The Son Who Cut Off His Own Head for Revenge / 干将莫邪 · 三王墓
A father killed for a sword. A son too easy to recognize. And a stranger on the road who said: give me your head and I'll do the rest.
From In Search of the Supernatural (搜神记), Book XI — by Gan Bao (干宝, c. 286–336) · Retold by Cathay Tales
A swordsmith forged the king a pair of legendary blades, then hid the better one in the wall and died for it. Years later his son went looking for revenge with the wrong head — and a stranger on the road offered to carry it for him.
The Story
In the kingdom of Chu (楚, a powerful southern state during the late Spring and Autumn period, roughly the 5th century BCE) there was a swordsmith named Gan Jiang (干将, the most renowned blade-maker of his generation). The king commissioned him to forge a sword, and Gan Jiang labored at the forge for three full years before the work was complete.
What he made was not one sword but a pair — male and female, twin blades from the same fire.[1]The male/female sword pair is one of the oldest motifs in Chinese metallurgical folklore. The names Gan Jiang and Mo Ye eventually became the names of the swords themselves — Gan Jiang (male) and Mo Ye (female) — and "Gan Jiang Mo Ye" remains a standard idiom in Chinese for "legendary weapon." The story's tension between the two blades — only one delivered, only one hidden — is also a tension between what a craftsman owes a tyrant and what he owes his own work. He knew, the moment they were finished, two things. The first was that the king would be angry that the work had taken so long, and would kill him. The second was that any king who killed the man who had made his sword did not deserve to keep both blades.
His wife Mo Ye (莫邪) was heavily pregnant. He spoke to her before he left to deliver the commission:
"I have made the king his sword, and it has taken me three years, and he will be angry, and when I go to him he will kill me. If the child you are carrying is a boy, when he is grown, tell him this: Go out the door. Look toward the South Mountain. There is a pine tree growing on a stone. The sword is in its back."
Then he took only the female blade and went to court.
The king looked at the sword and ordered his men to examine it. The men reported: "There were two — one male, one female. The female has come. The male has not." The king was already in a fury. He had Gan Jiang killed.
Mo Ye gave birth to a boy. She named him Chi (赤, "red," but in some versions of the story Chi Bi 赤比, and in popular memory he became Mei Jian Chi (眉间尺) — "Inch-Between-the-Brows," for the unusual width of his forehead).
When the boy was grown, he asked his mother where his father was. She told him the whole story — the three years, the king's anger, the hidden message about the pine and the stone. The boy went outside and looked south. There was no mountain visible from the door. But in front of the house stood a pine pillar set on a stone base. He took an axe and split the stone open. The male sword was inside, exactly where his father had said.
From that day forward, he thought of nothing but killing the king of Chu.
The king of Chu, meanwhile, had begun to dream. In the dream a young man appeared whose forehead was a full chi wide — about a foot across the brows — and the young man said: I am coming for you.
The king woke and offered a bounty: a thousand catties of gold for the head of the boy with the wide forehead.
Chi heard about the bounty and fled into the mountains. He walked along the road singing, and weeping as he sang.
A stranger met him on the road.[2]Gan Bao's text calls him only kè (客) — "the guest," "the stranger," "the traveler." Later folk versions gave him a name (most commonly Chi Bi 尺比, or in the Lu Xun retelling, Yan Zhi Ao Zhe 宴之敖者), but in the Soushen Ji original he has no identity. He simply appears on the road, recognizes the boy from the bounty, and offers a transaction the boy cannot refuse. The anonymity is part of the story's point. Revenge is delivered by a man who does not need credit.
Stranger: "You're a young man. Why is your weeping so terrible?"
Chi: "I am the son of Gan Jiang and Mo Ye. The king of Chu killed my father. I want to take his life in return."
Stranger: "I have heard the king is paying a thousand catties of gold for your head. Give me your head and your sword. I will do the rest for you."
Chi: "Nothing could make me happier."
⚠️ Content Warning — graphic self-decapitation and a boiled human head (click to reveal)
He drew his father's sword and cut off his own head. Then, while the body was still standing, he lifted his head with both hands and held it out, along with the sword, to the stranger. The body did not fall.
The stranger took the head and the sword and said: "I will not fail you."
Only then did the body collapse.
The stranger carried the head to the palace. The king was delighted. The stranger said: "This is the head of a hero. You should boil it in a cauldron."
The king ordered the cauldron. The head was put in.
For three days and three nights the water boiled, and the head did not soften. It leaped up out of the boiling water. It glared.
The stranger said: "Look, the boy's head will not cook. If Your Majesty would come close and look in, it will surely cook then."
The king came to the edge of the cauldron and leaned over.
The stranger drew the sword and cut off the king's head. It fell into the cauldron with the boy's. Then the stranger raised the sword to his own neck and cut off his own. His head fell in too.
The three heads boiled together until the flesh dissolved from all three skulls and none could be told from another. The remains were divided into three portions and buried together in one grave.
The place is still called the Tomb of Three Kings (三王墓). It lies in the old territory of Ru'nan (汝南), in what is now northern Yichun County (宜春县) — somewhere in the cracked country between Henan and the southern wetlands, where if you grew up there you may have heard the story from your grandmother before you ever heard it from a book.
Translator's Reflection
I had read this story before, as a child, in a children's edition that left out the part where the boy cuts off his own head. The version I remember had him going to the king disguised as a juggler. There was no stranger. There was no cauldron. The ending was something about heroism.
Reading the actual Gan Bao text was a different experience. The thing that stuck with me wasn't the violence — Chinese folklore is full of severed heads. It was the moment the stranger says "give me your head and I'll do the rest," and the boy says "nothing could make me happier." No hesitation. No discussion of trust. The boy is not naive. He has been thinking about killing the king his entire life. He understands instantly that this stranger is offering the one form of revenge that will actually work — a face the king won't recognize.
The detail that the body doesn't fall until the stranger promises is the part I think a Western reader might miss. In classical Chinese ghost logic, what holds a corpse upright is unfinished business. The boy's body is waiting to hear that the contract is sealed. The moment the stranger says "I will not fail you," the body is allowed to die.
And the ending. Three heads, boiled past recognition, buried in one grave. The king, the assassin, and the avenger sharing a single tomb because nobody could tell whose flesh was whose. I don't think this is meant as a moral. I think it's meant as a fact about what revenge does to the people involved. You don't come back from it as yourself. Even the king doesn't come back from it as a king. He just becomes one of three skulls in a pot.
Next tale: The Young Monk Who Met Real Tigers — a Qing-era novice meets the one thing his master told him not to look at, and decides his master was lying. → [Coming soon]
📜 Original Text in Classical Chinese · 文言原文
楚干将莫邪为楚王作剑，三年乃成，王怒，欲杀之。剑有雌雄，其妻重身，当产，夫语妻曰：「吾为王作剑，三年乃成；王怒，往，必杀我。汝若生子，是男，大，告之曰：『出户，望南山，松生石上，剑在其背。』」于是即将雌剑往见楚王。王大怒，使相之，剑有二一雄，一雌，雌来，雄不来。王怒，即杀之。
莫邪子名赤，比后壮，乃问其母曰：「吾父所在？」母曰：「汝父为楚王作剑，三年乃成，王怒，杀之。去时嘱我：『语汝子：出户，往南山，松生石上，剑在其背。』」于是子出户，南望，不见有山，但睹堂前松柱下石砥之上，即以斧破其背，得剑。日夜思欲报楚王。
王梦见一儿，眉间广尺，言欲报雠。王即购之千金。儿闻之，亡去，入山，行歌。客有逢者，谓：「子年少，何哭之甚悲耶？」曰：「吾干将莫邪子也。楚王杀吾父，吾欲报之。」客曰：「闻王购子头千金，将子头与剑来，为子报之。」儿曰：「幸甚。」即自刎，两手捧头及剑奉之，立僵。客曰：「不负子也。」于是尸乃仆。
客持头往见楚王，王大喜。客曰：「此乃勇士头也，当于汤镬煮之。」王如其言。煮头三日三夕，不烂。头踔出汤中，踬目大怒。客曰：「此儿头不烂，愿王自往临视之，是必烂也。」王即临之。客以剑拟王，王头随堕汤中；客亦自拟己头，头复堕汤中。三首俱烂，不可识别。乃分其汤肉葬之。故通名三王墓。今在汝南北宜春县界。
Source: 《搜神记·卷十一·三王墓》 — 干宝（东晋）. Public domain. 古诗文网 gushiwen.cn.
🏛️ Historical Context · 历史背景
Gan Bao (干宝, c. 286–336) compiled In Search of the Supernatural (Soushen Ji 搜神记) in the early 4th century, during the Eastern Jin dynasty. He was a court historian by training, and he framed the collection as documentary — these were not "stories" in the modern sense, but records of unusual events worth preserving. Many of the most enduring motifs of Chinese ghost and folklore literature appear in Soushen Ji for the first time: the fox spirit, the dragon king, the haunted official, the avenging ghost. Without Soushen Ji, much of the later tradition — Pu Songling's Liaozhai, Ji Yun's Yuewei Caotang, even modern wuxia film — would have nowhere to begin.
The "Three Kings Tomb" story is set in the southern kingdom of Chu, a state that existed independently before the Qin unification of 221 BCE. The historical King of Chu in question is sometimes identified with King Helu of Wu (阖闾) in alternate versions of the tale (the Wu Yue kingdoms shared sword-making lore), but Gan Bao's text says only Chu Wang — "the King of Chu" — without specifying which one. The geographical reference at the end — Ru'nan, north of Yichun county — places the tomb in modern Henan province, on the northern edge of what was once the Chu cultural sphere.
In the 20th century, Lu Xun (鲁迅) retold this story under the title Forging the Swords (《铸剑》, 1927) in his collection Old Tales Retold (《故事新编》), giving the stranger a name (Yan Zhi Ao Zhe), expanding the boy's psychology, and making the cauldron scene one of the most cinematic set pieces in modern Chinese literature. Lu Xun's version is darker and more political — for him, the story is about how violence consumes the avenger as surely as it consumes the tyrant. Gan Bao's original is more matter-of-fact: this is what happened. Three heads went into the pot. They could not be told apart. So they buried them together.
The male/female sword pair is one of the oldest motifs in Chinese metallurgical folklore. The names Gan Jiang and Mo Ye eventually became the names of the swords themselves — Gan Jiang (male) and Mo Ye (female) — and "Gan Jiang Mo Ye" remains a standard idiom in Chinese for "legendary weapon." The story's tension between the two blades — only one delivered, only one hidden — is also a tension between what a craftsman owes a tyrant and what he owes his own work. ↩
Gan Bao's text calls him only kè (客) — "the guest," "the stranger," "the traveler." Later folk versions gave him a name (most commonly Chi Bi 尺比, or in the Lu Xun retelling, Yan Zhi Ao Zhe 宴之敖者), but in the Soushen Ji original he has no identity. He simply appears on the road, recognizes the boy from the bounty, and offers a transaction the boy cannot refuse. The anonymity is part of the story's point. Revenge is delivered by a man who does not need credit. ↩