Some stories are about winning. Others are about the running. The legend of Kuafu belongs to the second kind — a tale of a giant who decided to outrun the sun, died trying, and left something behind that his people remembered for millennia.

Kuafu appears in several ancient Chinese texts, most notably Shan Hai Jing, which describes him as a giant of enormous size. The exact details vary depending on which version you read — some say he was hundreds of feet tall, others suggest he was simply a man of unusual height and constitution. Either way, he was large enough to drink rivers dry and fast enough to run down bison. When the texts describe his appetite and his speed, the tone is awe mixed with a certain unease. This was not an ordinary man.

The story begins, as many Chinese myths do, with a problem. According to the earliest accounts, Kuafu lived in a time of unbearable heat. The sun was merciless — crops withered, rivers dried to muddy traces, people suffered. The exact cause varies by retelling. Sometimes it’s that there were multiple suns (a common mythological motif in ancient China, where the idea of solar cosmography involved multiple celestial bodies), and their combined heat made life impossible. Other versions describe a single sun that simply blazed too fiercely. In all versions, the outcome is the same: people were dying, and something had to change.