Miluotuo

Before there was a sky to hold anything up, a bronze drum hung in the dark between two halves of a world that had not yet come apart, and a woman lay asleep inside it. Her head rested on a pair of drumsticks. Ninety-nine golden dragons carried the drum on their coils, ninety-nine phoenixes kept it company, and nine shadows drifted at her side, which were nine great gods standing guard over her sleep. She slept there for nine thousand nine hundred years.

Then a thunderclap split the joined stuff of heaven and earth along a single seam, and the dragons and the phoenixes wheeled around the drum and sang at her to wake up and make the world. She opened her eyes. She was immeasurably tall and her strength had no bottom to it. She walked to the edge of the crack, set her arms against the upper lip and her feet against the lower, and pushed. The top half went up slowly and became the sky. The bottom half sank away and became the ground. Stone ground on stone for a long time, and then it was quiet, and Miluotuo was alone with a bronze drum for company.

She wanted light. She took the gold ring out of her left ear and swallowed it, and carried it nine thousand years, and gave birth to a great gold ball; then she drew a circle in the air with her right hand, breathed on the ball, and it rose and became the sun. She took the silver ring from her right ear and did the same, and the moon went up after it. The seasons arrived in its wake, warm, then scorching, then cool, then bitter.

The nine gods went to work. Kaheng carried mountains on a golden shoulder-pole, one hanging from each end and one gripped in either hand, four peaks at once, moving so fast that his feet punched hollows into the rock. The limestone country of northwest Guangxi is pitted with those hollows to this day. Luoban, whose feet were as broad as boats, walked on the surface of the flood and bailed it away with his two enormous ears for three thousand three hundred and thirty days until dry plain showed through. Seeds were bought from a distant gardener for twelve bags of silver and twelve strings of pearls, and scattered on a wind that the Thunder Lord raised on request.

People were harder. She tried clay and got jars and water butts. She tried reed and maize leaves and got locusts. She tried sweet potato and got monkeys. She tried stone and iron, and the little iron people ate the little stone people and had to be driven into the hills. Most of the world was made by trial and error.

It was the nine gods, coming back from a hunt, who mentioned the tree. Something was seething inside a hollow trunk up the slope, they said, small white things like jade. She went and looked. Honeybees, wild bees, hornets and wasps were building comb in there, cell on cell, and the grubs lay in the warm dark with the beginnings of noses and eyes and mouths on them, and there was yellow wax and running honey to feed them. She laughed and said the people she made would be lovelier than that. Then she had the wax and the honey carried home.

She rolled the wax between her palms until it went tacky as glue and gave it three breaths. She modelled the head on a pomelo and the body on a winter melon, put on the ears and the mouth, then the nose and the eyes, and stopped at the limbs to think. Birds had feet and wings. Beasts had four feet. People should be better than either, so she gave them two feet to walk on and two hands to work with. The finished figures went into four great chests, and she took off her own skirt and spread it over them, and for two hundred and seventy days and nights she did not leave, breathing warm air over them in winter and fanning them cool in summer. On the last day the sky went black and a whirlwind came across the ground and the four lids lifted by themselves, and a baby cried.

Four kinds of bee made four peoples, and the tellings disagree about which grub gave rise to which. In the version taken down from Lan Ayong the hornets became the Han, the wasps the Zhuang, the honeybees the Miao, and the small ancient bees the Yao. In the collected epic published in 2002 the four couples are the great Han, the local Han, the Zhuang and the Bunu Yao. Every version agrees on the order that matters: the Yao came last and came smallest, and had to be given a wet-nurse fetched from another country before they caught their brothers up.

The tigers came for them almost at once, having grown tired of eating animals. Arrows sparked off their heads and glanced away. So Miluotuo had stones wrapped in the children’s soiled nappies and laid out on the slope, and the tigers smelled human and bit down hard and broke their teeth, and when they retreated into the grass the gods fired the grass around them. The scorch marks are still on their coats, which is also why a tiger will run from a torch.

Later the sun and the moon married and produced eleven sons and eleven daughters between them, and twelve suns and twelve moons stood in the sky at once. The crops went brown and the children lay on the ground asking for water. The fire god and the bow god drank banana juice against the heat and soaked their clothes, cut nine hundred and ninety arrows of gold-thread bamboo eighteen feet long and dipped every head in snake and wasp venom, crossed ninety-nine seas and ninety-nine burning mountains, and beat a bronze drum to declare war. Twenty-two of the twenty-four came down in fragments that fell like snow and piled up into mountains. The blood dyed the sorghum red, and a cockerel drank some of it and got a red comb and a red face and the habit of crowing before dawn.

When the children were grown she told them that trees put out branches and grown children leave home. The Han were up first and took the farm tools to the flat country. The Zhuang got up next and took the books. The Miao took axes and went to the timber. The Yao slept until the sun was high, found the house stripped, and came back crying. She gave them a peck of millet seed and told them the slopes would burn and the ash would feed it, and then she gave them the bronze drum to frighten the birds and the wild pigs off the crop. That drum stayed in Yao houses. It is a story a people tell about their own poverty, and it does not flinch from it.

She grew old at the work. Her back bent and her hair went white, and she called the children and told them the twenty-ninth day of the fifth month was her birthday and that if they all came she would go on living among them. The Yao said they had no pigs, no sheep and no money. She laughed and asked what mother ever despised her own children, and told them cold water is sweet if the heart is sincere, and to bring a jar of millet wine, four ounces of ramie for spirit-money and the big drum, and to come three days early. They still do. The festival is called Zhuzhu, or Danu, which is glossed as remembering forever, and Yao ritual masters chant her song across the nights of it.

Her power is entirely maternal and entirely physical. She makes nothing by decree; she swallows it, carries it, kneads it, and breathes on it, and where the material is wrong the result is a locust or a cooking pot. That is also the limit of her. She cannot command the twelve suns down, only send two gods with better arrows. She cannot keep the archers from coming back sterile. In the Bama telling she sells headscarves at market, catches cholera, is refused shelter by the nine gods who fear infection, and dies, and they carry her to a place called Wanshan and bury her. The creator of the world dies of a disease people still die of.

The name is the one genuinely open question. In Bunu ritual language her full title means something close to “the ancient mother”, with the element mi marking the female elder, and it sits in exact parallel with Buluotuo, the Zhuang ancestor god whose bu marks the male elder. Since the Bunu reached the Hongshui River valley late and settled among Zhuang neighbours, and since no other Yao subgroup keeps this goddess, scholars including Nong Xueguan and Li Siying have argued that the Yao took the divine name from their neighbours and filled it with their own story. Others have noticed that the characters used to write luotuo are the ones Chinese scribes reserved for transcribing Sanskrit, and wonder whether the element is native to either language. Meanwhile the Bunu had no script of their own, so all of this survived in the mouths of ritual singers until collectors began writing it down; the three-volume text most often cited was published in Nanning in 2002, and the myth was added to China’s national intangible heritage list in 2011. In one district near Du’an the name is split down the middle and treated as two people, a woman and a man, both blown into being by the wind.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Miluotuo?

Miluotuo is the supreme creator goddess and ancestral mother of the Bunu Yao, a large branch of the Yao people living in Du’an, Dahua and Bama in Guangxi, southern China. She woke inside a bronze drum, forced heaven and earth apart with her own arms and legs, and made the first human beings. Her worship is centred on an oral epic and an annual festival rather than on temples.

How did Miluotuo create human beings?

She made them from beeswax after every other material failed. Clay turned into pots, maize leaves turned into locusts, sweet potato turned into monkeys, and stone and iron produced little people who ate each other. She finally took wax and honey from a hollow tree full of bees, kneaded the wax soft, breathed on it three times, moulded figures with a pomelo-shaped head and a winter-melon body, and brooded over four chests of them for two hundred and seventy days until they cried.

What is the Zhuzhu or Danu Festival?

Zhuzhu, also called Danu or the Ancestral Mother’s Festival, is the great annual festival of the Bunu Yao, held on the twenty-ninth day of the fifth lunar month, which the tradition gives as Miluotuo’s birthday. The story says she asked her poorest children to come three days early with millet wine, ramie for spirit-money and a bronze drum rather than with livestock. Ritual masters chant the Miluotuo song through the nights of the festival.

Where does the Miluotuo epic come from?

It was preserved entirely by mouth, because the Bunu Yao had no writing system of their own, and was performed by ritual singers at festivals, weddings, births, illnesses and funerals. Collectors began recording versions in the twentieth century from named narrators, and a three-volume edition of the ancient songs was published in Nanning in 2002. The Miluotuo myth was listed as national intangible cultural heritage in China in 2011.

Is Miluotuo related to the Zhuang god Buluotuo?

The two names are built the same way, with mi marking a female elder and bu a male elder in front of the same element. Because the Bunu Yao settled late among Zhuang neighbours in the Hongshui River valley, and because no other Yao subgroup keeps this goddess, several scholars argue that the Yao borrowed the divine name and filled it with their own material. The stories themselves are largely distinct, and the question is still open.

Related Entries

Pangu, Nüwa, Fuxi, Hou Yi, Shennong, Zhulong, Prometheus, Ninhursag, Enki, Obatala, Unkulunkulu, Cōātlīcue, Izanagi and Izanami, Gaia, Viracocha