Just before Apollo 11 landed, Houston told the crew to watch for a beautiful woman and a giant rabbit under a cinnamon tree, and Michael Collins agreed to look out for the bunny girl. This deep dive builds a biography of Chang'e, the Chinese moon goddess Mission Control was referencing, beginning with the ecological catastrophe of ten suns rising at once, the archer Hou Yi shooting down nine of them, and the two portions of the elixir of immortality granted as his reward.

The episode contrasts the popular version, in which Chang'e drinks both doses to keep the elixir from the violent apprentice Feng Meng and floats to the moon, with the older second-century BCE account in the Huainanzi, where she steals it and flees her husband. It traces Hou Yi's mourning ritual as the origin of the Mid-Autumn Festival, the Han dynasty naming taboo that fo ...