Kuafu

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Kua Fu (Chinese: 夸父) is a giant in Chinese mythology.

One day out of the blue, Kua Fu was perplexed by the Sun's whereabouts at night and decided to chase and catch the Sun. With each stride he gets closer to the Sun, however, he could never catch up to it.

He followed the Sun from the East to the West, draining all rivers and lakes crossing his path as sources of water to quench his burning thirst as he closed in on the star. However, he wasn't able to finish his quest because he died of the extreme heat and exhaustion.

The wooden club he was carrying grew into a vast forest. In modern day Chinese usage, the story of Kua Fu chasing the Sun is used to describe a person who fails to obtain his goal because he greatly overestimates himself.

The Kua Fu story bears a striking similarity to the Greek legend of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun, melting his wax wings and causing him to fall into the sea and drown. The two stories may have derived from a very ancient legend of an ancestor tribe whose descendants dispersed widely. Although that is considerd by some to be a 'crackpot' theory to think that the two stories derived from one ancient story.