Huang An was an old man who was over eighty but still looked like a youth. Even during the winter he went about without garments. He sat on a three-feet-long tortoise. Once a man asked him, “How old might this tortoise be?” Huang An replied, “When Fu Hi first invented fish-nets and eel-pots, he caught and gave this tortoise to me.
From then on, I have worn its shield quite flat sitting on it. The tortoise is afraid of the light of the sun and the moon, so it sticks its head out of its shell only once in two thousand years. But from the time it is with me, it has already stuck its head out five times.” Saying this, Huang An took the tortoise and walked on. And the legend had that Huang An was ten thousand years old.
