Chapter 119 - Borrowing a Ship

Content Warning:
a boatload of innuendos

Translator(s): moon
Editor(s): juurensha, namio

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Translator's Comment:

nam: So, Feitian had to hurriedly replace Goguryeo with Dongying (Japan), right…? And thus turned the conflict into that between Dongying and Fusang which moon TNs as being a mythical place to the far east. The Fusang 扶桑 tree is a mythological place of the rising sun that is a remnant of Shang dynasty beliefs, and is said to be a mulberry tree that is the perch of the 10 sun birds. This naturally means that unlike Penglai, Fusang originally isn’t exactly a hospitable place— the whole point of Houyi shooting down the suns was because when out together, the suns were burning everything. Anyway, Fusang tree is actually mentioned in Shanhaijing, on the chapter Eastern Lands Beyond the Seas, and largely in its capacity as, quite literally, “the place where the sun rises”. Attempts to really turn Fusang into a mythical island with inhabitants appear to be a later efforts, with the earliest dated one being post-Dinghai and described in a book from the 7th cent. Anyway, even later traditions turned Fusang into a poetic way to call Japan. There’s nothing here of actual value, I just enjoy the idea that we get to choose between Japan vs Japan (somehow separated by water) or Japan vs mythical sunbird(s).

Based on like the things we have I’m reasonably sure the whole Fusang == a real place matter came at least further along than Dinghai’s time anyway; Guo Pu kinda revived the whole Shanhaijing into something actually comprehensible, because even by Eastern Jin the Zhou-Warring States era texts were becoming more and more obscure and incomprehensible to even scholars. And Guo Pu lived in Eastern Jin, and it was within like at least 5 decades before Dinghai… which could imply that Fusang doesn’t have the whole description of inhabitants it later got YET. There’s a supposed 499 description by a Buddhist monk but it got described in like 635 AD

This chapter is migrated and/or formatted by our fellow chicken enthusiast(s), moon.