e, the Jade Rabbit and Wu Gang.

Chang'e in poetry and Journey to the West

Tang dynasty poets loved Chang'e, and they usually pictured her alone. The best-known poem is by Li Shangyin, who lived in the ninth century. It is short enough to quote in full:

The poem turns immortality into a punishment: she has everything except company, forever. Readers still argue about whom Li Shangyin really meant.

Chang'e also appears in the great Ming dynasty novel Journey to the West, in the backstory of the pig-headed pilgrim Zhu Bajie. Before his exile he was Marshal Tianpeng, commander of the Milky Way's navy. In Chapter 19 he tells how he got drunk at the Queen Mother's peach banquet:

She refused, the palace guards caught him, and the Jade Emperor condemned him to death. On the plea of the immortal Taibai Jinxing the sentence was reduced to two thousand blows of the hammer and banishment to earth, where he was reborn in the body of a pig. The Jade Rabbit appears later in the novel too, as a demon who escapes to earth and has to be taken home. You can read about the hero of the novel in our Sun Wukong entry.

Chang'e and the Mid-Autumn Festival

Today Chang'e is best known through the Mid-Autumn Festival, held on the 15th day of the 8th month of the lunar calendar, when the moon is full and is said to be at its brightest. Families gather, eat mooncakes and look at the moon together. The full moon stands for reunion, and the round cakes do too.

The festival grew out of older customs of making offerings to the moon in autumn, and it was a major holiday by the Song dynasty. Tradition says that people set out fruit, cakes and incense to the moon in memory of Chang'e, as Yi did in the modern story, and children are told to look for her and the Jade Rabbit on the moon.

Mooncakes themselves are not part of the early Chang'e story. They became the festival's signature food in later centuries, and many of the stories that connect them to the festival are folk legends. A popular one says that messages hidden inside mooncakes were used to organize an uprising at the end of the Yuan dynasty; it is a good story, but historians have found no record of it from the time. The link between Chang'e and mooncakes comes through the festival: she belongs to the moon, and the cakes belong to the night of the full moon.

Lanterns, riddles and osmanthus wine are part of the festival in many places. Osmanthus blooms in the eighth month, and its Chinese name, gui, is the same word as the cassia tree in the moon that Wu Gang is still chopping.

Chang'e today

Chang'e is painted floating upward with long sleeves and ribbons, often holding the Jade Rabbit, on festival posters and mooncake boxes every autumn. In Peking opera she is the heroine of Chang'e Flies to the Moon, and she has been the subject of animated films such as Over the Moon.

Her name has also gone into space. China's lunar exploration program is named Chang'e after her, and its moon rovers are named Yutu, which means Jade Rabbit. Even earlier, during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969, mission control mentioned the legend of a Chinese girl on the moon with a big rabbit to the crew on their way there.

Chang'e is not one of the creatures of the Shan Hai Jing, but the world she comes from is. The ten suns her husband shot, the Queen Mother who gave him the elixir and the moon mother Changxi all appear in that ancient book. You can explore its beasts in our Shan Hai Jing bestiary, and meet the wider family of Chinese deities, from the creator Pangu to the Kitchen God, in our guide to the Chinese gods.