Five-Colored Stones- Chinese ArtifactArtifact"Stones That Repaired Heaven"

Repairing the Sky

When the water god Gonggong, defeated in his battle against Zhuanxu for supremacy of the cosmos, smashed his head against Mount Buzhou in a final act of rage, the pillar holding up the northwest corner of the sky collapsed. A great hole tore open in the heavens. Fire rained from above, floods swept the earth below, and the natural order shattered.

The goddess Nüwa, who had shaped humanity from yellow clay, refused to let her creation perish. She gathered stones of five colors, one for each of the five elements, and smelted them in divine fire for days until they fused into a luminous substance that could bond with the sky itself. She pressed the molten stone into the breach, sealing the hole in the heavens and making the firmament whole. To replace the shattered pillar, she severed the four legs of the great cosmic turtle Ao and set them at the corners of the earth to hold the sky aloft. The world was saved, though it was never quite the same: the northwest still tilts slightly lower than the southeast, which is why China's rivers flow eastward to the sea.

The Leftover Stone

Nüwa smelted 36,501 stones but needed only 36,500 to complete the repair. The single remaining stone, suffused with divine fire yet denied its cosmic purpose, gained consciousness over the ages and grew to long for the world of mortals it had never been permitted to serve. In Cao Xueqin's Dream of the Red Chamber, this sentient stone is transformed into a piece of jade placed in the mouth of the newborn Jia Baoyu. The entire novel unfolds as the stone's record of its sojourn through human life, its loves and losses, before it returns at last to the foot of the mountain where Nüwa had once labored.