Hou Yi (also Yi, Shen Yi; titled Lord Archer)

Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Chinese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: The greatest archer in Chinese myth, strong enough to shoot the sun out of the sky.
Role in Mythos: A divine or half-divine hero who saved the world by shooting down nine of the ten suns and clearing the land of monsters.
Relation to Humans: Sent to rescue humanity from scorching heat and predatory beasts, he acted as mortals’ champion against forces they could not fight for themselves. In darker traditions he became a tyrant over the very people he had saved, and he was finally killed by one of his own students.

Ten suns hung in a sky the color of heated iron. The paddies had baked to black stubble, the rivers had pulled back into cracked veins of mud, and the road stones held enough heat to raise blisters on a bare sole. In the shimmer above the fields a man stood with a vermilion bow, counting the suns and deciding the order in which they would fall.

There had always been ten of them. They were the children of Dijun, a high god of the eastern sky, and Xihe, their mother, who bathed them each dawn in the boiling eastern sea and carried them one at a time across the heavens in her chariot. They lived out in the far eastern water, in the branches of an enormous mulberry tree called Fusang, and each morning a single brother would climb into the sky while the other nine waited their turn. Inside each sun rode a three-legged crow, a black shape against the glare. For ages the arrangement held. Then, on a morning no story quite explains, all ten decided to rise at once.

The world began to burn. Grain withered in the ground, forests caught and would not stop, and the seas shrank while people fainted in the fields with nothing left to drink. Out of the parched country came monsters that had been waiting for their moment: a beast with teeth like chisels, a nine-headed thing that spat both fire and flood, a tusked boar the size of a hill, a wind-bird whose wingbeats flattened houses, a serpent long enough to swallow an ox whole. Emperor Yao, who ruled the human world, could do nothing against the sky. In some tellings it was Dijun himself, father of the suns, who sent for the archer, handing him a red bow and a quiver of white-feathered arrows and asking him to frighten his own children back into line.

Yi tried to reason with them, then to scare them, and neither worked. So he set his feet, drew a white arrow back to the head, and began. The first sun burst and dropped as a great three-legged crow, feathers smoking, and the heat in the air fell a fraction. He loosed again, and again, nine times, and nine burning crows tumbled out of the sky until the light was bearable and a single sun hung alone and terrified. Before Yi could nock a tenth arrow, someone stopped him. In one version Emperor Yao quietly slipped an arrow from the quiver, understanding that a world with no sun at all would freeze as surely as it had burned; in another a boy stole the shaft. That last surviving sun is the one that crosses the sky today.

With the heavens settled, Yao turned him loose on the monsters, and this was the work Yi was built for. He ran the giant boar to ground and bound it, drove the nine-headed creature into a river and killed it in the water, put an arrow through the wind-bird on the wing, and cut the great serpent apart at a lake in the south. The old carved stones of the Han tombs show him as a broad, planted figure, knees bent, one arm straight along the bow and the other hauling the string back past his ear. Past that the sources say almost nothing about his face or his build. He is defined by what his hands could do. The bow was the point of him.

His pride went with the skill, and the oldest poems keep the darker deeds. Sent to bring order to the people of Xia, he shot out the left eye of He Bo, the count of the Yellow River, as punishment for the floods that had drowned countless villages, and took the river god’s wife for his own. Other accounts make him a king who rescued the world and then ruled it as a tyrant, feared instead of loved. The line between the hero who saved humanity and the strongman who lorded over it was never firmly drawn, and the myth seems content to hold both at once.

For his service he was given the one thing a mortal hero is not meant to keep. The Queen Mother of the West, who guarded immortality on her mountain in the far west, handed him an elixir, enough to make one person live forever or two share a single long and ordinary life. His wife was Chang’e. While he was out hunting, the elixir was taken, in the gentle tellings by Chang’e defending it from a thief, in the harder ones by Chang’e choosing it for herself, and she rose weightless through the roof beams and away to the moon. Yi came home to an empty house. He set out her favorite food in the courtyard and called up at the pale disc, and could not follow.

What killed him in the end was neither a monster nor a sun. Among his students was a man named Feng Meng, nearly as fine an archer and eaten through with envy, who understood that as long as his teacher lived he would only ever be the second bow in the world. He waited until they were alone and beat Yi to death with a club of peach wood, the timber the Chinese used to drive off evil spirits. The greatest archer who ever lived was killed at close range by a man who could not out-shoot him. He had thinned the sky, cleared the land of its monsters, and been handed the secret of never dying, then lost the immortality to his wife and his life to his own pupil. The bow that could bring down a sun was no use against the man standing beside him.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Hou Yi?

Hou Yi is the greatest archer in Chinese mythology, a divine or half-divine hero best known for shooting down nine of the ten suns that were scorching the earth. He also rid the land of several monsters and was the husband of Chang’e, the moon goddess. He is sometimes called simply Yi or given the title Lord Archer.

How many suns did Hou Yi shoot down?

Hou Yi shot down nine of the ten suns. The ten suns were siblings who normally crossed the sky one at a time but rose all together one day, burning the crops, drying the rivers, and killing people with heat. Hou Yi shot nine of them out of the sky, and the single surviving sun is the one that still crosses the heavens.

How did Hou Yi die?

Hou Yi was murdered by his own archery student, Feng Meng, who was consumed by envy of his teacher’s skill. Feng Meng ambushed Hou Yi and beat him to death with a club made of peach wood, a material the Chinese associated with warding off evil spirits. The mightiest archer in the world was killed at close range by a man who could not defeat him with a bow.

What is the relationship between Hou Yi and Chang’e?

Chang’e was Hou Yi’s wife. After Hou Yi saved the world, he was rewarded with an elixir of immortality by the Queen Mother of the West, but Chang’e consumed it while he was away and floated up to the moon, becoming the lunar goddess. In most tellings Hou Yi was left behind on earth, setting out offerings and calling to her but never able to reach her again.

Was Hou Yi a hero or a villain?

Hou Yi is remembered as both. He is celebrated as the hero who saved humanity from the ten suns and from monsters, but older sources also record him blinding the river god He Bo, seizing that god’s wife, and, in some versions, ruling as a cruel tyrant after his rise to power. Chinese myth preserves both the savior and the despot without resolving the contradiction.