Why Mountain Monkeys Live Forever

Why Mountain Monkeys Live Forever.

This is the story of why some mountain monkeys never seem to get any older.

Some, so the legends say, are hundreds, maybe thousands of years old.

Now, to be fair, there are all sorts of stories about Taoist immortals from China, but they tend to be humans who have escaped aging and death through secret potions and hidden magics, mastering their internal energies and transcending mortality.

But why on Earth would a bunch of mountain monkeys live forever? Well, to tell that tale, you first need to know a bit about the Monkey King, Sun Wukong.

There are countless tales of Sun Wukong, how he was born from a stone egg and became the King of the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit, how he fought the Havoc Demon and stole the iron that pounded the Milky Way flat, how he learned to change his shape and split his hairs into a thousand copies of himself and leap through the clouds in an instant.

But this is the story of how he cheated death, not just for himself, but for all the monkeys of his kingdom, and it starts, as many stories about Sun Wukong do, with the Handsome Monkey King, as he liked to call himself, getting into trouble.