Ranka (爛柯) or Lankeshan ji, or Rotten Axe Handle in English, is a Chinese legend similar to that of Rip Van Winkle, although it predates it by at least a 1000 years. The exact date of origin of the legend is unknown. Its earliest known literary reference is a poem written in 900 by the Japanese poet and court official Ki no Tomonori upon returning to Japan from China:
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furusato wa
mishi goto mo arazu
ono no e no
kuchishi tokoro zo
koishikarikeru
Here in my hometown
things are not as I knew them.
How I long to be
in the place where the axe shaft
moldered away into dust.
The legend features a woodcutter, Wang Chih, and his encounter with the two immortals in the mountains.
Kiseido Publishing Company (Japan), The Immortals, http://www.kiseido.com/printss/immort.html
Ki no Tomonori, “991” In Kokin Wakashū: The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry, trans. Helen Craig McCullough (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 216.