Fuxi

Also Known As: also Fu Hsi, Paoxi, Baoxi, Mixi, Taihao
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Chinese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He read the patterns of the sky, the ground and the markings of animals, and drew out of them the eight trigrams, the ancestor of Chinese divination and of the written sign.
Role in Mythos: He is the first of the sovereigns, the figure to whom China assigned the invention of the net, the marriage rite and the written contract.
Relation to Humans: Almost everything credited to him is a human technology rather than a divine favour, so he stands less as a power to be placated than as the reason people can fish, marry and keep records. A much later strand of tradition made him and Nüwa the brother and sister who repopulated the world after the flood, which turned him into an ancestor as well as a benefactor.

At a marsh called Leize there was a footprint in the mud too large to belong to anyone. A woman named Huaxu put her own foot inside it. That, according to the Tang scholar Sima Zhen, is the entire conception: no father, no courtship, just a woman standing barefoot in wet reed mud in the shape of something enormous that had walked there before her. She carried the child west to a place called Chengji and gave birth to him there. He had a human head and the body of a snake.

The oldest thing anybody says about Fuxi has nothing to do with any of that. It comes from the Great Treatise appended to the Book of Changes, a text assembled somewhere around 300 BC, and it is not a birth story or a battle. It is a description of a man looking at things. Anciently, when Bao-xi had come to rule all under heaven, the passage runs, he looked up and contemplated the brilliant forms in the sky, and looked down and surveyed the patterns shown on the earth. He studied the ornamental markings of birds and beasts and the suitabilities of the soil. Near at hand he found things to consider in his own body, and far off in things in general. And from that long act of attention he devised the eight trigrams, to show fully the attributes of the spirit-like and to classify the qualities of the myriad things.

That is the whole of his oldest claim. He looked hard enough at the world to find that it had a grammar.

The same passage gives him one other invention, and it is a humbler one. He knotted cords into nets, for hunting and for fishing. Picture that as it would actually have happened: a man on a bank with a coil of wet hemp across his knees, working the knots in with cold fingers, the cord smelling of river, and the first haul coming up out of the shallows heavy and thrashing and silver. Everything that made him a god began as a piece of practical work.

The rest accumulated later, and it accumulated fast. By the time Sima Zhen compiled his supplement to the Records of the Grand Historian in the early eighth century, Fuxi had acquired a surname, the Feng clan, and a predecessor, Suiren, the man who drilled wood for fire. He had a throne at Chen and a reign of a hundred and eleven years. He had replaced government by knotted cords with written tallies. He had reared animals for the sacrificial kitchen, which is where one of his names, Paoxi, comes from, and which sits oddly beside the trigrams. Dragon omens appeared at his accession, so he named his officers after dragons and was called the Dragon Master. He made a zither of thirty-five strings. He was identified with Taihao, the Great Brightness, the god of the east and of the first month of spring. And he instituted marriage, with a formal betrothal gift.

The gift was a pair of deerskins. Two hides carried across a threshold, the fur still stiff with cold, and a thing that had been improvised became a thing with a shape and a rule.

His body is the part of him that everybody remembers, and it is very old. Han tomb shrines in Shandong carved him in stone as a man to the waist and a serpent below it, his tail braided with the tail of Nüwa, a set square in his hand and a pair of compasses in hers, the two of them locking the straight and the round of the world together. Seven centuries later people were still painting the same image. In a tomb at Astana, outside Turfan in the Xinjiang desert, a silk painting was hung above the dead: Fuxi and Nüwa with flowing sleeves and intertwined snake tails, he holding the square, she holding the compass, and around them the sun and moon and stars drawn in ink to show the cosmos in motion. It was found in 1965 and is in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region Museum. Nobody in that tomb needed the picture explained.

Which raises the question of who Nüwa is to him, and here the popular answer and the old answer part company. In Sima Zhen she is not his wife. She is his successor. She is also of the Feng clan, also snake-bodied and human-headed, and she takes the throne after him; her own work is the reed-pipe and, when Gonggong cracks the sky against Mount Buzhou, the melting of five-coloured stone to patch it. The story that has swallowed all the others, the one about the brother and the sister alone on the mountain after the flood, is not in the classical record at all. It surfaces in writing in a Tang collection, Li Rong’s Duyi zhi, where a brother and sister on Kunlun want to marry, are ashamed of wanting it, climb to the summit and ask heaven for a sign, and the smoke of their two fires draws together into one column. That is the ninth century, at the earliest.

It is also, on the evidence, not originally a story of the Chinese heartland. When the ethnographer Ruey Yih-fu did fieldwork in southwest China in the 1930s, he found the tale alive and everywhere among the Miao of western Hunan: a brother and sister survive the flood, marry, and become the ancestors of every living person, and the pair are worshipped as the Nuo god and goddess. Ruey argued from the linguistic and narrative overlaps that this southwestern flood myth is where the Fuxi and Nüwa pairing came from, not the other way round. The most famous thing about Fuxi may be a borrowing.

What he can do follows exactly from what he is. His power is legibility. He can read the sky, the ground, the pelt of an animal and his own hand as though they were the same document, and having read them he can compress what he found into eight three-line figures that will still be in use three thousand years later. From that single ability everything else falls out: nets, because a net is a pattern imposed on water; writing, because a written sign is a pattern imposed on speech; marriage, because a rite is a pattern imposed on desire. He is a god of taking the shapelessness out of things.

His limits follow just as directly. He does not fight anything. There is no monster in his story, no rival, no descent into the underworld, no wound. He has no weapon, only a measuring tool. And he dies, which the record is quite matter of fact about, after eleven decades on the throne, with his burial place disputed between Nanjun and a hill in Shanyang. The deepest limitation is one he cannot do anything about: his gifts, once given, stop being his. The trigrams belong to the diviners, the net belongs to the fishermen, marriage belongs to everybody, and Fuxi recedes into the far end of the genealogy, a snake-tailed figure on the wall of a tomb, holding the square that someone else will use.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Fuxi in Chinese mythology?

Fuxi is the first of the Three Sovereigns, a culture hero credited with giving humanity the eight trigrams, fishing and hunting nets, written records and the marriage rite. He is depicted with a human head and torso above a serpent’s body. He is also known as Paoxi, Baoxi and Taihao, and is worshipped as the god of the east and of spring.

What did Fuxi invent?

The eight trigrams of the Book of Changes are his defining invention, drawn from his observation of the patterns of heaven, earth and animals. The same classical passage credits him with knotting cords into nets for hunting and fishing. Later tradition added written tallies to replace government by knotted cord, the institution of marriage with a betrothal gift of two deerskins, and a thirty-five-stringed zither.

Why is Fuxi depicted with a snake body?

The earliest surviving description, in Sima Zhen’s eighth-century supplement to the Records of the Grand Historian, states plainly that he had a serpent’s body and a human head, and Han tomb carvings show him that way centuries earlier. He is almost always paired with Nüwa, who is also snake-bodied, their tails intertwined. The image was still being made in the seventh century, as in the silk painting found in the Astana tombs at Turfan.

Are Fuxi and Nüwa brother and sister, or husband and wife?

Both, depending on which layer of tradition you read. In the classical record Nüwa is not his wife but his successor on the throne, a separate snake-bodied sovereign who mends the sky. The story of the two as siblings who marry after a flood to repopulate the world first appears in writing in a Tang-era collection, Li Rong’s Duyi zhi, and the ethnographer Ruey Yih-fu traced its living form to the Miao peoples of southwest China.

What do Fuxi and Nüwa hold in their hands?

Fuxi holds a carpenter’s square and Nüwa holds a pair of compasses. The square measures the straight and the earthly, the compasses the round and the heavenly, so the pair together represent the ordering of the whole cosmos. The motif appears on Han stone tomb shrines and on the Tang silk painting from Astana Cemetery in Turfan.