Three-Legged Bird

Also Known As: Chinese 三足烏 sānzúwū, “three-footed crow”, also 金烏 jīnwū, “golden crow”; Korean 삼족오 samjogo; Japanese 八咫烏 Yatagarasu, “eight-span crow”
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Chinese Mythology, Japanese Mythology, Korean Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: The bird lives inside the sun and carries it across the sky, embodying the pure yang principle against the moon’s toad.
Role in Mythos: It is the solar body itself in Chinese cosmology, a royal emblem in Goguryeo Korea, and a divine guide in the Japanese chronicles.
Relation to Humans: Humans depend on it for daylight and were nearly destroyed when ten of them rose at once and had to be shot out of the sky. In Korea and Japan it became a sign of legitimate rule and heaven-sent guidance rather than a threat.

Past the last coastline, in a hot valley where the water steams, there grows a mulberry tree with ten black birds in it. Each bird is a sun. Nine of them wait in the branches while the tenth climbs into a chariot and is driven across the sky by its mother, and when that one comes down the far side of the world another takes the shift. The tree does not burn. In the first century a sceptic named Wang Chong pointed out that it certainly should.

He was arguing with the *Shanhaijing* and the *Huainanzi*, two of the oldest places the bird appears, and he lost, in the sense that everyone went on telling the story anyway. Wang Chong did leave behind the cleanest description of the thing, in his *Lunheng*: within the sun there is a three-legged crow, and within the moon there is a hare and a toad. That one line fixes the whole cosmology in place. A bird up there in the blaze, its opposite number squatting in the cold light across the sky, the hot half and the cold half of the world balanced against each other on an amphibian and a crow.

The bird itself is unremarkable until you count its feet. It is black, of the size and shape anyone would recognise from a winter field, with the same blunt beak and the same oily sheen. Then there is the third leg, set between the other two, and the whole ordinary thing tilts into something else. Han painters were not consistent about it. The silk banner from Lady Dai’s tomb at Mawangdui, buried around 168 BCE, shows a bird perched inside a pink solar disk, and elsewhere in Han tomb art the sun birds have two legs as readily as three. Korean painters were firmer. In the Goguryeo tombs the crow stands inside a wheel of sun with a crest rising from its head like a peacock’s, unmistakable, repeated across chamber after chamber.

Its beginnings run back further than any of the texts. Bird and sun motifs turn up on Neolithic pottery of the Yangshao culture in Henan, thousands of years before anyone wrote the myths down, which suggests the idea of a bird carrying the day is older than the names later given to it. The version that survives makes the ten suns the children of Xihe, the solar goddess, and Di Jun. Their mother drove them out one at a time, from the mulberry at the eastern edge to the mountain in the west, and the arrangement held for a long while.

Then it stopped working. All ten came out on the same morning.

What follows is the part every version keeps. The crops went first, then the rivers, then the stone itself began to give off heat, and the world was being cooked alive under ten suns with no intention of taking turns. An archer was sent down. Yi drew and shot, and nine times something enormous came apart in the sky. Black feathers fell for a long while afterwards, drifting over scorched ground, each one bigger than a man. One sun was left. That is the one still working.

The third leg has attracted explanation for as long as people have looked at it. The reading common in Korea and Japan makes the legs heaven, earth and humanity, all three standing on one body, all three drawing from the same sun. In Chinese terms the crow is pure yang, the fiercest expression of the bright active principle, which is exactly why the toad in the moon has to sit opposite it. None of this appears in the earliest sources. It accumulated, the way such things do.

In Goguryeo the bird stopped being a curiosity and became a claim. It went onto the walls of royal tombs and onto the regalia of kings, the sun in the sky and the king on the ground drawing authority from a single emblem. Nobody paints a crow on a crown by accident.

Japan received the sun crow and did something odd with it. The *Kojiki* of 712 and the *Nihon Shoki* of 720 both tell how Kamu-yamato Iware-biko, remembered afterwards as the first emperor, struggled east from Hyuga and lost his way in the mountains of Kumano when his party was struck down by a hostile god. A great crow was sent to lead him out, and with the bird walking ahead the march ran smoothly through to Yamato. The *Kojiki* says the deity Takamimusubi sent it. The *Nihon Shoki* credits Amaterasu. Neither chronicle says the crow had three legs. The name Yatagarasu means something close to eight-span crow, which is to say a very large one, and the extra leg arrived later out of Chinese solar lore and simply stayed. It flies on the banners at the three Kumano shrines now, and on the badge of the Japanese national football team, guiding a ball instead of an emperor.

Its powers are the powers of the sun and not a great deal besides. It carries light and heat across the whole width of the sky in a day and never tires of the work, and the *Shanhaijing* has it grazing on two grasses of immortality, the ground sun and the spring grow, which is presumably how it keeps going. It sees whatever the daylight sees. When a god needs a message delivered or a lost army walked out of a mountain range, this is the bird that gets sent, because it is already going everywhere.

It has one weakness and it is a large one. It can be shot. Nine of them were, by one man with a bow, and no account suggests they saw it coming or could have done anything if they had. A god a good archer can kill is a strange sort of god. The bird’s strength was never really its own. It belonged to the position it held, and the position turned out to be within range.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the three-legged bird in mythology?

The three-legged bird is a crow with three legs that lives inside the sun, known in China as the sanzuwu or jinwu, in Korea as the samjogo, and in Japan as the Yatagarasu. It appears in the *Shanhaijing*, the *Huainanzi* and Wang Chong’s *Lunheng*, and in Han and Goguryeo tomb art. In the oldest Chinese accounts the bird is not merely a passenger in the sun but the sun itself.

Why does the sun crow have three legs?

No early source explains it. The interpretation common in Korea and Japan reads the three legs as heaven, earth and humanity sharing one body and one sun, while Chinese cosmology treats the crow as the purest expression of yang, paired against the yin toad in the moon. Han tomb art is inconsistent on the point, showing sun birds with two legs as often as three.

Who shot down the sun crows?

The archer Yi shot down nine of the ten sun crows after all ten rose on the same day and began burning the world. The story is told most explicitly in the *Huainanzi*: crops failed, rivers dried and the ground itself grew too hot to bear until Yi was sent down with a bow. The nine birds came apart in the sky and their enormous feathers rained down afterwards, leaving the single sun that still crosses the sky.

Is the Japanese Yatagarasu the same as the Chinese sun crow?

Not originally. The *Kojiki* and *Nihon Shoki* describe Yatagarasu only as a great crow sent from heaven to guide the future Emperor Jimmu through the mountains of Kumano, with the *Kojiki* naming Takamimusubi as its sender and the *Nihon Shoki* naming Amaterasu. The name means roughly eight-span crow, a reference to size, and the three legs were absorbed later from Chinese solar lore.

Where can the three-legged crow be seen today?

It appears on the banners of the three Kumano shrines in Japan and on the emblem of the Japan Football Association, and in Korea it survives on reproductions of Goguryeo tomb murals and royal regalia. The oldest surviving images are far older: the bird perches in a pink sun disk on the silk funeral banner from Lady Dai’s tomb at Mawangdui, buried around 168 BCE.