The Giant Whose Head Touched the Sky / 长人国：身长七万八千里，专靠一张嘴
A Chinese Gulliver's Travels — Episode 9
From Flowers in the Mirror (镜花缘), Chapter 20 · 第二十回 · 丹桂岩山鸡舞镜 碧梧岭孔雀开屏
By Li Ruzhen (李汝珍, c. 1763–1830) · Translated and annotated by Cathay Tales
A walled city rises on the horizon like a mountain range. The people walking its streets are seventy or eighty feet tall. Their insteps alone are higher than a man's belly. Tang Ao takes one look and runs. Back on the ship, old Duo Jiugong pours wine and tells him that these are the small giants — that somewhere further out to sea, there are men a thousand li long, and men ten thousand li long, and one man so tall his head pressed flat against the firmament. And every single one of them, Duo Jiugong adds, had a mouth to match.
The Story
The travelers have spent the last week working their way down a coast of small, strange kingdoms. They have passed the Silk-Spinners' Wilds (呕丝之野), where women wrapped in raw silk live in mulberry groves and feed on leaves — and where Lin Zhiyang's attempt to bring a few of them home as concubines was vetoed by Duo Jiugong on the grounds that the women, when annoyed, could spin a man into a cocoon before he finished his sentence.[1]The 呕丝之野 (ǒusī zhī yě, "Wilds of Silk-Vomiting Women") is drawn from the Classic of Mountains and Seas, where the women are recorded as living north of the Northern Sea, feeding on mulberry leaves and producing silk from their mouths. Li Ruzhen places them immediately before Cháng-rén Guó in the voyage order. In the Shanhai Jing tradition, these women are sometimes identified with the 蚕神 (cánshén, silk-goddess) of the Shu region. Lin Zhiyang's proposal to bring them home as concubines is characteristic: he has, in the immediately preceding chapters, attempted to sell goods in every port without the least effort to understand local customs beforehand. They have passed the Qǐzhǒng Guó (跂踵国), a nation of square, red-haired fishermen who walk only on their toes, their heels held an inch above the ground for their entire lives, taking each step with the slow, balanced care of men crossing a river on a single plank.[2]The Qǐzhǒng (跂踵) people are also from the Classic of Mountains and Seas, where they are described as walking on the tips of their toes with their heels held off the ground. Li Ruzhen's addition — that they are square, red-haired, and walk with the slow care of men crossing a river on a single plank — is his own. The phrase Tang Ao uses in the original is "宁可湿衣，不可乱步" ("they would rather get their clothes wet than take an irregular step"), which became a minor four-character idiom for a person of excessive, inflexible propriety. Tang Ao watched one of them for ten minutes, decided the place was too rigid to be interesting, and did not go ashore.
On the morning of the eighth day, the lookout calls down from the mast.
There is a city ahead.
The city, when they come within sight of it, is not the kind of city a man expects to see at sea. Its walls rise like a mountain ridge. Its gate towers are taller than the mast of any ship Tang Ao has ever sailed on. The flagstones of its outer boulevard, visible even from half a mile offshore, are the size of courtyard gates. And walking the boulevard, going about what is plainly the ordinary morning business of an ordinary town, are men.
The men are seventy or eighty feet tall.
Lin Zhiyang, who has already gone below to sort a crate of embroidered slippers he hopes to sell at this port, hears Tang Ao's intake of breath and comes back on deck. He takes one look at the city and says, very quietly, that perhaps the embroidered slippers are not the right cargo for this particular country. He goes back below to look for something larger.
Tang Ao and Duo Jiugong go ashore alone.
They walk up the harbor road.
The road is built for people the size of the gate towers. Each flagstone is the size of a small house. The curbstones come up to Tang Ao's chin. They have walked perhaps two hundred paces when three of the local inhabitants round a corner ahead of them, coming down the road in the opposite direction, three long-legged citizens in plain cloth robes, talking among themselves in low voices that carry like distant thunder.
The instep of the nearest giant is, Tang Ao notes with a kind of clinical calm, higher than his own belly.
Tang Ao has read the old books. He has read the passages in the Classic of Mountains and Seas and the Bowuzhi and the various later compendia that describe the Cháng-rén, the long people of the far southeast, as being one or two zhàng tall — perhaps twenty or thirty feet.[3]The bare name Cháng-rén Guó (长人国, "Country of Tall People") is inherited from the Classic of Mountains and Seas (《山海经·大荒东经》/ Dàhuāng Dōngjīng), which records a people east of the Great Wilds who are described only as "very tall" with no specific measurement given. Earlier commentators had estimated the height at one or two zhàng (roughly 10–20 feet / 3–6 meters), which is the figure Tang Ao says he has read in "the ancients." Li Ruzhen's seven or eight zhàng (70–80 feet / 21–24 meters) is his own inflation, designed to make the country's inhabitants genuinely frightening — and, more importantly, to set up Duo Jiugong's subsequent escalation. He had assumed, being a classically educated man of the Tang dynasty (and, in this story, the Wu Zhou interregnum), that those passages were the usual exaggerations of armchair geographers. He had assumed, specifically, that no human being could be twenty feet tall and continue to function.
The man coming down the road is not twenty feet tall. He is seventy or eighty feet tall, and he is walking, and he is talking, and his companion is laughing, and neither of them is paying the two small figures on the road the smallest attention.
Tang Ao grabs Duo Jiugong by the sleeve and turns around.
They walk back to the boat at a pace that is, by the standards of two men in their fifties and seventies, undignified in the extreme.
"Jiugong!" Tang Ao says, once they are back on deck and the ship has pushed a safer distance offshore. "I have read in the ancients that the long people are one or two zhàng tall. I thought it was a tale. The ones we just saw were seven or eight zhàng. Their feet were swaying in the air above us. The backs of their feet were higher than our bellies. If one of them had seen us and picked us up between two fingers for a closer look, we would have been dangling thirty feet off the ground. I am very glad we left when we did."
Duo Jiugong, who has caught his breath more quickly, pours himself a cup of wine.
"The ones you saw today," he says, "are not particularly long."
Tang Ao stares at him.
"If you compared them to the really long ones," Duo Jiugong says, taking a slow sip, "the men we just fled from would come up, at most, to the other fellow's ankle."
Lin Zhiyang, who has come back on deck in time to hear this, sits down hard on a coil of rope.
Duo Jiugong settles into his chair. He is, by now, in his element. The story of the long people is one he has been saving. He heard it years ago, he explains, on a long outer-ocean voyage, in a waterfront tavern somewhere south of everything, when a group of old sailors — each of them with more decades at sea than Duo Jiugong himself — got onto the subject of the tallest man any of them had ever seen. Each old sailor told a story. Each story was taller than the last. Duo Jiugong has been carrying them around ever since, waiting for an audience that would believe the first one, let alone the fifth.
He begins.
The first old sailor, Duo Jiugong says, told them that when he was a young man on a far southern run, he had once seen with his own eyes a long person whose body stretched for more than a thousand li. His waist alone was over a hundred li wide. He drank heavenly wine — the thin, cold rain that condenses above the highest clouds — and he drank five hundred dǒu of it in a single sitting.[4]天酒 (tiānjiǔ, "heavenly wine") is a Chinese mythological term for the cold moisture that condenses in the upper atmosphere above the highest clouds — a kind of celestial dew. The concept appears in the Huainanzi and in various Daoist alchemical texts, where it is associated with long-life elixirs. A giant who drinks five hundred dǒu (a dǒu is roughly 5–10 liters) of it in a sitting is, among other things, a giant who has access to a substance ordinary humans cannot reach. The sailor had watched him, across an entire day, from the deck of a ship that had the misfortune to be becalmed within view of him. The sailor had later found the man's name in an old book. His name was Wúlù (无路, "No Road").
Nobody in the tavern, Duo Jiugong says, was particularly impressed.
The second old sailor said that he had once seen, north of the land of Dingling (丁零), a long person lying down on the ground. The man was lying on his side. His height, even recumbent, was like a mountain. When he stamped his foot, a valley formed. When he turned over, he dammed a river. His length, measured along the ground, was more than ten thousand li.
The first old sailor said nothing.
The third old sailor said that the Wúlù of a thousand li was nothing. He had once heard of, and in an old travel book seen an account of, a long person so large that when he had his long robe made, every bolt of cloth in the world was bought up, and every tailor in the world was hired, and they worked for several years before the robe was finished. During those years, the price of cloth rose everywhere, and the wages of tailors rose everywhere, and every cloth merchant and every tailor in the world got rich. To this day, the third old sailor said, cloth shops and tailor shops throughout the southern oceans still said a quiet prayer, every morning, that the long person might commission another robe, so that they could all make a second fortune.
And, the third old sailor added — warming to his own story now — there had been a single tailor, working on the hem of the robe, who had stolen a single scrap of cloth from the lining. That single scrap had been enough, when the tailor brought it home and sold it, for him to give up tailoring and open a cloth shop of his own, a large one, and live in comfort for the rest of his life.
Lin Zhiyang, hearing this, makes a small, involuntary, merchant's noise of respect.
The third old sailor, Duo Jiugong says, then told them the long person's exact height. From the crown of his head to the sole of his foot, he was — neither more nor less — exactly 193,500 li.
The other old sailors asked him, naturally, how the measurement could be so precise.
"Because the ancients tell us," the third old sailor said, "that the distance from earth to heaven is 193,500 li. This man's head touched the sky, and his feet stood on the earth. So his height was exactly that."
There was a pause.
One of the other sailors observed that the hard wind of the upper heavens — the gāng fēng (刚风), the cutting stratospheric gale in which, the ancients said, even birds were torn to mid-air silk if they flew too high — must have made the man's face extremely uncomfortable, since his head was, by this account, pressed up against it.[5]The 刚风 (gāng fēng, "hard wind") is a concept from Chinese cosmology. The gāng fēng is the wind of the uppermost atmosphere, the layer just below the celestial sphere, and it was believed to be so strong that "birds that fly too high are dissolved into sky-silk" (飞鸟过高，都被吹的化为天丝). The third old sailor's question — how the giant's face could withstand it — is a real question within the cosmology: if the man's head is literally touching the sky, his face is literally in the gāng fēng, and anything in the gāng fēng is torn apart. The answer — that his face is too thick — is the chapter's central pun made physical.
"Oh," said the third old sailor, "his face was very thick. The wind didn't bother him at all."
The others asked how he knew the man's face was thick.
"If his face weren't thick," the third old sailor said, "how could his mouth keep talking such enormous nonsense all day long, without ever once being afraid that people would laugh at him?"[6]The phrase 脸厚 (liǎn hòu) is, in modern Chinese, the everyday word for "shameless." In classical usage the more common term was 厚颜 (hòu yán, "thick-faced"), from the Classic of Odes (《诗经》): "厚颜如厚" — roughly, "a face as thick as a wall." Li Ruzhen's joke works on both registers: within the fiction, the giant's face is literally thick enough to withstand the heavenly wind; outside the fiction, every reader would recognize the idiom and understand that the "giant" being described is anyone who talks big without embarrassment. The modern Mandarin word for a boaster who cannot be shamed is still 厚脸皮 (hòuliánpí, "thick-faced").
Tang Ao laughs so hard he has to set his wine cup down.
Duo Jiugong, encouraged, continues.
A fourth old sailor, he says, then spoke up. The fourth sailor said that the third sailor's long person — the one 193,500 li tall, with his head pressed against the sky — was all very well, but he, the fourth sailor, had once seen a long person who was five hundred li taller than that.
The other sailors asked how such a man could even lift his head, since there was no sky above the sky for him to lift it into.
"He couldn't," the fourth sailor said. "He was so large that he had forgotten there was a sky above him at all. He spent his whole life with his head bowed, muddling along, because there was nowhere for him to lift it to."
A fifth old sailor, Duo Jiugong says, then said that none of these were worth mentioning. He had once known of a long person who, lying down, was already 193,500 li tall. His back was on the ground. His belly was pressed against the sky.
The others asked how a man in that position could ever stand up.
"He couldn't stand up," the fifth sailor said. "He couldn't even roll over. He just lay there on his back with his two eyes looking at the sky, and there was nothing in the world he considered worth noticing. That is what I call really large."
The third old sailor, Duo Jiugong says, thought about this for a while and then conceded the point.
Lin Zhiyang, by this stage of the story, has forgotten all about the embroidered slippers. He wants to know whether these long people buy things, and if so, what. Duo Jiugong says that the long people of the country they have just left are, in fact, enthusiastic customers; that the ship's cargo of flower-pots, in particular, has been known to do very well there, since the long people have proportionally large houses and proportionally large gardens and a proportionally large need for things to put plants in.
Lin Zhiyang, who had not previously thought of flower-pots as a serious line of trade, goes off to check the hold.
He comes back, later in the afternoon, in a very good mood. He has sold two crates of ordinary household goods and, on Tang Ao's behalf, a substantial batch of the small porcelain flower-pots that Tang Ao had been carrying as ballast. The long people paid happily, in silver, at prices Lin Zhiyang describes as embarrassing.
That evening, over the customary wine on the afterdeck, Lin Zhiyang holds up his cup and makes a small speech about the nature of commerce.
"I have always said," he says, "that business is entirely a matter of luck. Here I brought silk and embroidery and all the expensive things, thinking this was a civilized country that would appreciate them. What did they buy? Empty jars I have been carrying since the last port because nobody else wanted them. And my brother-in-law's flower-pots, which he brought aboard because they were cheaper than stone for ballast. The things I thought were valuable, I couldn't give away. The things I thought were worthless, they treated as treasure. A man can be the best salesman in the world and still go hungry if the luck isn't on his side."
Tang Ao, who is pleasantly drunk on the flower-pot money, says that there is a lesson in this and that he is not entirely sure what it is.
Duo Jiugong, looking back at the enormous city shrinking on the horizon, says that the lesson is the same one every country has taught them so far. The people who look the largest, he says, are not always the largest in any way that matters. The ones whose heads touch the sky, in particular, tend to be the ones whose faces are thickest — and the thicker the face, the easier it is for them to keep saying that their heads touch the sky, whether or not the sky is actually there.
Tang Ao says that this is a cynical way to look at the world.
Duo Jiugong says that he is seventy years old and that he has found cynicism a good deal more accurate than the alternative.
The ship sails on.
Why This Chapter Is Funnier Than It Looks
Flowers in the Mirror has, by this point in the voyage, trained its readers to expect a certain structure. The boat arrives at a country. The country has a peculiar physical feature. The peculiar physical feature turns out, by a series of careful satirical steps, to be a metaphor for a moral failing of Qing-dynasty Chinese society. Tang Ao, Lin Zhiyang, and Duo Jiugong walk around the metaphor for a while. They get into trouble. They leave. Duo Jiugong, on the boat, makes a dry observation that closes the joke.
The chapter on Cháng-rén Guó follows this structure — and then, halfway through, it does something structurally unusual. It does not let the travelers actually explore the country. Tang Ao and Duo Jiugong go ashore, see three of the inhabitants, get frightened, and leave. The actual satirical content of the chapter is not something they observe in the streets of the country; it is a story Duo Jiugong tells on the boat afterwards, in the form of a nested series of ever-taller tall tales told by ever-older old sailors.
This is a strange piece of narrative construction, and I think it is deliberate.
The reason Li Ruzhen cannot let Tang Ao and Duo Jiugong walk around the Country of Tall People is that the Country of Tall People is not a place. It is a conversation. A country of men seventy feet tall would be, if you actually took the premise seriously, a country of men who need enormous houses, enormous clothes, enormous food, enormous tools. A realist novelist would have to write all of that. Li Ruzhen is not interested in any of it. The tall people in the street exist for exactly one purpose: they establish that the benchmark for "long" is longer than you think. Once that benchmark is established, the chapter can move to its real subject, which is the human activity of saying that you are bigger than the next man.
The five old sailors in Duo Jiugong's story are not actually describing a physical creature. They are having a conversation men have been having since language was invented. The first man says he has seen a man a thousand li long. The second man says he has seen a man ten thousand li long. The third man says he has heard of a man 193,500 li long — and gives, as his evidence, the beautifully circular argument that the man's head touched the sky, and the distance from earth to sky is 193,500 li, and therefore the man was 193,500 li tall. The fourth man says his man was five hundred li taller than that, and therefore could not lift his head because there was no sky above the sky. The fifth man says his man was lying on his back with his belly against the sky and could not even roll over, and that this — the inability to move, the inability to see anything except the sky — is what really counts as large.
This is not a natural-history report. It is a transcript of a boasting contest. Each sailor's giant is less a creature than a unit of rhetorical inflation, and each sailor raises the bid. The thousand-li man is one-upped by the ten-thousand-li man. The ten-thousand-li man is one-upped by the man-longer-than-the-earth-is-high. The man-longer-than-the-earth-is-high is one-upped by the man who is five hundred li longer than that. The five-hundred-li-longer man is one-upped by the man who is the same length but lying down. By the fifth story, the competitors have stopped competing on size entirely and are competing on posture — the final giant cannot even stand, but his attitude of looking at the sky and noticing nothing else is declared, by the fifth sailor, to be the genuine article.
And then, on top of all of this, Li Ruzhen lays the punchline that makes the chapter work: every single one of these giants, the sailors agree, has a face so thick that the hard wind of heaven cannot damage it — because if his face were not thick, he could not say such enormous things all day without being afraid of ridicule.
The Chinese term is 脸厚 (liǎn hòu), "thick-faced," and it is one of the great everyday insults of the language. A thick-faced person is a person who is shameless in a specific and social sense: he says things that are plainly untrue or plainly self-aggrandizing, and he says them without the physiological reaction of embarrassment. His face does not flush. His eyes do not drop. The skin of his face, in the metaphor, has grown so thick that the social gaze of other people can no longer penetrate it. Li Ruzhen's joke is that the giant whose head touches the sky is not a physical being at all. He is a metaphor for the thick-faced boaster, taken literally. A man who says he is the biggest in the world, and who keeps saying it in the face of all evidence, and who is not embarrassed when other men laugh — that man has a head that touches the sky, and that man has a face thick enough to withstand the heavenly wind. The physical giant in the story is the visual embodiment of a social type everyone in Li Ruzhen's readership had met.
The type has not disappeared.
The smaller, quieter joke of the chapter — the one I almost missed on first reading — is the bit about the tailor's scrap.
When the third old sailor describes the making of the 193,500-li man's long robe, he does not dwell on the grandeur of the garment. He dwells on its economic effects. The commission buys up every bolt of cloth on earth. It hires every tailor on earth. It takes years. During those years, cloth prices rise, tailor wages rise, and everyone in the cloth-and-tailoring economy makes a fortune. A single tailor, stealing a single scrap from the hem, is able to retire from the scrap alone and open his own cloth shop. Two hundred years later — the sailor says — cloth merchants and tailors are still praying, every morning, that the giant will order another robe.
This is, when you think about it, an extraordinarily precise description of what a large, lying, self-aggrandizing public figure does to an economy. The giant himself is not productive. He does not make cloth. He does not sew. All he does is order an impossibly large robe — and the order, by its sheer impossible scale, sets an entire industry in motion. Cloth is woven. Tailors are hired. Fortunes are made. A single scrap, falling from the hem of the giant's vanity, is enough to set up a small businessman for life. And the industry, once set in motion, begins to pray for the giant to keep boasting — because the boasting is what keeps the orders coming. The tailors do not care whether the robe fits. They do not care whether the giant is, in fact, 193,500 li tall. They care that the work exists.
Li Ruzhen is writing, in 1818, about the economy of bullshit — about the way in which large and unfounded claims, once they enter the commercial system, generate real secondary wealth for everyone around them, and about the way in which the people who benefit from that wealth become, over time, the loudest defenders of the claims. The tailor who got rich from a stolen scrap does not go around telling people the giant is not really that tall. The cloth merchant whose prices rose during the robe's making does not go around questioning the measurement. Every morning, in every cloth shop and tailor shop the world over, a small prayer is said for the giant's continued vanity.
I have read a certain amount of Qing-dynasty satire. I cannot think of another passage in which the economic structure of sycophancy is described this compactly.
The final punchline of the chapter — the one that lands only after you have put the book down — is Lin Zhiyang's commercial report.
Lin Zhiyang, the merchant, brings silk and embroidery to the Country of Tall People. The silk and embroidery are the goods a merchant ought to bring to a civilized country: high-value, high-margin, tasteful. They do not sell. What sells is empty jars and flower-pots used as ballast. The giants buy, in other words, things Lin Zhiyang did not even know he was selling — things he was carrying because they were cheaper than rocks, things he had planned to throw away when he found better ballast at the next port.
Lin Zhiyang's own moral — "business is a matter of luck" — is the moral a merchant draws. Tang Ao's half-formed moral — "there is a lesson here and I am not sure what it is" — is the moral a scholar draws. Duo Jiugong's moral — "the people who look largest are not largest in any way that matters" — is the moral the old sailor has been drawing, in one form or another, since the voyage began.
But I think Li Ruzhen has a fourth moral in mind, and I think it is aimed directly at the boasting giants of the chapter's tall-tale section. The long people buy flower-pots and empty jars. They do not buy silk. They do not buy embroidery. They do not, so far as we are told, buy anything that a reasonable person would consider an appropriate object for a giant's attention. The goods that fit their actual lives are the small, unglamorous, useful things; the goods that fit their claimed size are the things nobody buys. The chapter is, among other things, a small essay on the gap between what a man says he is and what he will actually pay for — and the merchant, who has no philosophical investment in either, is the only one who walks away from the country with a profit.
The giants can talk all they like about the distance from earth to heaven. The tailor with the stolen scrap retires. The merchant with the flower-pots makes his margin. The giant himself, at the end of the chapter, is still standing in the street with his head in the hard wind, talking.
Nobody is measuring him.
Notes & Further Reading
Next Flowers in the Mirror stop: The Kingdom of the White People (Baimin Guo, Tale 70 in our sequence), where the scholars are beautiful and cannot read; and, later in the rotation, the further sea-lane countries including Shēnmù Guó (深目国, eyes in the palm) and Chángbì Guó (长臂国, arms two zhàng long). In Chapter 39, the kings of Cháng-rén, Cháng-bì, and Cháng-gǔ gather together at Xuānyuán for a banquet, where the Long-Arm king points out to the Long-Leg king that the two of them, stacked on top of each other, make an excellent fisherman.
📜 Original Text in Classical Chinese · 文言原文（《镜花缘》第二十回·长人国节选）
【前情提要】 唐敖、林之洋、多九公三人乘船游历海外诸国。前已历君子国、两面国、黑齿国、淑士国、女儿国、无肠国、大人国、白民国等。本章途经呕丝之野（女子以丝绵缠身、栖于桑林、食桑吐丝）、跂踵国（身长八尺、身宽八尺、赤发蓬头、以脚指行走、脚跟不落地），随后抵达——
这日到了一个大邦，远远望见一座城池，就如峻岭一般，好不巍峨。原来却是长人国。
林之洋自去卖货。唐敖同多九公上去，见了几个长人，吓的飞忙走回道：「九公！吓杀小弟了！当日我见古人书中，言长人身长一二十丈，以为必无这事，那知今日见的，竟有七八丈高，半空中晃晃荡荡，他的脚面比我们肚腹还高，令人望着好不害怕！幸亏早早逃走，他若看见，将我们用手提起，放在面前望望，我们身子已在数丈之外了！」
多九公道：「今日所见长人并不算长。若以极长的比较，他也只好算个脚面。老大向在外洋同几位老翁闲谈，各说生平所见长人。内中有位老翁道：『当日我在海外，曾见一个长人，身长千余里，腰宽百余里；好饮天酒，每日一饮五百斗。当时看了，甚觉诧异。后来因见古书，才知名叫「无路」。』又一老翁道：『老朽向在丁零之北，见一长人，卧在地下，其高如山，顿脚成谷，横身塞川，其长万余里。』又一老翁道：『我曾见一极长之人，若将无路比较，那无路只好算他脚面。莫讲别的，单讲他身上这件长衫，当日做时，不但天下的布都被他买绝，连天下的裁缝也都雇完，做了数年才能做成。那时布的行情也长了，裁缝工价也贵了，人人发财。所以布店同裁缝铺至今还在那里祷告，但愿长人再做一件长衫，他们又好齐行了。彼时有一个裁缝，在那长衫底襟上偷了一块布，后来就将这布开了一个大布店，因此弃了本行，另做布行交易。你道这个长人身长若干？原来这人连头带脚，不长不短，恰恰十九万三千五百里！』众老翁都问道：『为何算的这样详细？』老翁道：『古人言由天至地有如此之高，此人恰恰头顶天、脚踹地，所以才知就是这个里数。他不独身子长的恁高，并且那张大嘴还爱说大话，倒是身口相应。』众老翁道：『闻得天上刚风最硬，每每飞鸟过高，都被吹的化为天丝。这位长人头既顶天，他的脸上岂不吹坏么？』老翁道：『这人极其脸厚，所以不怕风吹。』众老翁道：『怎晓他的脸厚？』老翁道：『他脸如果不厚，为何满嘴只管说大话，总不怕人耻笑呢？』旁边有位老翁道：『老兄以为这人头顶天、脚踹地就算极长了，那知老汉见过一个长人，较之刚才所说还长五百里。』众老翁道：『这人比天还大，不知怎能抬起头来？』老翁道：『他只顾大了，那知上面有天，因此只好低头混了一世。』又一老翁道：『你们所说这些长人，何足为奇！当年我见一人，睡在地下就有十九万三千五百里之高，脊背在地，肚腹顶天，这才大哩！』众老翁道：『此人肚腹业已顶天，毕竟怎样立起？倒要请教。』老翁道：『他睡在那里，两眼望着天，真是目空一切，旁若无人。如此之大，莫讲不能立起，并且翻身还不能哩！』
说着闲话，回到船上。林之洋卖了两样货物，并替唐敖卖了许多花盆，甚觉得利。郎舅两个，不免又是一番痛饮。林之洋笑道：「俺看天下事只要凑巧：素日俺同妹夫饮酒存的空坛，还有向年旧坛，俺因弃了可惜，随他撂在舱中，那知今日倒将这个出脱；前在小人国，也是无意卖了许多蚕茧。这两样都是并不值钱的，不想他们视如至宝，倒会获利；俺带的正经货物，倒不得价。人说买卖生意，全要机会，若不凑巧，随你会卖也不中用。」唐敖道：「……」
【后续走向】 长人国之后，三人续经麟凤山、碧梧岭等地，至白民国（第二十二回，详 Tale 070 →），其后再历淑士国、两面国、厌火国、寿麻国、结胸国、长臂国、翼民国、豕喙国、伯虑国等多国。第三十九回「轩辕国诸王祝寿」中，长人王、长臂王、长股王、聂耳王、深目王、翼民王、女儿王等海外诸王朝会于轩辕国，长臂王向长股王道「王兄腿长两丈，小弟臂长两丈，若到海中取鱼，王兄将我驼在肩上，你的腿长可以不怕水漫，我的臂长可以深处取鱼，岂非绝好渔翁么」——与本章长人主题遥相呼应。
Source: 《镜花缘·第二十回·丹桂岩山鸡舞镜 碧梧岭孔雀开屏》— 清·李汝珍. Public domain. 凤凰网 · 镜花缘 第二十回 · 识典古籍 · 镜花缘.
🏛️ Historical Context · 历史背景
The chapter in the novel. Cháng-rén Guó (长人国) appears in Chapter 20 of Flowers in the Mirror, sandwiched between the Qǐzhǒng (跂踵) people and the White People (白民国) of Chapter 22. The order of countries in this section of the novel does not follow a single source text; Li Ruzhen is freely drawing from the Classic of Mountains and Seas (《山海经》), the Bowuzhi (《博物志》) of Zhang Hua, the Taiping Yulan (《太平御览》), and various later encyclopedias, arranging them into a voyage sequence that alternates between visual grotesquerie and moral satire. The long people are one of the oldest elements in the Chinese mythic vocabulary — the Shanhai Jing places them in the east beyond the Great Wilds — but Li Ruzhen's treatment of them is almost entirely original. The physical encounter in the street is over in two paragraphs; the rest of the chapter is Duo Jiugong's nested story of the five old sailors.
The tall-tale tradition in Chinese literature. The form Li Ruzhen is using — a chain of one-upmanship stories, each speaker claiming to have seen something larger than the last — has a long history in both the xiaoshuo (笔记小说) anecdote tradition and the sujiang (俗讲) popular storytelling tradition. The Qixie Ji (《齐谐记》) of the Southern Dynasties and the Taiping Guangji (《太平广记》) of the Song both contain sequences of "I have seen something stranger" stories, and the Ming vernacular novel inherited the form directly. What distinguishes Li Ruzhen's version from its predecessors is the final turn of the screw: every giant in the sequence is, by explicit authorial commentary, a boaster. The thousand-li man drinks five hundred dǒu of heavenly wine — a conspicuous display. The 193,500-li man has a mouth that "loves to talk big" and a face "thick enough not to fear ridicule." The man five hundred li taller cannot lift his head because he has "forgotten there is a sky above him." The final giant, lying on his back with his belly against the sky, "looks at the sky with both eyes and considers everything else beneath notice" (目空一切，旁若无人). Each escalation is, in other words, not merely an escalation in physical size but an escalation in a recognizable moral posture — the postures, respectively, of the heavy drinker, the shameless boaster, the man who has lost touch with reality, and the man who is so pleased with himself that he cannot even move. The chapter reads, in this light, as a small taxonomy of arrogance rendered in the form of a tall-tale contest.
The economic satire. The tailor's-scrap episode — in which the commissioning of an impossibly large robe drives up cloth prices and tailor wages worldwide, making fortunes for an entire industry and producing a retired cloth-merchant from a single stolen hem-fragment — has no direct antecedent in the Shanhai Jing or the Bowuzhi. It is pure Li Ruzhen. The satire operates on at least three levels. At the first level, it is a joke about bureaucratic waste: the giant's robe is the Qing-dynasty equivalent of a procurement scandal, in which an impossibly large government commission distorts an entire market for the benefit of the contractors. At the second level, it is a joke about court politics: the giant is the emperor, the robe is the empire, the tailors are the officials and eunuchs who grow rich on imperial commissions, and the tailor who steals the scrap and sets up his own shop is the functionary who embezzles from the imperial budget and retires on the proceeds. At the third level, and I think the sharpest, it is a joke about the economy of prestige: the giant's boasting does not produce anything, but the claim that the giant is 193,500 li tall produces real economic activity around it, and the people who benefit from that activity become invested in the claim. The tailors do not question the measurement. The cloth merchants do not question the measurement. They are, in the words of the story, praying every morning that the giant orders another robe. Li Ruzhen is describing, in 1818, a structural feature of authoritarian political economy that has not become less relevant since.
The "thick face" idiom. The phrase 脸厚 (liǎn hòu) and its more classical form 厚颜 (hòu yán) have been part of the Chinese moral vocabulary since at least the Classic of Odes. The Shijing (《诗经·小雅·巧言》) line "巧言如簧，颜之厚矣" ("clever words like a reed-organ; a face that is thick indeed") is the locus classicus, and it was already, in Confucius's time, the standard term for a person who can say disgraceful things without showing disgrace. By the Qing, the term had expanded into colloquial usage as 厚脸皮 (hòuliánpí) and 脸皮厚 (liǎnpí hòu), both of which remain in everyday Mandarin. Li Ruzhen's pun — the giant's face is literally thick, because it must withstand the gāng fēng of the upper heavens — is a vernacular joke made possible by the fact that the metaphorical meaning of "thick face" was already so well established that the literal meaning could be reactivated as a punchline. This is a technique Li Ruzhen uses throughout Flowers in the Mirror: he takes a common Chinese idiom, builds a country around its literal meaning, and then lets the inhabitants of that country act out the idiom as though it were physics. The two-faced people of Chapter 9 are the literal version of 两面三刀 ("two faces, three knives," two-faced treachery). The no-bowels people of Chapter 14 are the literal version of 没肠子 ("no bowels," thoughtless/careless). The tall people of Chapter 20 are the literal version of 说大话 ("talk big," boast) and 厚脸皮 ("thick-faced," shameless).
The real-world target. As with every chapter of the voyage, the obvious question is: whom, specifically, is Li Ruzhen making fun of? The answer, for Cháng-rén Guó, is almost certainly the high officials of the Jiaqing-era court whom Li Ruzhen had watched, from his lowly position as a local tutor and minor official in Haizhou, making grandiose claims about their own competence, their own virtue, and their own importance to the empire, while doing very little that was useful. The Jiaqing reign (1796–1820) was, by the 1810s, a period of slow institutional decay: the White Lotus Rebellion had been suppressed only at enormous cost; the opium trade was expanding along the southern coast; the Yellow River administration had become a byword for corruption; and the court's response to all of these problems was, increasingly, a rhetoric of grand self-congratulation in which officials described their own modest measures in language suitable for the founding of a dynasty. Li Ruzhen's giants — men whose heads touch the sky, whose robes require every tailor in the world, and whose faces are too thick to be damaged by the wind — are, in this context, not foreigners. They are Chinese officials, made foreign by the voyage's distancing device. The book does not say so. The book only describes a country.
Connection to other Cathay Tales. This is the ninth Flowers in the Mirror tale on Cathay Tales. The earlier eight — Junzi Guo (Tale 010), Liangmian Guo (Tale 019), Nü'er Guo (Tale 027), Heichi Guo (Tale 036), Shushi Guo (Tale 044), Wuchang Guo (Tale 053), Daren Guo (Tale 056), and Baimin Guo (Tale 070) — cover the eight most-quoted imaginary countries of the novel's first half. In Tale 056 (Daren Guo), Duo Jiugong explicitly distinguishes Daren ("Great People," moral greatness) from Changren ("Long People," physical size), noting that the latter are "much further south and we will reach them later" — a direct Chekhov's-gun setup for this chapter. The Long-Arm and Long-Leg kings who appear in the Chapter 39 banquet scene have not yet been translated in our sequence but are natural candidates for a later rotation.
Translator's Note
This is one of the shortest physical-encounter chapters in Flowers in the Mirror, and one of the longest sustained jokes. Li Ruzhen gives the giants themselves barely two paragraphs; he gives the boasting contest two full pages. I have tried to preserve the rhythm of escalation — each old sailor's giant a little more impossible than the last — and to keep the final punchline about the "thick face" as dry in English as it is in the original. The Chinese joke depends on a pun that does not survive translation, and I have done what a translator can do: rendered it flat, and explained it in the notes.
— Wang Cai
Related Tales
If you enjoyed this story, you might also like:
- The Country Where Your Soul Showed Beneath Your Feet: A Qing Satire on Moral Visibility — Duo Jiugong distinguishes the "Great People" from the "Long People"
- The Country Where the Teacher Read Every Character Wrong — the country where appearance and reality have hired separate lawyers
- The Country with No Bowels: A Qing Satire on Misers — where the rich save the master's leftovers to feed the servants
- The Country of Two Faces: A Qing Satire on the Two-Faced Official — where every citizen wears a second face on the back of his head
The 呕丝之野 (ǒusī zhī yě, "Wilds of Silk-Vomiting Women") is drawn from the Classic of Mountains and Seas, where the women are recorded as living north of the Northern Sea, feeding on mulberry leaves and producing silk from their mouths. Li Ruzhen places them immediately before Cháng-rén Guó in the voyage order. In the Shanhai Jing tradition, these women are sometimes identified with the 蚕神 (cánshén, silk-goddess) of the Shu region. Lin Zhiyang's proposal to bring them home as concubines is characteristic: he has, in the immediately preceding chapters, attempted to sell goods in every port without the least effort to understand local customs beforehand. ↩
The Qǐzhǒng (跂踵) people are also from the Classic of Mountains and Seas, where they are described as walking on the tips of their toes with their heels held off the ground. Li Ruzhen's addition — that they are square, red-haired, and walk with the slow care of men crossing a river on a single plank — is his own. The phrase Tang Ao uses in the original is "宁可湿衣，不可乱步" ("they would rather get their clothes wet than take an irregular step"), which became a minor four-character idiom for a person of excessive, inflexible propriety. ↩
The bare name Cháng-rén Guó (长人国, "Country of Tall People") is inherited from the Classic of Mountains and Seas (《山海经·大荒东经》/ Dàhuāng Dōngjīng), which records a people east of the Great Wilds who are described only as "very tall" with no specific measurement given. Earlier commentators had estimated the height at one or two zhàng (roughly 10–20 feet / 3–6 meters), which is the figure Tang Ao says he has read in "the ancients." Li Ruzhen's seven or eight zhàng (70–80 feet / 21–24 meters) is his own inflation, designed to make the country's inhabitants genuinely frightening — and, more importantly, to set up Duo Jiugong's subsequent escalation. ↩
天酒 (tiānjiǔ, "heavenly wine") is a Chinese mythological term for the cold moisture that condenses in the upper atmosphere above the highest clouds — a kind of celestial dew. The concept appears in the Huainanzi and in various Daoist alchemical texts, where it is associated with long-life elixirs. A giant who drinks five hundred dǒu (a dǒu is roughly 5–10 liters) of it in a sitting is, among other things, a giant who has access to a substance ordinary humans cannot reach. ↩
The 刚风 (gāng fēng, "hard wind") is a concept from Chinese cosmology. The gāng fēng is the wind of the uppermost atmosphere, the layer just below the celestial sphere, and it was believed to be so strong that "birds that fly too high are dissolved into sky-silk" (飞鸟过高，都被吹的化为天丝). The third old sailor's question — how the giant's face could withstand it — is a real question within the cosmology: if the man's head is literally touching the sky, his face is literally in the gāng fēng, and anything in the gāng fēng is torn apart. The answer — that his face is too thick — is the chapter's central pun made physical. ↩
The phrase 脸厚 (liǎn hòu) is, in modern Chinese, the everyday word for "shameless." In classical usage the more common term was 厚颜 (hòu yán, "thick-faced"), from the Classic of Odes (《诗经》): "厚颜如厚" — roughly, "a face as thick as a wall." Li Ruzhen's joke works on both registers: within the fiction, the giant's face is literally thick enough to withstand the heavenly wind; outside the fiction, every reader would recognize the idiom and understand that the "giant" being described is anyone who talks big without embarrassment. The modern Mandarin word for a boaster who cannot be shamed is still 厚脸皮 (hòuliánpí, "thick-faced"). ↩