Pangu

Eighteen thousand years is a long time for anything to be asleep, and the thing that woke had no word for the dark it woke into. The dark was not empty. It was thick and warm and undivided, everything pressed against everything else with nothing to hold the parts apart, murk and light stirred together like the inside of an egg. Which is exactly what the oldest text says it was. Heaven and earth were mixed like a chicken’s egg, and Pangu was born within it.

He reached for an axe. Whether the axe was already there or came into being because he reached for it is a question none of the surviving fragments bother to answer.

The stroke went through the middle of the murk and the murk came apart. What was clear and light drifted upward and became sky. What was heavy and turbid settled and became ground. That should have been the end of the work, except that the two halves had spent an eternity touching and showed every sign of drifting back together. So he stood up between them and pushed, and he kept pushing.

Every day the sky rose ten feet, and every day the ground thickened ten feet, and every day Pangu grew ten feet taller to fill the gap he had made. He did this for another eighteen thousand years. There is no drama in that middle stretch of the story, no enemy, no trial, nothing but a body enlarging in the dark at a fixed and unhurried rate until the distance between the ground and the sky was ninety thousand li and the arrangement would hold on its own.

Then he was tired, and then he died, and then the interesting part begins.

His breath went out of him and became the wind and the drifting cloud. His voice became thunder. His left eye became the sun and his right eye the moon. His four limbs and his torso set as the four quarters of the world and the five sacred peaks. His blood ran out into the rivers, his tendons became the contours and grain of the land, his flesh the soil of the fields. His hair and beard scattered into the stars, the fine hair on his skin into grass and standing timber, his teeth and bones into metal ore and stone, the marrow inside them into pearl and jade. His sweat came down as rain and lay in the marshes. Every hill anyone has climbed is a piece of him.

And the small creatures living on his skin, touched by the wind, became the people of the earth. That is the line the later retellings quietly drop, and it is the best line in the myth. Humanity is vermin, dignified by weather.

What he actually looked like is genuinely unsettled, and the disagreement is old rather than modern. One Ming compilation quotes the lost annals as giving him a dragon’s head and a snake’s body, a formula that would put him in the same family as Fuxi and Nüwa, whose serpent tails coil together on Han tomb bricks. The trouble is that the same passage has his hair turning into grass and his body carrying parasites, and a dragon has neither hair nor fleas. Village tradition around the Tongbai Mountains in Henan is more consistent and much stranger: a giant one zhang tall with a square face, big round eyes, a pair of horns growing from his head, kudzu vine woven with leaves for clothing, bare feet. A carved stone from a Han dynasty tomb in Nanyang shows a naked horned man with an axe in his right hand. The horns come with their own local explanation, that people once had horns too, used for fighting animals, and that when a person’s horns went soft it meant they were dying; so many horns went soft that nobody was left working, and heaven sent generals down overnight to take them all back.

There is one honest thing that has to be said about him, and it does not weaken the story. Pangu is late. He is absent from the Classic of Mountains and Seas, absent from the Heavenly Questions, absent from every pre-Qin book where a creator ought to be. He surfaces for the first time around the middle of the third century of the common era, in two works by Xu Zheng, a writer in the southeastern kingdom of Wu: the Sanwu liji, which has the egg and the splitting, and the Wuyun linian ji, which has the death and the transformation. Both books were lost. What survives are quotations, one preserved in a Tang encyclopedia compiled in the 620s, the other in a history assembled in 1670. The entire foundation of the Chinese creation myth is two paragraphs that somebody else copied out.

That lateness has generated a century of argument. One camp, following scholars such as He Xin, read the sudden appearance as an import, Buddhist and Indian material arriving through the southwest and settling into Chinese literature. Another notes that Xu Zheng lived and collected in the south, among peoples whose own epics tell the same story at greater length and with more detail than his Chinese version, and concludes that he was writing down something already ancient and simply not written. The Ancient Miao Song has an old grandfather who walks down from the east with a big axe, splits two thin planks apart so that heaven gets one and earth the other, then holds the sky up with his head and his outstretched arms until his body falls to pieces and becomes the hillside. In the Xiangxi dialect of Miao, pangu still means old grandfather, pan for grandfather and gu for old, in that order, which is Miao word order and not Chinese. Archaeologists working at a Pangu temple in the Tongbai range have turned up Han dynasty well brick under the later building, which puts worship there centuries before Xu Zheng wrote anything down.

He is not Panhu, though the names are one phoneme apart and have been confused since at least the Ming. Panhu is the dog who won a king’s daughter and fathered the Yao people, a different being with a different story. In parts of Hunan and Guangxi both tablets sit on the same ancestral altar, with Pangu’s placed first.

His powers are all one power, which is the ability to grow, and everything he does follows from it. He can divide what has never been divided, hold apart what wants to close, and produce out of his own substance every material thing that exists. His limits follow just as directly. He cannot stop growing, he cannot set the burden down until the world can stand without him, and the effort is what kills him. He has no cult of adventures, no enemy, no weapon beyond the axe, no second act. He performs one function perfectly and then he is used up. Fieldworkers have collected his story from more than twenty peoples across twenty provinces, and in most of them he is not a god to be petitioned so much as an old man to be thanked, with incense on his festival day at the head of the spring, when the mountains he is made of are just coming green.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Pangu in Chinese mythology?

Pangu is the first being in Chinese mythology, born inside a cosmic egg and credited with separating heaven from earth. After splitting the egg with an axe, he stood between the two halves and grew ten feet a day for eighteen thousand years to keep them apart, and when he died his body became the physical features of the world.

How did Pangu create the world?

Pangu created the world in two stages. First he split the undivided chaos with an axe, so that the clear and light part rose to become the sky and the heavy and murky part sank to become the earth. Then, after his death, his breath became the wind, his eyes became the sun and moon, his blood became the rivers, his bones became stone and metal, and his hair became the stars and the vegetation.

What did Pangu look like?

The sources disagree. The most widespread portrait is a hairy giant with a pair of horns on his head, a broad square face and big ears, barefoot and clothed in leaves and animal hide, and a Han dynasty carved stone from Nanyang shows a naked horned man holding an axe. One quoted fragment instead gives Pangu a dragon’s head and a snake’s body, but that description sits badly with the same text’s account of his hair becoming grass.

How old is the Pangu myth?

The earliest surviving written account of Pangu dates to the third century CE, in two lost works by Xu Zheng that are known only through later quotations. Pangu does not appear in earlier Chinese classics such as the Classic of Mountains and Seas, which has led some scholars to argue for a foreign origin and others to argue that the myth circulated orally among peoples of southern China long before anyone wrote it down.

Is Pangu the same as Panhu?

No. Pangu is the primordial giant who separated heaven and earth, while Panhu is a dog ancestor who married a king’s daughter and fathered the Yao people. The two names differ by a single sound and have been confused since at least the Ming dynasty, but the traditions are distinct, and in some southern Chinese households both are honoured on the same altar with Pangu’s tablet placed first.

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