Yantze River trip story: the legend of the “Three Pools Mirroring the Moon”

“Three Pools Mirroring the Moon” is a very famous scenic spot in Hangzhou. Most tourists in Yangtze River trip would not miss the opportunity to see this fabulous landscape. Also, there’s a legend about it.
The “Three Pools Mirroring the Moon” was actually composed of three stone pagodas on the West Lake, and our story is about the origin of these pagodas.
One year, the Chinese master carpenter---- Lu Ban came to Hangzhou with his little sister and opened a workshop. Numerous people came to the workshop and requested Lu Ban to bind them out. And Lu Ban chose 180 dexterous young men from them as his apprentices. After a few days, all the apprentices became experts as they followed Lu Ban and his sister.
One day, a black fish demon came to Hangzhou who created torrential rain, flood, polluted the water and destroyed the plants. Lu Ban and his sister, their apprentices climbed up the Baoshi Mountain and saw the whole city submerged in the stinky water and the black fish demon leaped to the mountain then turned into a black and ugly young man. The black man saw Lu Ban’s beautiful sister and asked her to marry him. He even threatened them that if she didn’t agree he would create bigger flood. Lu Ban’s sister knew that solve the flood was the first thing to do, but she didn’t want to marry this demon, then she came out an idea.
She said to the black guy that she could marry him only after his brother offer her one thing as trousseau. The fish demon was very happy and asked what kind of trousseau she wanted. The girl said that she wanted her brother to chisel this mountain to a big censer and asked the demon to solve the flood so that they could get down and start to chisel the mountain. The black fish agreed and then whiffed all the water into his mouth.
Lu Ban and his apprentices actually finished this job, after forty nine days the big censer was done. When the black fish came to pick up his bride, Lu Ban asked him to carry this censer into the lake first. The demon created a whirlwind to roll the censer off the mountain, but when the censer fell into the lake, it got upside down and tripped the demon in it. Whatever he did could not get him out of this big stone censer, so a few hours later he died there and could never do evil things again.
And the three cucurbit-shape pagodas are just the three feet of the censer.

 

 

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