According to legend, Wan Hu was a minor Chinese official — supposedly of the middle Ming dynasty (16th century) — who decided to take advantage of China's advanced rocket and fireworks technology to launch himself into outer space. He supposedly had a chair built with forty-seven rockets attached. On the day of lift-off, Wan, wonderfully attired, climbed into his rocket chair while forty seven servants lit the fuses and then hastily ran for cover. There was a colossal explosion. When the smoke cleared, Wan and the chair were gone, never to be seen again.

A precursor of the story of Wan Hu appeared in an article by John Elfreth Watkins published in the October 2, 1909 issue of Scientific American, but it used the name Wang Tu instead of Wan Hu.

"Tradition asserts that the first to sacrifice himself to the problem of flying was Wang Tu, a Chinese mandarin of about 2,000 years B.C. who, having had constructed a pair of large, parallel and horizontal kites, seated himself in a chair fixed between them while forty-seven attendants each with a candle ignited forty-seven rockets placed beneath the apparatus. However the rocket under the chair exploded, burning the mandarin and so angered the Emperor that he ordered a severe paddling for Wang."

(It should be noted that a date of 2000 BC pre-dates the emergence of writing in China by three or four centuries and pre-dates the invention of gunpowder-based rockets in China by about 3,000 years.)