In the time of King Kang of Song there was a retainer named Han Ping, who had married a woman of the He family, and she was very beautiful. The king saw her, and took her.
Han Ping dared to grieve, and for that the king threw him into prison and condemned him to hard labour on the city wall. His wife, in the palace, contrived to send him a letter with its meaning folded inside itself: The rain falls and falls; the river is deep and wide; the sun rises toward my heart. The letter was intercepted and read aloud at court, and no one understood it — until the minister Su He said: “The rain that falls and falls is her grief. The deep wide river is that you cannot come to each other. The sun rising toward her heart means she has resolved to die.”
Soon afterward, Han Ping killed himself.
The king, hearing it, was pleased; and he had He brought up onto a high terrace with him to look at the work on the wall. But she had prepared. She had treated her clothes with some decoction that rotted the threads. Standing at the edge of the terrace she threw herself off — and when the king’s attendants caught at her dress, the silk came away in their hands like ash, and she fell, and died.
In her sash they found her last letter, addressed to the king: Your servant wishes only to be buried with Han Ping.
The king, in a rage, refused even that. He buried them in separate graves, set apart on either side of the road, and said: “You two loved one another so well — if you can make your graves join together, I shall not stand in your way.”
In a single night a great catalpa tree sprang up on each grave. In ten days they were tall enough to embrace. Their trunks leaned toward one another across the road, their branches wove together overhead, and their roots twined beneath the earth. And a pair of mandarin ducks came and nested in the joined branches, and called to one another there, morning and evening, with a sound that made travellers weep.
The people of Song mourned them and named it the Husband-and-Wife Tree, and the name stayed. The king, who had commanded walls and graves and the lives of everyone in the story, is remembered only as the man who could not keep two trees from meeting.