Gonggong- Chinese GodDeity"Water Spirit"

The Serpent of the Floods

Gonggong had a serpent's body and a human head crowned with red hair. He commanded water at its most destructive: not the rain that fills rice paddies but the flood that swallows them.

The Huainanzi records that he first challenged Zhuanxu, one of the Five Emperors, for supremacy over the world. He lost. During the reign of the sage-king Yao, he disrupted the waterways and sent floods against the settlements of the earth. Yao banished him to the wilderness beyond the borders of civilization. Exile could not hold him.

Fire Against Water

Gonggong turned his fury against heaven itself, and the fire god Zhu Rong came down to stop him. In the Huainanzi, Zhu Rong descended mounted on a dragon, his body wreathed in flame. Gonggong rose from the seas with his water demons. His waves towered like mountains.

Zhu Rong's flames evaporated Gonggong's waters. Gonggong's waves quenched Zhu Rong's fires. Mountains crumbled and seas boiled. Neither yielded. In the end, Zhu Rong prevailed, and Gonggong's armies scattered.

Mount Buzhou

Humiliated, Gonggong refused to accept his defeat. He smashed his head against Mount Buzhou, one of the pillars holding up the sky at the corners of the earth. The Huainanzi describes what followed: the pillar cracked. The sky tore open in the northwest. The earth collapsed in the southeast. Fire and water poured through the hole in the heavens, and demons emerged from the chaos to devour the helpless.

Nüwa smelted stones of five colors with celestial fire and patched the hole in the sky. She cut off the legs of a cosmic turtle to replace the broken pillar, then burned reeds to dam the floods and slew the black dragon ravaging the central plains. Her repair held, but imperfectly. The sky remained tilted to the northwest, the earth lower in the southeast. Rivers in China still flow east to the sea. The stars still revolve around a point in the northern sky rather than directly overhead. The world never straightened.

The Zuozhuan records that Gonggong's son Goulong proved more useful than his father. He served as minister of the earth so capably that after death he was honored as Houtu, the spirit of the earth itself.

Xiangliu

Gonggong's nine-headed serpent Xiangliu served him during the rebellion. The Shanhaijing describes it eating from nine mountains at once, its heads stripping the land bare in every direction. Wherever it rested, it left toxic marshes. Its stench poisoned the earth for miles, killing every plant and fouling every water source.

Xiangliu survived its master's defeat and continued to plague the world until Yu the Great killed it during his labors to control the floods. Yu tried to build an altar on the site, but the ground was so saturated with the serpent's venom that it collapsed three times. He finally raised the altar on elevated ground nearby.