High on the mountain the beasts have a king, and the king is not a beast. "The wild beasts of the mountain have a king", the record says; "He is a wild man," his body "covered with hair", his head crowned with "long, thick locks, fiery red in colour". He is monstrously strong: with "a single blow of his huge fist" he can "break large rocks to pieces" and "pull up the trees of the forest by the root", and his flesh is "as hard as iron", proof against "the thrusts of knife, spear, or sword." He "rides upon a tiger", "rules over the wolves, leopards, and tigers," and governs all their affairs; other wild men share the heights, but "on account of his great strength he alone is king".

The record keeps the other half of the story — how so terrible a king is undone, not by force but by cunning. The mountain herb-gatherer "arms himself with two large hollow bamboo tubes", slips them over his wrists, and carries "a jar of very strong wine". He lets the giant grip his arm, then draws his real arm out of the bamboo cuff and "pours it down the throat of the stooping giant," "causing the victim to drop to the ground in a dead sleep" — after which a single thrust through the heart is enough.

This is the whole shelf: one Chinese witness, Myths & Legends of China (published 1922), with no second tradition set beside it to say whether this hairy, tiger-riding king of the beasts belongs to a wider family of tales or to a single mountain. The motif rests, entirely, on one people's memory of the wild men.

If the lord of every beast can be laid low by a hollow reed and a jar of wine, was his kingship ever strength — or only the fear of it?