Hou Yi (后羿): The Archer Who Shot the Suns, and the Other Man With His Name

Ten suns came up at once. Not one after another, in the decent rotation their mother had arranged for them, but all ten together, hanging over the world like a row of open furnace doors. The crops burned in the field. The grass and the trees died. Rivers went off as steam. And a man walked out onto the cracked ground with a bow, planted his feet, and began shooting at the sky.

That is the story every Chinese child knows, and it is a magnificent one. There is only one difficulty with the way it is usually told in English, which is the name at the top of it.

China renamed him in 2025

In August 2025, parents across China opened their children's new Chinese textbooks and discovered that a story they had learned by heart had been retitled. Hou Yi Shoots the Suns was now Yi Shoots the Nine Suns. Sima Guang, in the neighboring lesson, was no longer smashing a gang to save a drowning playmate but a weng, which is a different sort of jar. The man stopping his own ears to steal something was stealing a bell rather than a doorbell. Social media did what social media does. "I can't help my kid with Chinese anymore" became the week's refrain, and the phrase "sweeping revisions" trended.

The publishers pushed back on the drama. Most of the talk of sweeping revisions, they said, was self-media exaggeration; what had happened was that a handful of phrases had been quietly tightened up while the familiar wording stayed where it was. Sima Guang really does break a weng in the History of Song. The bell really is a bell in the Lüshi Chunqiu. And Hou Yi really did not shoot the suns.

That last one is the change worth stopping on, because the reasoning behind it has been sitting in the Chinese record for eighteen hundred years, and the English-speaking world has walked straight past it.

The eight-year-old who caught the textbook out

Before the rename there was a smaller and more delightful scandal. In 2019 a second-grader in Fuzhou, reading the same story in the same series, put his hand up. The text says the rivers were boiled dry. Two paragraphs later it has Yi wading across ninety-nine rivers on his way to the eastern sea. If the water is gone, the boy wanted to know, what exactly is he wading through?

This is a very good question, and the extraordinary thing is that he got an answer. The People's Education Press replied in public, conceded that the verb was wrong, thanked him, and said the editorial team was looking into it and would fix the wording in the next edition. Commentators spent a fortnight arguing about whether a myth is allowed to be internally inconsistent, which is itself an excellent thing for a country to spend a fortnight arguing about.

Keep the boy in mind. He is the reason the rest of this page exists, in the sense that people who read the sun-shooting story closely tend to find that it does not quite hold still.

He is a marksman now

The largest audience Yi has ever had is holding a phone. In Honor of Kings, Tencent's arena game, he is one of the marksmen: a bow at the back of the fight, doing from range what he has always done. The game came out in China in October 2015, went worldwide in June 2024, and is the highest-grossing mobile game ever made, which means that for an enormous number of people on earth the first Hou Yi they ever met had a cooldown timer.

There is a small irony in this. When Tencent first localized the game for Western players, a great many of the Chinese heroes were renamed and redesigned for audiences assumed not to know who they were. Yi survived to become globally famous under a name that is not really his.

What the oldest texts actually say

Now to the roots, and they are stranger than the retellings.

The oldest text to put a bow in his hands is the Classic of Mountains and Seas, that magnificent gazetteer of monsters and mountains that reads like a geography compiled by someone who had been drinking. It says: God Jun bestowed on Yi a red bow and white corded arrows, so that he might succor the lands below, and so Yi first went down to relieve the hundred hardships of the world beneath. That is the whole commission. A red bow, white arrows, and a job.

Notice what is missing. The suns are not mentioned. The text that arms him never says what he shot.

Now turn to another chapter of the same book, and meet the suns' family. Beyond the southeast sea, between the waters of Gan, lies the country of Xihe, and a woman named Xihe was bathing the suns in the Gan abyss. Xihe, the text says, is the wife of God Jun, and she gave birth to the ten suns.

Read those two passages next to each other and something rather appalling comes into focus. God Jun handed the archer the bow. God Jun was also the suns' father. Whether the compilers of a text assembled over several centuries meant that as one story is a fair question, and the honest answer is that we cannot know. But it is there on the page, and it is the sort of detail that a folktale would have sanded off and a genuinely old text simply leaves lying about.

The nine is a footnote

The version of the shooting that everyone quotes comes from the Huainanzi, the great syncretic compendium presented to the Han throne in 139 BCE. It gives him a full campaign, not just the suns. Yao sends him to execute Chisel Tooth in the wilds of Chouhua, to kill Nine Gullets on the banks of the Xiong river, to bring down Great Wind with a corded arrow over the marsh of Qingqiu, to shoot upward at the ten suns and downward to kill the Yayu, to cut the Long Snake in two at Dongting, and to take the Giant Boar in the Sanglin. The people were overjoyed, the text says, and they made Yao the Son of Heaven.

Read that list again and count the suns he brings down. You cannot, because it does not say. The Huainanzi says he shot upward at the ten suns, and moves briskly on to the boar.

The number nine arrives three centuries later, in a footnote. Wang Yi, annotating the Heavenly Questions around the second century CE, explains the line for his readers: the Huainanzi says that in Yao's time ten suns came out together and the plants withered, so Yao ordered Yi to shoot up at the ten suns, and he hit nine of them, and the nine crows inside those suns all died and their feathers fell, and one sun was left. Every falling three-legged crow in every children's book on earth descends from that gloss. It is a commentator tidying up an arithmetic problem, and it has comprehensively outlived the text it was tidying.

The other Yi

Here is where the name goes wrong.

Open the Zuo Zhuan at the fourth year of Duke Xiang and you find a minister named Wei Jiang telling his ruler a cautionary tale about a man called Lord Yi. When the house of Xia was in decline, Wei Jiang says, Lord Yi moved from Chu to Qiongshi and used the people of Xia to take the Xia government in its place. He trusted to his archery. He did not attend to the affairs of the people but gave himself over to the beasts of the plain. He cast off four good officers and used a man named Han Zhuo instead, who curried favor within and spread bribes without, made a fool of the people, and had Yi watched while he was out hunting. Yi's own household killed him and boiled him and served him to his sons. The sons could not bring themselves to eat, and died at the gate of Qiong.

No suns. No monsters. No drug of deathlessness, no woman on the moon. A usurper who preferred hunting to governing, and a stew.

后 does not mean "after"

The confusion is helped along by an accident of modern Chinese. In the language people speak now, that first syllable overwhelmingly means after, so Hou Yi reads to a modern eye like "Later Yi," as though he were a sequel.

In the old language it is a title: lord, sovereign, the ruler of a place. It is the same word sitting in front of Hou Ji, the Lord of Millet who taught agriculture, and inside the formal name of the Xia royal house itself. Lord Yi is not a man called Hou Yi. He is a man called Yi with a rank attached, in the way that Chef Ding and Music-Master Kuang are a cook and a musician with their names on. The Book of Documents has him as Lord Yi of Youqiong, which is a title, a name and an address.

And the classical philologists were perfectly clear about this. Open the Shuowen Jiezi, the first Chinese dictionary, finished around 100 CE, and you do not find one Yi. You find two, filed under two different characters in two different sections of the book: one in the feather section, glossed as an ancient lord, and a second under the bow radical, described as Emperor Ku's archery officer, destroyed by Shao Kang of Xia.

Duan Yucai, annotating that dictionary around 1815, spells the distinction out and then produces the clincher. Quoting the Han commentator Gao You on a Huainanzi passage about Yi's skill, he records Gao's verdict on which Yi is meant: this is the Yi of Yao's time, who could shoot the ten suns, bring down Great Wind, kill the Yayu, cut down Nine Gullets and shoot the earl of the river. Not Lord Yi of Youqiong.

Not Lord Yi of Youqiong. A Chinese scholar wrote that around the year 200, flatly, as a correction, and here we are.

Even Qu Yuan had them apart. The Heavenly Questions, that dizzying poem of unanswered riddles from the third century BCE, asks in one breath how Yi shot the suns and how the crows shed their feathers, and elsewhere entirely asks a quite different question about Yi of the Yi people, who wrecked the Xia populace, shot the earl of the river and took the river goddess as his wife. Two men, two stanzas, one poem. The oldest surviving voice to mention either of them was already keeping them straight.

Two deaths, and the one everybody tells

Both Yis were murdered, which cannot have helped.

The archer's death is in the Mencius, and it is one of the neatest cruel anecdotes in the Chinese canon. Feng Meng studied archery under Yi. When he had learned everything Yi had to teach, he worked out that in all the world only Yi was better than himself, and so he killed Yi. Mencius then delivers the line that makes it literature rather than gossip: in this, Yi too had a share of the blame. Teach a man everything and give him nothing else, and you have manufactured the person who removes you.

The other death is the stew.

What most people now know is neither of these. In the modern folk version, the one on the festival television and in the picture books, Feng Meng is downgraded from murderer to burglar. He waits until Yi is out hunting, breaks in, and demands the drug of deathlessness at knifepoint, and Chang'e swallows it herself rather than let him have it. It is a kinder story about a nicer woman, and it does not appear in the early record at all. If you want the full account of how she got up there, and why the oldest texts have her arriving on the moon and turning into a toad, Chang'e has her own page, and the jade rabbit she found waiting for her has another.

The suns' mother has a satellite

The gods of this story have done curiously well in the space age.

Chang'e has an entire lunar program, eight missions and counting, and the rovers are named after her rabbit. And Xihe, the woman bathing her ten children in the abyss, is now a spacecraft: China's first solar exploration satellite, the Chinese H-alpha Solar Explorer, launched from Taiyuan on 14 October 2021 and named after the mother of the suns, watching the one sun that survived through a telescope tuned to the deep red of its light.

The archer got a mobile game.

There is something fitting about that, and something a little sad. The woman who left him is on the moon and in orbit. The suns' mother has a telescope. And the man himself, whose name was never quite his own, is a marksman with a cooldown timer, still drawing on a sky that has one sun in it because he did his job. If you want to know which full moon his wife is being celebrated on this year, the Mid-Autumn Festival page has the dates worked out through 2035.