According to legend, an emperor long ago declared that he would build a great wall spanning thousands of kilometers to protect his new empire and ensure his sustained power. He ordered many men across China to leave their homes and submit to the grueling labor required for its construction. As years passed and the wall grew, few returned home.
Nestled in the foothills of a remote mountain, the Mengs and their neighbors, the Jiangs, hadn’t yet had to worry about being drafted by the emperor’s soldiers. One year, the Mengs grew gourds that flourished along their shared fence. One particular gourd crossed the fence and extended into the Jiang’s yard, so they cared for it.
The gourd grew to be the biggest of all. At harvest, the Mengs and the Jiangs decided to take equal halves. But as they went to split the gourd, something remarkable happened.
It cracked open to reveal a beautiful baby curled inside, smiling up at them. They agreed to raise her together and named their magical, boundary-breaking daughter, Meng Jiang. She grew into a virtuous, accomplished young woman who infused life with joy.
She cared for her elderly parents and their land with dedication. But the surrounding world remained turbulent. One day, Meng Jiang stumbled upon a young man hiding in the garden.
The emperor’s soldiers had come to conscript him into building the wall. But he had an elderly mother to care for and knew that obeying the soldiers’ orders would mean almost certain death, so he escaped. Meng Jiang and Fan Xiliang connected instantly, and soon enough, they married.
But their happiness wouldn’t last long. When the emperor’s soldiers descended the next time, they captured Fan Xiliang. For months, she watched the horizon, hoping the world would do right and deliver her love back to her safely.
But he never came. And as the air grew frigid, Meng Jiang’s worries only grew, so she set out to find him herself. Through bitter snow and howling winds, across rivers and mountains, she undertook the dangerous journey that many others had been forced to complete.
Finally, she reached the construction site, where thousands of workers toiled, day and night, to realize the emperor’s vision. Stealing into the fray, Meng Jiang whispered her husband’s name to the workers until, eventually, one man’s eyes glimmered with recognition— only for him to reveal the tragic news that Fan Xiliang had recently died. He was rumored to be buried under the wall alongside many others.
Heartbroken beyond words, Meng Jiang could only weep. As her tears filled the construction halls, seeped into the cracks of the wall, and soaked its stone, whole portions crumbled and washed away in the flood of her grief. Livid, the emperor ordered that the person who’d sabotaged his grand project be captured and brought to his palace for punishment.
But when he beheld the otherworldly beauty and virtue Meng Jiang radiated, his plan changed. Leering at the devastated widow, the emperor instead suggested that she become one of his imperial concubines. She had few options, but she realized she could leverage the wretched proposal to honor Fan Xiliang and humiliate the emperor.
She said she agreed— but only if the emperor gave her deceased husband a grand funeral and that the emperor attend dressed in the traditional mourning attire he would wear had Fan Xiliang been his own father. The emperor begrudgingly made the arrangements and Meng Jiang bid her beloved farewell. Finally, with her wish carried out, she refused to either submit to the emperor, who now awaited her in his palace, or to face his punishment.
Instead, she cast herself into the nearby water, as all-enveloping as her own tears, never to emerge again. She had left an unjust world as mysteriously as she’d entered it. But her tears flowed on, a reminder of her virtue and defiance.
