In the West, love defies distance—Orpheus descended into the underworld for his bride, and his song moved even the stones.
But in the East, love once defied an empire itself. Her name was Meng Jiangnü, and her tears changed the face of a kingdom.
It began on an autumn night, beneath a sky of thin frost. A man fled from soldiers who hunted conscripts for the Great Wall. Desperate, he stumbled into a garden and hid among the vines. The woman who found him there offered him food, and when she saw the terror in his eyes, she whispered, "Stay. No one will find you here."
Days turned to weeks, and the frost melted into spring. They married beneath the wisteria, their vows carried away by the wind. But peace never lingers in the shadow of power. When the soldiers came again, they found him and dragged him north—to build the emperor's dream of immortality in stone.
Seasons passed with no word. Then came winter once more, cruel and endless. Wrapped in a single cloak, Meng Jiangnü set out to find her husband. She crossed rivers that had turned to glass, fields where no birds sang, and mountains that tore her feet to blood. At last she reached the Great Wall, a serpent of stone that cut across the horizon.
She searched among the laborers, calling his name. No answer came. Only silence, and the wind sighing between the stones. When she learned that he had perished there, his bones buried within the wall itself, she fell to her knees and wept.
Her cry rose like thunder, shaking heaven and earth. The Wall trembled, cracked, and a thousand slabs crashed into dust. Beneath them, she found a single fragment of bone, pale as moonlight.
She buried it beside the river and vanished soon after. Some say she became the frost that settles on the Wall each dawn; others, that she still walks its length in mist and snow, calling softly for the man she loved.
The emperor built his monument to eternity—but it was her grief that endured. For even stone may crumble before the persistence of a single human heart.