Liu Hong

Hongjiang ferry, late at night. The new top scholar Chen Guangrui is traveling with his wife Yin Wenjiao to take up his post in Jiangzhou, and they need to cross the river. The boatman is a river bandit named Liu Hong - together with his accomplice Li Biao, he has already set his sights on this innocent scholar and his beautiful young wife. There is no moon on the water. No one is around. Liu Hong strikes Chen Guangrui when the man is off guard, kills him, and throws the body into the river. Then he puts on the scholar's official robe, takes Yin Wenjiao, and proceeds to Jiangzhou as if nothing had happened. From that night on, a murderer takes the place of a top scholar, occupies his wife and his office, and keeps the fraud going for eighteen years. This episode is the core of Tripitaka's tragic origins, and the passage in Journey to the West that comes closest to a worldly crime novel - no magic, no divine powers, no heavenly troops, only one mortal's murder of another, plus impersonation and possession.

The murder at Hongjiang ferry: Tripitaka's tragic origins

Chapter 9 lays out the murder in detail. After Chen Guangrui wins first place in the imperial examinations, he is appointed prefect of Jiangzhou. He travels from Chang'an with his pregnant wife Yin Wenjiao and reaches Hongjiang ferry, where he must hire a boat to cross the river. Liu Hong and Li Biao are local bandits who set traps at the ferry and use the crossing as cover for murder and theft.

Wu Cheng'en writes the murder with great restraint. There is no gory excess, only a sparse account of the act itself: after nightfall Liu Hong and Li Biao kill Chen Guangrui and push the body into the river. Yet the restraint makes the horror sharper. Ferry, darkness, an unfamiliar boatman, a journey with no village and no inn between - everything points to the most basic fear for human safety: you handed your life to a stranger, and that stranger wanted your life.

Yin Wenjiao's position in the crisis is desperate. She sees her husband killed, but she is heavily pregnant and cannot fight back. Liu Hong threatens to kill her too if she refuses. To save the child in her womb - the future Tripitaka - she is forced to submit. This is the heaviest ethical dilemma in the whole episode: a woman choosing between dying with her husband or living for her child. Wu Cheng'en offers no moral judgment, but readers have argued over it ever since.

After the child is born, Yin Wenjiao knows Liu Hong will never allow Chen Guangrui's bloodline to survive. She places the infant on a board, bites her finger, writes a blood letter, and sends the baby drifting down the river. That is how Tripitaka's infant name, "River-Flow Child," comes to be. The baby floats to Gold Mountain Monastery, where the elder Fazeng raises him. Eighteen years later, the grown Xuanzang learns the truth of his birth, returns home to acknowledge his mother, and petitions for justice.

Eighteen years of impersonation: the longest scam in the book

Liu Hong's impersonation is the longest-running fraud in Journey to the West. Eighteen years - long enough for an infant to become an adult. For all those years he wears Chen Guangrui's robes, sits in the Jiangzhou prefect's seat, lives in Chen Guangrui's house, and shares the same roof with Chen Guangrui's wife.

Logically, the scam should never work. How can a river bandit replace a scholar-official without being found out? Would no colleague, superior, or subordinate recognize the real Chen Guangrui? Would Yin Wenjiao's natal family - she is the daughter of a minister - never write once in eighteen years? Wu Cheng'en barely explains any of that. In the novel's logic, Liu Hong's fraud functions as a necessary premise. It has to be true so that Tripitaka's origins can unfold. You do not need to ask how it could happen. You only need to accept that it did.

From a psychological angle, eighteen years of impersonation would be exhausting. Every day Liu Hong has to play someone he is not: handle documents, meet officials, survive social occasions. A man who began as a bandit must maintain the dignity of a prefect. That tension is easy to imagine. Yin Wenjiao, who knows the truth, is a blade hanging over his head. He must control her for eighteen years, and that control can hardly be only physical; it must also be psychological.

Wu Cheng'en gives Liu Hong a thoroughly worldly evil. The demons on the pilgrimage road usually have supernatural motives - eat Tripitaka for immortality, seize a relic to improve cultivation, or do the bidding of a heavenly master. Liu Hong's motives are human: greed, lust, power. He kills for money and a woman; he impersonates for office and comfort. He does not need any cultivation logic. His evil is naked, worldly, and very close to real life.

Heart cut out and offered to the river: Chen Guangrui's vindication

Eighteen years later, Tripitaka, raised in the monastery, learns the truth of his birth. He returns to Jiangzhou and finds his mother. Yin Wenjiao confirms the blood letter, mother and son recognize each other, and she secretly writes to her father, the minister Yin. Yin sends troops to arrest Liu Hong.

Liu Hong's punishment is the harshest mortal execution in the whole novel. The text says he is bound and taken back to Hongjiang ferry - the very place where he killed Chen Guangrui - and there his belly is cut open and his heart taken out, which is then offered on the riverbank to appease Chen Guangrui's spirit. This kind of live disemboweling appears often in Ming vernacular fiction when dealing with the most vile offenders. Wu Cheng'en uses it here to satisfy the reader's sense of justice and to give Chen Guangrui - the drowned wronged soul - the revenge he deserves.

The place of execution matters. Liu Hong is killed at Hongjiang ferry, the start of his murder and the end of his punishment. Eighteen years of escape form a perfect circle: he begins here as a prefect and ends here with his heart cut out. That kind of closed causality is common in Journey to the West, but here it is especially strong because Liu Hong is a mortal, not a demon. A demon can die and return to the cycle of spirits; a mortal cut open at the river is simply dead. No second chance, no reincarnation buffer.

Chen Guangrui's ending is more mythic. When he is pushed into the river, the River Dragon King takes his corpse in - Chen Guangrui had once saved a dragon, and the dragon keeps his body intact until the day of vindication. After Liu Hong falls, the dragon lets Chen Guangrui return to life. Family reunites. The contrast is sharp: the killer is disemboweled and finished; the victim is restored by karma and grace.

Liu Hong's story has a unique place in the novel because it supplies the emotional background for Tripitaka's mission. Why does Tripitaka go to the West? On the surface because Emperor Taizong asks him and the Buddha commands it. But deeper down, his personal engine is a childhood wound: he was born into catastrophe, with his father murdered, his mother violated, and himself floated on a board through the river before he even had a name. That trauma gives him his instinctive compassion for suffering and his hunger to rescue others. In a sense, Liu Hong's cruelty forges Tripitaka's moral core.

Related Figures

• Chen Guangrui - Tripitaka's biological father, a new top scholar killed by Liu Hong at Hongjiang ferry and later revived
• Yin Wenjiao - Tripitaka's mother, the minister's daughter, forced to endure eighteen years under Liu Hong while protecting her son
• Tripitaka - the greatest victim of Liu Hong's crime, cast adrift as an infant and later reunited with his mother to exact justice
• Elder Fazeng - the abbot of Gold Mountain Monastery, who finds the drifting infant and raises him
• Emperor Taizong - the Tang emperor, who orders Liu Hong arrested after Yin's memorial reaches the throne