Fusang

The water in the valley is hot. It has to be, because ten suns bathe in it. They come down one after another to the pool at the eastern rim of the world, steam rising off the surface, and when they are clean they climb out and settle in the branches of the tree that stands in the middle of the water. Nine take the lower boughs. One takes the top. That one is next.

This is Fusang as the Classic of Mountains and Seas gives it, in a passage only a few lines long. The place is Tang Valley, the Hot Water Valley, north of the country of the Black-Teeth people. The tree is simply called a great tree that stands in the water. A second passage in the same book calls it the Fu tree and adds the detail that makes the whole arrangement work: as one sun arrives, another sets out, and every one of them is carried by a crow. The schedule is strict. Ten suns, ten days in the old Chinese week, one turn each.

Nobody in these early lines measures the tree, and the restraint is worth respecting. It is big enough to hold ten suns, and that is the only scale offered. The name is usually read as “leaning mulberry” or “supporting mulberry”, and a mulberry is what most later writers and painters took it for, though the tree has also been identified as a hibiscus. What the texts are sure about is the heat, the water, and the birds.

The Huainanzi, compiled in the second century BCE, turns the scene into a timetable. The sun comes up out of the Bright Valley, washes in the Pool of Xian, and brushes past the Fusang tree, and that moment has a name: Dawn Light. Then it climbs the tree and starts out on its journey, and the names keep coming, one for each stage of the road, until the sun sinks at the far western end of the world. A whole day is laid out like a route with posting stations, and Fusang is the first of them. Other tellings put the sun in a chariot with its mother, Xihe, at the reins. She is the mother of all ten, and it is she who bathes them.

The poets of the south went there in their heads. In the long shamanic flight of the Li Sao, the speaker waters his dragon steeds at the Pool of Xian and ties their reins to the Fusang tree, then snaps off a branch of the Ruo tree to beat back the sun and buy himself more time. In one of the Nine Songs the Lord of the East, the sun himself, rises with his light already falling across a balustrade at Fusang. For these writers the tree was a place a spirit traveller could hitch a team, somewhere between a hitching post and the edge of everything.

Then came the morning the timetable failed. All ten suns rose together. Crops burned in the fields, the ground cracked, and the heat lay on the people like a hand. The archer Hou Yi took his bow and shot nine of them out of the sky, and where each sun fell, a crow came down. One sun was left, and one has been enough ever since. The story never says what became of the tree with nine empty branches. It is a strange silence. The roost of the suns survives the disaster as a perch for one.

The image outlived the telling. On the painted silk banner laid over the coffin of Lady Dai at Mawangdui, buried around 168 BCE, a red sun holding a black crow sits in the upper corner, and below it smaller orange discs hang among the curling branches of a tree. Far to the west, in Sichuan, the pits at Sanxingdui gave up a bronze tree nearly four metres high, cast more than three thousand years ago, with nine birds perched on its nine branches and the top missing. Many who have studied it see the Fusang tree. Nobody can prove it, since the people who cast the bronze left no writing at all.

Fusang did not stay a tree. In 499 CE a Buddhist monk named Huishen arrived at Jingzhou, in the last years of the Southern Qi, and described a country called Fusang, twenty thousand li east of a land named Dahan. His report is kept in the Book of Liang, written down in the seventh century. The country took its name from the fusang trees that grew there, he said, with leaves like the paulownia and a reddish fruit shaped like a pear. People ate the young shoots, spun cloth from the bark, and made paper of it. They had copper but no iron, and set no value on gold or silver. They kept deer for milk and drove carts pulled by horses, oxen and deer. They had no armies and two prisons, one in the north and one in the south. A man who wanted to marry built a hut outside the girl’s door and swept and watered the ground there morning and evening for a year. Five monks from Kipin had brought Buddhism to them in 458.

That short report has caused more argument than the whole myth of the ten suns. In 1761 the French scholar Joseph de Guignes decided that Huishen’s Fusang was America, and the idea was revived in 1875 by Charles Godfrey Leland, who gave it a book. Sinologists were not persuaded. Gustaaf Schlegel argued in 1892 for Sakhalin, and others have looked to Kamchatka or the Kuril Islands, or judged the account too mixed to be placed anywhere. By the Tang dynasty the question had been settled in a simpler way. Fusang had become a graceful name for Japan, the land where the sun comes up, and when the poet Wang Wei saw a Japanese friend off for home in 753, Fusang was the word he reached for.

What the tree does is keep order. It holds the suns apart, lets them out one at a time, and gives the day a place to begin. As long as the rota holds, the world gets light without being cooked by it. That is the whole of its power, and it is not small.

Its limit is that it is only a perch. The tree could not stop ten suns from leaving together, and it took a man with a bow to repair what a tree could not prevent. Its other weakness is distance. Fusang always stands just past the last known coast, and every time someone has tried to pin it to a real shore, it has turned into somewhere else.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Fusang in Chinese mythology?

Fusang is a giant mythical tree at the eastern edge of the world, the place where the sun rises. The Classic of Mountains and Seas says it stands in the water of Tang Valley, where the ten suns bathe. Nine suns rest on its lower branches and one on its top branch.

How are the ten suns connected to the Fusang tree?

The ten suns roost in the Fusang tree and take turns crossing the sky, one each day. Each sun is carried by a crow, and as one arrives back at the tree another sets out. When all ten rose at once, the archer Hou Yi shot nine of them down.

Was Fusang a real country?

A country called Fusang is described in the Book of Liang, based on a report by the monk Huishen in 499 CE. He placed it twenty thousand li east of a land called Dahan and described its trees, bark cloth, deer herds and marriage customs. Its location has never been agreed, with Sakhalin, Kamchatka and the Kuril Islands all proposed.

Is Fusang the same as America?

No reliable evidence supports that. Joseph de Guignes proposed in 1761 that Huishen’s Fusang was America, and Charles Godfrey Leland revived the idea in 1875. Sinologists such as Gustaaf Schlegel rejected it, and Schlegel argued for Sakhalin instead.

Why is Japan sometimes called Fusang?

Fusang became a poetic Chinese name for Japan because both were thought of as the land in the east where the sun rises. The usage was established by the Tang dynasty. The poet Wang Wei used the name in 753 in a farewell poem for a Japanese friend sailing home.

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