Ranka (legend)

Lan Ke (爛柯, Làn Kē, or The Rotten Axe Handle in English), is a Chinese legend which has been compared to that of Rip Van Winkle, although it predates it by at least 1000 years. The exact date of origin of the legend is unknown, but it has literary antecedents from the 5th century AD, and the "rotten axe handle" plot element was certainly present by an early 6th-century version.

Another plot element of the legend features two immortals playing a board game, interpreted in later times as Go, so that Lan Ke has become a literary name for Go. It is through this connection that the name "Ranka", which is the Japanese pronunciation of "Lan Ke", entered the English language.

The early 4th-century compilation of legends and occult tales Yiyuan (異苑) by official Liu Jingshu (劉敬叔) recorded a tale about a traveller riding a horse, who saw two elderly men by the side of the road playing shupu (樗蒲), a race game, and got off his horse to watch. In the middle of the game he glanced at his horse and was astonished to see that it had turned to a skeleton. When he returned home, he found that all of his family were gone. The 4th-century Dongyang Ji (東陽記) by Zheng Qizhi recorded a slightly different version: a man named Wang Zhi went to Mount Shishi, in Zhejiang, to chop wood, and stopped when he heard four youths singing. The youths gave him food that looked like date cores. He ate them, and was not hungry. By the time the youths finished singing, and he started on his way home, he noticed that his axe handle had rotted. When he returned home, he realised that decades had past. The Dongyang Ji version was quoted by Li Daoyuan's influential 6th-century work Commentary on the Water Classic, which made the story famous. Still later, 6th-century author Ren Fang's Tales of the Strange (述異記) reworked the story once again, so that the youths were playing a board game and singing, although he did not specifically mention Go.

The later versions of the story that identify two elders playing Go may also be influenced by the motif of immortals playing Go in other stories, such as the tale that appeared in Gan Bao's 4th-century compilation of supernatural stories In Search of the Supernatural, in which the gods Bei Dou (the Big Dipper) and Nan Dou (the corresponding stars in Sagittarius) were playing Go, when the youth Yan Chao approached them to ask for a longer life.

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