Kunlun Valley

For a long time, I’ve wanted to rewrite several ancient classics: the Book of Changes, the Dao De Jing, the Classic of Mountains and Seas, and the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon. Naturally, I want to explain them in modern language and keep them from becoming obscure and hard to understand.

Of these, the hardest to write is definitely the Classic of Mountains and Seas. It keeps saying things like “a hundred li to the east, two hundred li, three hundred li...” over and over like Xianglin’s Wife. It’s not really about explaining principles, but about broadening your horizons, which makes it hard to discuss.

But the Classic of Mountains and Seas has its mysteries. After all those descriptions, some true and some false, who can say what secrets are hidden within?

Could the startling truth be that the records called myths in the Classic of Mountains and Seas were never primitive imaginings at all, but rather a severely damaged science-fiction archive of an alien civilization?

This half-formed realization made me abandon the idea of interpreting this ancient classic in the traditional way. When our ancestors used “dragon” to describe a kind of flying creature, “immortals” to refer to genetically modified humans, and “heavenly ladder” to describe a space elevator, perhaps we really shouldn’t presumptuously and arrogantly dismiss these records as primitive myths.

If we regard the Classic of Mountains and Seas as a scattered archive of contact with an alien civilization, many questions become much easier to explain. The “strange beasts” that generations of commentators have argued over, the unusual kingdoms in the Great Wilderness, and the wars among the emperors may all record conflicts between different civilizations.