The Story 故事

原文：

信安有樵夫入山伐木，见二人对弈于石上。樵夫素好棋，遂置斧旁观。二人以白黑子相搏，局势精妙。樵夫凝神观之，不知日之将暮。一局既终，二人忽不见。樵夫欲归，取斧则柯已烂尽。还家，村中人物皆非旧识。问之，已过百年矣。樵夫叹曰："山中一局棋，世上已百年。"遂入山不返。

In the mountains of Xin'an, a woodcutter went up to chop wood. On a flat stone he found two men playing chess. The woodcutter loved the game, so he set down his axe and watched.

The two men played with black and white stones. Their moves were brilliant, their strategies unfathomable. The woodcutter was so absorbed that he did not notice the sun setting.

When the game ended, the two men vanished. The woodcutter reached for his axe — the handle had rotted to nothing.

He walked home. The village was unrecognizable. The people were strangers. He asked what had happened.

A hundred years had passed.

"One game of chess in the mountains," the woodcutter murmured, "and a hundred years in the world."

He went back into the mountains and was never seen again.

文化注释 Cultural Note This is a retelling of the famous "Rotten Axe Handle" (烂柯) story, originally recorded in the Shuyiji (述异记) by Ren Fang (任昉) of the Liang dynasty. The original is set in Shinan (石室山), and the woodcutter is named Wang Zhi (王质). Hong Mai's version preserves the essential structure while adding the detail that the woodcutter, having seen the other world, chooses to return to it. The phrase "烂柯" (rotten axe handle) became a standard Chinese idiom for the relativity of time — the idea that a moment in one world can be a lifetime in another.

Time and Chess 时间与棋

The story is, at its simplest, about attention. The woodcutter watches a chess game so intently that time loses its grip on him. He does not travel to another world — he simply stops noticing this one. The immortals are not a metaphor for divinity; they are a metaphor for focus. To be so absorbed in something that a century passes like a breath — that is the story's real miracle.

But there is a darker reading. The woodcutter returns to a world he no longer belongs to. Everyone he knew is dead. The village has forgotten him. He is a ghost in all but name — and so he goes back to the mountains, to the stone, to the place where time moves differently. The story does not say whether he finds the immortals again. It says only that he was "never seen again" — which is, of course, exactly what happens to someone who dies.

文化注释 Cultural Note The chess game as a portal to the supernatural is a recurring motif in East Asian folklore. The Japanese folktale Urashima Tarō follows the same structure: a fisherman visits an undersea palace, watches a dance, and returns to find centuries have passed. The parallel suggests a shared cultural intuition about the fragility of time — that it is not a river but a landscape, and different beings move through it at different speeds.