Kuafu — Kuāfŭ (夸父) — is the giant of Chinese mythology who chased the sun: a colossal being who, in a feat of titanic ambition and folly, ran a great race to catch the setting sun, and died of thirst at the very end — his cast-away staff becoming a vast peach forest. The sun-chasing giant, Kuafu is a figure of magnificent, doomed determination.
The Giant Who Chased the Sun
Kuafu was a giant of the mythic past, a being of colossal size and strength (a descendant of the earth-deity Houtu in some accounts). In the famous and strange myth, Kuafu — for reasons variously given as ambition, defiance, a wish to capture the sun’s warmth and light for the people, or simply the desire to test his own might — resolved to chase and catch the sun. He set off in a great race against the sun across the sky, running westward after it as it crossed the heavens toward its setting, pursuing the blazing orb with giant strides.
The Race and the Thirst
Kuafu ran and ran, pursuing the sun all the way to the west, to the very place where the sun sets — and he almost caught it, reaching the valley of the setting sun. But the effort and the sun’s heat had filled him with a terrible, raging thirst. To quench it, the giant drank the entire Yellow River and the Wei River dry in great gulps — and still his thirst was not satisfied. He turned north to drink from the great lakes (or marshes) — but before he could reach them, he collapsed and died of thirst on the way, at the very threshold of his goal, his colossal body falling to the earth. So the giant who chased the sun died, undone by his own titanic ambition and the thirst it brought, just short of the lakes that might have saved him.
The Peach Forest
From Kuafu’s death came a final transformation. As he died, the giant cast away his great wooden staff (his walking-stick or cane) — and where it fell, it took root and grew into a vast and beautiful peach forest (the “Forest of Deng”), a grove of peach trees that would give shade and fruit to travellers ever after. Thus even the giant’s death and his abandoned staff brought a lasting gift to the world. (The peach, in Chinese symbolism, is the fruit of immortality — a poignant touch for the giant who died of thirst.)
The Magnificent Folly
Kuafu’s story is read in different ways — as a tale of overweening ambition and its folly (the giant who reached too high and died for it), but also as a tale of magnificent, heroic, almost admirable determination and self-sacrifice (the giant who dared to chase the sun itself, and whose very staff became a forest of life). “Kuafu chasing the sun” (Kuafu zhui ri) became a famous Chinese idiom for grand, perhaps impossible ambition and indomitable, if doomed, willpower. The colossal giant who raced the sun to its setting, drank the rivers dry, died of thirst at the threshold of his goal, and whose cast-away staff became a peach forest — Kuafu is the sun-chasing giant of Chinese mythology, the icon of magnificent, doomed determination.
