10 Yuan Folk Fairy Tales - Man and Mountains

The "Man and Mountains" piece belongs to China's Folk Fairy Tales commemorative series, which the People's Bank launched in 1999 to document mythological narratives at risk of fading from popular memory. The specific tale depicted here — variously rendered in English as "The Man Who Moved the Mountains" — derives from the ancient Liezi text and concerns an old man who resolves to relocate two mountains blocking his village, undeterred by a neighbor's mockery. The story entered modern political currency when Mao Zedong invoked it in his 1945 closing speech at the Seventh National Congress of the Communist Party.