A well-known figure in the ancient history of the Tun Empire is a man named Ganlu, who was a warrior, healer, religious philosopher, and advisor to Emperor Sh’jan the Third. Ganlu is described in Tuni historical texts as a bearded foreigner who came from the Island in the West. Accounts differ as to the date of his arrival, but it is said that when he saw the vast plains of the Great Basin of Tun he fell to his knees and praised the gods, famously exclaiming (in a phrase that would later be appropriated by various Tuni rulers and generals as justification for imperial expansion): “Glorious land, where a man can walk for his whole life and never reach the sea!”
Ganlu traveled for many years. In the wake of recent famine and war, the Tun countryside was plagued by lawlessness and banditry, against which common villagers were often helpless. Wherever Ganlu went, he confronted crime and immorality, taught martial skills to the ordinary people, treated sickness and ailments with his healing touch, and espoused a philosophy of peaceful living, neighborly obligation, and communion with the divine spirits of the land, rivers, and sky. His teachings formed the basis for krajow, the Tuni fighting arts, and greatly influenced the Shubai religion.
Eventually, the traveler’s reputation reached the ears of the emperor, who summoned Ganlu and his disciples to the palace and asked him to become a royal advisor. Ganlu refused three times before consenting, each time asking the emperor to offer evidence of his virtues as a monarch. Ganlu’s acumen as a counselor and the founding of his schools of krajow are recounted in further legends, which differ in detail but hold in common that Ganlu derived extraordinary power and wisdom from an enchanted stone given to him by his forest goddess mother and which he wore close to his heart at all times. It is said that Ganlu lived until the age of one hundred and seventy; upon his death, his spirit went into the stone, which was kept in the Imperial Palace so that the emperor could continue to consult it.
While historians agree that Ganlu was a Kekonese Green Bone and that his teachings bear considerable resemblance to both Abukei folklore and pre-Deitist spirituality, only recently have they concluded that he was most likely the third son of the king of Jan during the early part of the Three Crowns period in Kekonese history.
Kekon has no record of this man, other than a royal genealogy set down at the time with an unnamed reference to “a young prince, lost.”