The Couple Who Became Mandarin Ducks / 韩凭夫妇

The story that invented the Chinese word for "longing for the one you love"

From In Search of the Supernatural (搜神记), Book XI — by Gan Bao (干宝, c. 286–336) · Retold by Cathay Tales

A king stole another man's wife. The husband killed himself. The wife jumped from a tower. The king ordered them buried in separate graves so they would never touch again. Ten days later, two trees grew out of the mounds and tied themselves together at the roots.

The Story

There was once a king of the small state of Song^{[1]Song (宋) — a small state in what is now eastern Henan province, between the larger powers of Chu and Qi during the Warring States period (475–221 BCE). It was annexed by Qi, Chu, and Wei jointly around 286 BCE — about thirty years after this story takes place. Song Kang Wang (宋康王, r. c. 328–286 BCE) was its last king.} named Kang (康王) — "Kang the Vigorous." He was the kind of ruler whose vigor mostly took the form of doing whatever he wanted.

One of his minor officials, a man named Han Ping (韩凭), had a wife. Her family name was He (何), and she was beautiful. The king saw her, decided he wanted her, and took her.

Han Ping was bitter. The king, sensing trouble, had him arrested on a manufactured charge and sentenced him to the chéng dàn (城旦) — the punishment that sent convicts to labor on the city walls in iron collars, from dawn until dark, for four years.

That was the king's mistake. He should have killed him.

Han Ping's wife — we only ever learn her family name, never her given name — found a way to smuggle a letter to her husband at the labor camp. She knew the king's spies would intercept it, so she wrote in code. The whole letter was three lines:

Qí yǔ yín yín, hé dà shuǐ shēn, rì chū dāng xīn. 其雨淫淫，河大水深，日出当心。

The rain falls heavy and steady. The river is wide and the water deep. The sun rises directly over the heart.

The king's men intercepted it, exactly as she expected. They brought it to court. The king passed it to his ministers. What does this mean? Decode it.

Most of them were stumped. Then a courtier named Su He (苏贺) spoke up.

"My king," Su He said, "she is telling him three things. The rain falls heavy and steady — she is full of sorrow and longing. The river is wide and the water deep — there is no way for us to reach each other. The sun rises directly over the heart — I have decided to die."

The king laughed at the ingenuity of it. He congratulated Su He on his cleverness. He kept the letter as a curiosity.

Han Ping, of course, was never going to see it.

But he received the message anyway. A few days later, in the labor camp, he killed himself.

When the news reached the palace, Han Ping's wife — now living as a prisoner of the king's lust — knew her time had come.

She prepared with a patience that should have terrified anyone watching her closely. Quietly, over weeks, she rotted her own clothes. She soaked them in damp places, smeared them with secret applications of something corrosive (the old text doesn't say what — vinegar, perhaps, or lye). She wore them anyway, layered, so they still looked like robes. From a distance, she looked like a beautifully dressed woman of the court.

One day the king took her up onto a high tower to admire the view. This was a thing kings did, in the old stories. They took beautiful women up to high towers.

At the edge of the parapet, she jumped.

The guards lunged for her — caught the trailing edge of her sleeve, caught a fistful of silk. The cloth disintegrated in their fingers like wet paper.

She fell.

When they reached her body at the foot of the tower, they found a final letter tucked into the sash at her waist. It read:

The king wished me alive. I wished myself dead. I beg only this: give my bones to my husband. Let us share one grave.

The king read it. The king refused. He ordered her body buried in a separate plot from her husband's — close enough that the two graves could see each other across the field, far enough that they could never touch.

"They loved each other so much," he said, with the kind of smile a man wears when he thinks he has won. "If they can make their graves come together on their own — I won't stop them."

Within one night, a young tree pushed up out of the soil at each grave. By the tenth day, both trees were a full embrace thick.

They were catalpas (梓 zǐ), tall and straight by nature. But these two grew strangely. They bent.

Their trunks curved toward each other across the empty ground between the graves. Their roots, hidden underground, found each other and braided together. Their branches reached out high in the air and interlocked, leaf by leaf, until you could not tell whose canopy was whose.

And in the joined branches, a pair of birds came to nest. A male and a female. The kind of waterfowl that mate for life: yuānyāng (鸳鸯) — what English calls mandarin ducks, though they are not really ducks at all and not really called mandarin in any other language.

The two birds never left the tree. Morning and evening, year after year, they pressed their long necks together and called. The sound, the old text says, was sad enough to move anyone who heard it.

The people of Song mourned the couple in private. They called the two intertwined trees the xiāngsī shù (相思树) — "Tree of Mutual Longing."

This is where the Chinese word xiāngsī (相思) — "the longing of one person for another" — first enters the written record. Before this story, the language did not have a word for it. After this story, every Chinese love poem for two thousand years would use it.

The people of southern China decided the two mandarin ducks were Han Ping and his wife, come back. They have been the symbol of married love in China ever since. A pair of mandarin ducks appears on wedding gifts, embroidered pillows, gold pendants. Couples are still photographed in front of them at parks.

The king who started all of this — Song Kang — was killed about thirty years later when the neighboring states finally got tired of him and divided his kingdom among themselves. The old text does not bother to name how he died.

The ruins of what people called "Han Ping's Wall" were still pointed out, centuries later, near the city of Suiyang (睢阳) in what is now Henan province. There were folk songs about the couple, still sung when Gan Bao wrote this down, around the year 320. Some of them probably survived into the Tang dynasty.

We don't know the wife's given name.

Translator's Reflection

A few things stayed with me after reading this.

The first is that the coded letter is barely a code. The rain falls heavy and steady — anyone in love who'd been separated from their husband for months would understand that line on the first reading. The king's ministers didn't decode it because they weren't looking for sorrow. They were looking for sedition.

The second is the rotted dress. She must have been working on it for weeks, in secret, while sharing meals and a bed with the man who killed her husband. She knew the guards would grab her when she jumped — she had seen them do it before, with other women, probably — and she designed a way to slip out of their hands. That is not despair. That is a plan.

The third is that the king's last cruelty — burying them in separate graves — is the one that fails. The bodies are buried. The trees grow anyway. The birds come anyway. The word xiāngsī enters the language anyway. He took her name, her body, her freedom, even her death. The one thing he could not take was the bond.

The fourth, and the one that hurts, is that we never learn her name. Han Ping has a name. Su He, the minister who decoded the letter, has a name. The king is named twice. The wife is "He's daughter" (何氏) — her family name and a particle meaning of that family. In a story explicitly about her courage, her plan, her death, her becoming the word for love itself, she is anonymous.

She is anonymous in this translation too. I tried to fix it, then realized I couldn't — the historical record genuinely does not preserve her given name. So when you read this, and you remember that two mandarin ducks on a Chinese wedding card mean we will not be separated, not even by death — try to remember her too. Whoever she was.

Next tale: The Red Umbrella That Revealed the Truth — a Song dynasty coroner uses a piece of optical equipment from 1247 to find injuries on a corpse no one can see with the naked eye. → [Coming soon]