Wan Hu's journey to the stars... at least, that was the plan.
Several centuries earlier -- legend says about 1500 AD, around the middle of the Ming Dynasty -- a Chinese stargazer named Wan Hu dreamed of going where no man had gone before and set out to turn that dream into space age reality.
According to the legend, Wan, a local government official, was obsessed by the stars and planned a rather harebrained scheme to get himself closer to them.
Something of a nutty professor character, Wan set out to make himself the world's first astronaut.
Picking up on China's recently developed expertise in rocketry, he took up the task of building himself a space ship.
Centuries before the Wright brothers took to the air or the Germans launched their V1 and V2 rockets, Wan was convinced that the weapons of war could also be a means of transportation and his ticket to the stars.
He was somewhat ahead of his time.
Big bang
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Wan's pioneering spacecraft was built around a sturdy chair, two kites and 47 of the largest gunpowder-filled rockets he could lay his hands on.
Come the launch day, Wan dressed himself in his imperial finery, strapped himself in the chair and called upon his 47 servants, each armed with a flaming torch, to light the 47 fuses.
Their job done, the servants speedily retreated to a safe distance ... and waited.
What came next, the legend goes, was an enormous bang.
When the smoke eventually cleared, Wan and his chair were nowhere to be seen.
Whether Wan actually made it or not has never been made clear.
The prognosis does seem a little doubtful.
But despite the somewhat cranky nature of spacecraft he was certainly on the right track.
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