Nüwa

The sky broke at the corners and would not hold. Fire ran through the marsh reeds and did not go out, water rose and did not drain away, and the nine provinces of the world split along seams nobody had known were there. Predators came down out of the smoke to take whatever was still moving. Into that ruin the Huainanzi, compiled at a Han prince’s court in the second century BC, sets a woman with a serpent’s lower body. She knelt at a furnace and began melting stones.

She smelted stone of five colours and patched the azure sky with it. She cut the legs from a giant turtle and stood them at the four corners to carry the weight of heaven. She killed the black dragon that had driven the water and scattered the beasts that came behind it, then heaped reed ash until the flood stopped climbing. The colours were not decoration. Five is the number of the phases in Chinese cosmology, wood and fire and earth and metal and water, so the patch was the whole material world melted down and pressed back into its own ceiling.

The text does not say who broke it. A different chapter of the same book tells of Gong Gong, beaten in a fight over the succession, ramming his head against Mount Buzhou until the pillar holding up the northwest gave way. Later readers stitched the two accounts together and the join has held ever since, but the repair is older on the page than the culprit.

What she managed was a patch, not a restoration. Heaven never sat level again. It leans toward the northwest, which is why sun and moon and stars slide that way across it, and the earth sags toward the southeast, which is why every great river in China runs east until it finds the sea. A world was saved and left crooked. The entire drainage of a continent was explained as scar tissue.

She is older than the story that made her famous. The Questions to Heaven, a long catalogue of riddles preserved in the Songs of Chu and attributed to Qu Yuan, asks flatly: Nüwa had a body, who formed it? The oldest surviving line about her is a question about her own origin, and nothing in the poem answers it. Around AD 100 the lexicographer Xu Shen glossed the wa in her name as an ancient divine woman who transformed the myriad things, which says what she did without going anywhere near what she was.

The making of people comes down through Ying Shao, whose Fengsu Tongyi was written near the end of the second century AD. She squatted at a bank of yellow loess and worked the earth between her palms until it warmed and took a shape, then set each small figure down to dry and watched it get up and walk away. It was slow. There was a great deal of world to fill and her hands were only two. So she took a length of cord, dragged it through the wet mud, and hauled it up, and the clots that flew off the rope landed and stood and became people as well. Ying Shao adds the detail nobody would invent by accident: the ones she shaped by hand became the rich and the noble, the ones flung from the cord became the poor and the common. A creation myth doing double duty as an argument for the class system.

The images are more consistent than the texts. On the west wall of the Wu Liang shrine at Jiaxiang in Shandong, cut into grey stone in the middle of the second century AD, she and Fuxi turn toward each other with their tails wound together like twisted rope. She has her hair in a bun and holds a compass; he wears a cap and holds a carpenter’s square. The carving is shallow, barely a finger’s depth, and the whole meaning of it sits in those two tools, since the Chinese words for compass and square combine into an ordinary phrase for establishing order. He draws the straight lines. She draws the circle, which is the shape of the sky she had to put back.

The marriage came late. Li Rong’s Duyi zhi, a Tang collection written a full millennium after the Huainanzi, has the two of them alone on Kunlun when the universe has only just opened, wanting each other and ashamed of wanting it. The brother took his sister to the summit and prayed that the smoke of their offering would gather if heaven approved and scatter if it did not. The smoke drew together into one column. She wove a fan out of grass and held it in front of her face, and they went down the mountain married. Before that text she is frequently alone in the record, a maker with no husband, and the eighth-century scholar Sima Zhen who slotted her into the Three Sovereigns was tidying a genealogy that had never needed her to be anyone’s wife.

Everything she does is manual. She does not order the water down, she burns reeds and banks the ash against it. She does not restore the shattered pillars, she butchers a turtle and props the sky on its legs. There is no throne in any of it, no court, no thunderbolt, only heat and mud and a great deal of unpleasant work done at speed. That is the source of her reach and also its edge: a goddess of repair can only ever return the world to a working condition, not a perfect one, and the tilt she left in the sky is permanent.

Nor was she exempt from ending. The Classic of Mountains and Seas, in the section on the great wilderness of the west, records ten spirits that were formed out of Nüwa’s intestines after her death, settled on a stretch of open country and blocking the road that crossed it. She made humanity out of earth and hand pressure, held up heaven with reconstituted stone, and then came apart herself into a group of minor deities who spent their time in the way of traffic.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Nüwa in Chinese mythology?

Nüwa is the creator goddess of Chinese mythology, depicted with a woman’s upper body and the lower body of a snake or dragon. She is credited with making the first human beings out of yellow earth and with repairing the sky after it collapsed. She was later counted among the Three Sovereigns and worshipped as a patron of marriage.

How did Nüwa repair the sky?

According to the Huainanzi, she smelted stone of five colours and used it to patch the hole in the sky, then cut the legs off a giant turtle and set them up as the four pillars supporting heaven. She also killed a black dragon that had caused the flooding and piled up reed ash to hold back the water. The five colours correspond to the five phases of Chinese cosmology.

How did Nüwa create humans?

The Fengsu Tongyi, written by Ying Shao around AD 195, says she moulded human beings by hand from yellow earth. When the work proved too slow she dragged a cord through mud and pulled it out, and the drops that flew off became people too. The text adds that the hand-made humans became the rich and noble while those made from the cord became the poor and common.

What is the relationship between Nüwa and Fuxi?

They are usually described as siblings and, in later tradition, as husband and wife. Han dynasty tomb art regularly shows them with their serpent tails intertwined, Nüwa holding a compass and Fuxi a carpenter’s square. The marriage story, in which they seek heaven’s approval through the smoke of an offering on Mount Kunlun, appears in Li Rong’s Tang dynasty Duyi zhi, roughly a thousand years after the earliest accounts of Nüwa.

Why does the sky tilt in Chinese mythology?

Because Nüwa’s repair was a patch rather than a full restoration. The damage attributed to Gong Gong striking Mount Buzhou left heaven leaning to the northwest and the earth sinking to the southeast, and Chinese tradition uses this to explain why the sun, moon and stars move westward across the sky and why the great rivers of China flow east.

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