Who Is the Monkey King? The Most Popular Character in Asia
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A monkey born from a stone egg learns magic, acquires a staff weighing eight tonnes that shrinks to fit behind his ear, erases his own name from the registers of death, eats the peaches of immortality at a banquet he was not invited to, defeats the armies of heaven, and is finally trapped by the Buddha under a mountain for five hundred years. He is arguably the most widely known fictional character in East Asia, he comes from a sixteenth-century novel, and the novel is a comedy.
The book he comes from
Journey to the West was published anonymously in the 1590s and is conventionally attributed to Wu Cheng'en, on evidence that is suggestive rather than conclusive. It is one of the four great classical novels of Chinese literature and runs to a hundred chapters. Its frame is historical: a Buddhist monk called Xuanzang really did travel from China to India in the seventh century, over sixteen years and against imperial prohibition, to obtain scriptures, and his own account of the journey survives and is a serious geographical and ethnographic document. The novel takes that journey and populates it with a fictional escort, demons, deities, transformations and a great deal of bureaucratic satire, so that the celestial administration is depicted as a vast civil service with paperwork, jurisdictional disputes and officials trying to avoid responsibility, which was a recognisable joke about the Ming state.
The character
Sun Wukong, whose name means awakened to emptiness, is not a hero in any conventional sense, and the appeal lies in the mixture:
- •He is born from a stone on a mountain, becomes king of the monkeys, and leaves to seek immortality, which he obtains by study and then by several increasingly outrageous thefts
- •His abilities include seventy-two transformations, a cloud somersault covering thirty-four thousand miles in one leap, and the power to turn each of his hairs into a copy of himself
- •His weapon is a pillar from the dragon king's undersea palace, originally used to measure the depth of the oceans, which obeys him and changes size at command
- •He is vain, impulsive, insubordinate and extremely funny, awarding himself the title Great Sage Equal to Heaven and demanding that the celestial bureaucracy recognise it
- •He is finally subdued not by force but by a trick, betting the Buddha that he can leap beyond the edge of the world and discovering that he has not left the Buddha's palm
- •His discipline comes from a golden band fixed around his head, which tightens agonisingly when the monk recites a spell, making the whole journey a story about a chaotic force being brought under control
The journey and the company
Released from under the mountain to protect the monk on his pilgrimage, he travels with a group whose members are as flawed as he is. Zhu Bajie, the pig, is greedy, lazy, lustful and cowardly, and is a demoted celestial marshal punished for harassing a moon goddess. Sha Wujing, the sand monk, is quiet and reliable and was exiled for breaking a cup. A dragon prince serves as the monk's horse. The monk himself, Tang Sanzang, is pious, compassionate and almost uselessly credulous, repeatedly walking into obvious traps and forbidding his disciples from harming the demons trying to eat him. The structure is episodic, with eighty-one ordeals, and the running joke is that the group's spiritual leader is the least capable member and the most powerful member is the least spiritual. Each ordeal is both an adventure and an allegory, since the Chinese title of the novel's key religious layer treats the pilgrimage as a journey of self-cultivation with each character representing an aspect of the mind.
The layers underneath
The novel mixes Buddhism, Taoism and Confucian social assumptions without attempting to reconcile them, which was normal in the period and is part of what makes it readable as several things at once. It is a comic adventure, a religious allegory of the mind's unruliness being disciplined, a satire of officialdom in which heaven is run like a ministry, and a folk collection, since the stories had circulated for centuries in oral tales, opera and earlier written versions before the novel fixed them. The character's own origins are disputed and interesting, with a long-standing scholarly argument about whether he derives partly from Hanuman, the monkey deity of the Ramayana, transmitted along the same routes as Buddhism, or arose from indigenous Chinese water-demon and ape traditions, or both.
How far he has travelled
Few characters have been adapted as often. In China he appears in opera, where the monkey role is a specialised performance tradition with its own movement vocabulary, in the 1961 animated film Havoc in Heaven, and in a vast quantity of television, film and games, including a 2024 video game that became one of the fastest-selling titles ever released. In Japan he is Son Goku, and the name and premise were borrowed directly for the protagonist of Dragon Ball, which carried the character to a global audience that mostly does not know where he came from. A Japanese television series dubbed into English reached British audiences in the late 1970s and is remembered fondly by a generation. He appears in Korean, Vietnamese and Indonesian traditions, in Gene Luen Yang's graphic novel about Chinese American identity, and in an opera by Damon Albarn. The durability is not hard to explain: a clever, disrespectful, immensely powerful figure who mocks authority, cannot be killed and is nonetheless bound by a headache-inducing crown is a combination that travels.
The takeaway
Sun Wukong comes from Journey to the West, a hundred-chapter comic novel of the 1590s built around the real seventh-century pilgrimage of the monk Xuanzang to India. Born from a stone, he acquires immortality by theft, defeats heaven's armies, is trapped under a mountain by the Buddha and is released to escort the monk, restrained by a golden band that tightens on command. The book works simultaneously as adventure, religious allegory and bureaucratic satire, and the character has been adapted into opera, film, anime and games across Asia and beyond.