The Qigong Flying Cart: A Flying Machine in Ancient Chinese Texts
A people from a far country build wind-driven flying carts; one lands in ancient China, is dismantled, and ten years later flies home.
Zhang Hua's Bowuzhi (c. 290 CE) says the Qigong people built flying carts that travel on the wind. One landed in King Tang's time, was taken apart, and ten years later its travelers flew home.
The Shan Hai Jing, the Classic of Mountains and Seas, lists among the strange nations beyond China the country of Qigong (also romanized Jigong), whose people have one arm and three eyes. Later writers expanded the entry into one of the most talked-about stories in early Chinese literature. The name is also read Jigong, and its people appear on lists of marvelous foreigners in several later books.
The version most often cited is from the Bowuzhi (Records of Diverse Matters), compiled by the scholar-official Zhang Hua around 290 CE. The Qigong people are skilled at making clever devices, including a flying cart that travels great distances on the wind. In the time of King Tang, founder of the Shang dynasty, a west wind carries one of these carts to the region of Yuzhou. Tang has it taken apart because he does not want his people to see it. Ten years later, when an east wind comes, the travelers build another cart and are sent home. The text says their country lies far beyond the Jade Gate pass.
The Bowuzhi is a miscellany of geography, marvels and lore, much of it collected from older books, and scholars read the story as part of a long Chinese tradition of wondrous peoples at the edges of the world. An earlier telling attributed to Huangfu Mi treats Qigong as a person rather than a nation.
Modern ancient-astronaut writers call it China's Roswell: a craft comes down, the authorities hide it, and the visitors wait years for the right conditions to leave. The comparison is modern. What the text itself stresses is craftsmanship and wind, not the sky beyond it. The story still stands out because it combines a machine, a technical explanation and a return journey.
The ruler's reason for dismantling the craft is that he did not want his own people to see it.
The story belongs to a genre of marvels about distant peoples, compiled some two thousand years after the reign it describes, and "flying on the wind" fits kites or pure fantasy as well as any machine.
