Ranka

    Keywords: Culture & History

Chinese: 烂柯 (爛柯) (làn kē)
Japanese: 爛柯 (ranka)
Korean:

The story of Ranka Mountain is one of the oldest myths about go:

In the Zhejiang province of China there was a mountain inhabited by faeries. The story tells of an uncautious carpenter, Wang Zhi, who went up on the mountain in search of wood. At a certain point, he came over a group of people gathered round a go board. He joined the group to watch, leaning his axe against the rock. One of the company gave him a prune to eat (!). Wang Zhi lost himself completely in the game; the moves made were of unsurpassable beauty, of course. Suddenly, one of the spectators turned to him and asked if he shouldn't be thinking about getting home at some point. Startled, he reached for his axe, but it crumbled to dust at the touch of his hand. Returning to the village, he learned that a hundred years had passed.

This myth was so popular that Ranka became one of the poetical words for Go in China and Japan. Literally, it means "rotted handle". Painters and poets used the myth. The following brief text was written by Zhang Yiling, to go with his painting "Ranka Mountain": "People envy the lifespan of fairies, but the life of a fairy is really quite pitiful. Who would trade a hundred years for a game of weiqi?"

There is also a poem by Meng Chiao? encapsulating this.


See also:


This is a copy of the living page "Ranka" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2009 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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