Gong Gong

Also Known As: 共工, also written Gonggong; personal name Kang Hui 康回; the two characters read as an office title, roughly Minister of Works
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Chinese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He holds the rivers and the floodwater and can let them go over the whole world, and his skull is hard enough to break the pillar that props up the sky.
Role in Mythos: He is the rebel at the beginning of things, the loser of a war for the throne of heaven whose temper knocks the sky and the earth permanently out of true.
Relation to Humans: People inherit the damage rather than the quarrel, living ever after on a crooked world whose rivers all run the same way. In the sober court histories he is not a god at all but an officer who was handed the Yellow River to manage, failed at it, and was sentenced to the northern frontier.

Every great river in China runs east, and the oldest explanation for that is a god who lost an argument.

The Huainanzi, assembled at the court of Huainan around 139 BC, gives the whole catastrophe in about forty characters. Gong Gong and Zhuanxu fought, each of them wanting to be thearch. In the rage of it Mount Buzhou was struck, the pillar of heaven broke, and the cords that tied down the earth snapped. Heaven tilted to the northwest, so the sun and moon and the stars and planets slide that way across the sky. Earth came up short in the southeast, so the floodwater and the heaped silt settle there instead. The passage is compressed to the point of ambiguity: it never fixes which of the two combatants put his head into the mountain, and a modern translator can render the collision as the work of both without straining the grammar.

He is older than that telling. In the Heavenly Questions of the Songs of Chu, a Warring States poem made almost entirely of questions that are never answered, someone asks why the earth tips toward the southeast and names the rage of Kang Hui as the cause. Kang Hui is Gong Gong under his personal name. The poem offers nothing further, because it assumes its listener already knows the story, which is the surest sign the story was old by the fourth century BC.

Before the mountain there is a version of him that is very nearly respectable, and his own name points straight at it. Gong Gong is less a name than a post. The two characters read as an office, something close to Minister of Works, and James Legge, translating the Book of Documents, simply put the title down and left the man out of it. In that mode he walks the water. He follows a stream down through the reeds until the cold has climbed past his knees, marks where it rises and where it gives itself up to something larger, and fixes a name to it. One strand of the tradition sets him and his son Hou Tu over the waterworks between the Yi and the Luo, which is bookkeeping, not thunder.

Where he came from depends on which scroll is open. The Classic of Mountains and Seas runs a line down from the Flame Emperor through four generations to Zhurong, and makes Gong Gong the son of Zhurong, with Hou Tu after him and another son, Shuqi, given a square head and a flat crown. That genealogy is awkward, since in the better-known telling Zhurong is the fire god who beats him. A few old lists of the Three Augusts include his name, which is a peculiar promotion for a figure the court histories file under criminals.

Nobody in the early texts says what he looked like. The serpent arrives late. The picture most readers now carry, a man to the waist and a thick coil below it with red hair hanging loose, is set down in the Lushi, a Song compilation of the twelfth century AD, better than a thousand years after the Huainanzi. The bronze head and iron brow that get bolted onto him in later popular accounts are not his; in the old encyclopedias that description belongs to Chiyou, the other great insurgent of the early world. What the ancient sources give instead of a face is a consequence, which is the smell of wet silt in a room that had a floor in it yesterday.

So the scene has to be built out of the damage. A god puts his shoulder down and runs at a mountain in the northwest. Stone gives, dust stands in the air for a long time, and the whole sky shifts a few degrees and stays there. Then the quiet. Then the water, arriving across the plain in flat grey sheets with nothing in front of it.

The repair belongs to Nüwa, and the Huainanzi tells that part in a different chapter without naming him once. She smelts stones of five colours and works them into the torn sky, cuts the legs from a great turtle and stands them at the four corners, kills a black dragon, and heaps up burnt reeds and cinders to turn the flood. It holds. It does not hold straight. The two halves of the disaster sit inside the same book, in separate chapters, and the book never quite says that the first one caused the second.

The other tradition refuses him godhood altogether. The Bamboo Annals record that in the nineteenth year of Yao he was ordered to manage the Yellow River. The Canon of Yao preserves the reference Yao gave him afterwards, and it is brutal in the way only an official assessment can be: when all is quiet he talks, but when he is employed his actions turn out differently, and he is respectful only in appearance. Meanwhile the floods assail the heavens. By the Canon of Shun the matter is closed. Shun banishes the Minister of Works to Yu island in the far north, alongside Huandou confined on Mount Chong, the Sanmiao driven into Sanwei, and Gun held prisoner until death on Mount Yu. Four criminals, and all under heaven acknowledged the justice of it. Sima Qian adds a purpose to the sentence: Gong Gong was sent north to work a change on the Northern Di. In the eighth century AD the commentator Zhang Shoujie went one step further and matched each of the four criminals to one of the Four Perils, handing Gong Gong to Qiongqi, the winged man-eater that swallows whoever is in the right.

His minister kept the flood going for him. Xiangliu had nine heads on one snake body and fed from all nine at a sitting, and everywhere he rested the ground turned to bitter marsh where nothing would live. Yu the Great killed him. The blood stank so badly that no grain would grow in the soil it soaked, and the ground flooded and stayed uninhabitable, until Yu penned the water in a pool and the lords of the sky raised their terraces over the top of it.

What Gong Gong can do is short and enormous. He holds the water and can let it go, and once it is going there is no natural limit to how far it runs. He can break one of the props of the world with his own head, which is a feat nobody else in the Chinese record claims, and it is very nearly the only thing he is remembered for.

What he cannot do is win. Zhuanxu, Zhurong, Gao Xin, Nüwa: the opponent shifts from text to text and the result never moves. In the sober version the failure is technical rather than martial. He was given the river and could not hold it. Gun came after him, piled up barriers, and lost nine years to it. Yu came after Gun, opened channels, and gave the water somewhere to go. The judgment is buried in the sequence. The god who commands the flood is beaten by the man who declines to fight it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Gong Gong in Chinese mythology?

Gong Gong is a Chinese water god remembered chiefly as a rebel who fought for the throne of heaven and lost. The Classic of Mountains and Seas makes him a descendant of the Flame Emperor and the son of Zhurong, and one strand of the tradition has him managing rivers and waterworks before he turned on the world. His name is also an office title, roughly Minister of Works, which is how the Book of Documents treats him.

Why did Gong Gong smash Mount Buzhou?

He did it in rage after losing a contest for the position of thearch. The Huainanzi, compiled around 139 BC, says that Gong Gong and Zhuanxu fought to rule, and that in the fury of the fight Mount Buzhou was struck, breaking the pillar of heaven and severing the cords that anchored the earth.

What happened after Gong Gong broke the pillar of heaven?

The sky tilted toward the northwest and the earth fell short in the southeast, which is the reason Chinese myth gives for the sun, moon and stars moving as they do and for the rivers of China running east. Floods followed. Nüwa repaired the damage by smelting five-coloured stones to patch the sky and cutting the legs from a great turtle to prop up the corners, but the tilt was never fully corrected.

Who did Gong Gong fight?

The opponent changes from text to text. The Huainanzi names Zhuanxu, while other traditions set him against the fire god Zhurong, or Gao Xin, or Nüwa. In the Book of Documents he is not fought at all but sentenced, banished by Shun to Yu island in the far north as one of the Four Criminals, alongside Huandou, the Sanmiao and Gun.

What did Gong Gong look like?

The earliest sources give him no physical description whatsoever. The familiar image of a human face and torso above a serpent’s body, with red hair, is first recorded in the Lushi, a Song-dynasty compilation from the twelfth century AD, more than a thousand years after the Huainanzi told the story of the broken pillar. The bronze head and iron forehead sometimes attributed to him in popular accounts belong in the old texts to Chiyou.