Nüwa- Chinese PrimordialPrimordial"Mother Goddess"

Clay and Breath

Nüwa walked the earth after Pangu's body had become its mountains and rivers. The land was beautiful and empty. She went to the banks of the Yellow River, scooped up handfuls of yellow clay, and shaped figures with two arms and two legs, modeled on her own form but without the serpent's tail. She breathed on them and they lived.

Shaping each figure by hand was slow. Ying Shao's Fengsu Tongyi records that she took a rope, dipped it in mud, and flicked it across the ground. Wherever a droplet landed, a human sprang up. The handcrafted figures became nobles. The rope-flicked droplets became commoners.

She also established marriage, pairing men and women in lasting unions sanctified by ceremony. The Shiben credits her with creating the sheng, the reed mouth organ. She gave humanity music alongside life.

The Broken Sky

The water god Gonggong smashed his head against Mount Buzhou, one of the pillars holding up the sky. The pillar cracked. The sky tore open in the northwest, the earth collapsed in the southeast, and fire and floodwater poured through the gap.

Nüwa smelted stones of five colors over a celestial fire and sealed the hole. She set the legs of a giant cosmic turtle at the four corners of the earth to replace the broken pillar, then dammed the floods and drove back the beasts ravaging the central plains. The Huainanzi records these repairs. They held, but imperfectly. The sky still tilts to the northwest. Rivers still flow east to the sea.

In Cao Xueqin's Hongloumeng, Nüwa smelted 36,501 stones but used only 36,500. The leftover stone gained consciousness and lamented being unused. A Buddhist monk and a Taoist priest took pity on it, shrank it to the size of a pendant, and carried it into the mortal world, where it was born as Jia Baoyu.

The Gourd and the Bonfire

Nüwa and her brother Fuxi survived a great flood by hiding inside a giant gourd. The waters receded and they found themselves alone on Mount Kunlun. Uncertain whether heaven approved of siblings marrying, they devised a test: each lit a bonfire on a separate mountain peak. The smoke from the two fires rose and merged into a single column. They took this as permission.

In Han dynasty tomb paintings, the two appear with their serpent tails intertwined. Nüwa holds a compass, Fuxi a set square. She represents the circular sky, he the square earth.

The Desecrated Temple

In the Fengshen Yanyi, King Zhou of Shang visited Nüwa's temple on the day of the annual offerings. Struck by the beauty of her statue, he wrote a lustful poem on the temple wall. Nüwa returned from a heavenly banquet and found the desecration. She summoned three spirits and commanded them to infiltrate King Zhou's court, enchant him, and hasten the fall of his dynasty.

The Thousand-Year Vixen possessed Daji, a noblewoman sent to the king as a concubine. Under the fox spirit's influence, Zhou descended into cruelty and debauchery. Yet Nüwa had warned her spirits to corrupt only the king, not to harm the innocent. When they exceeded their orders, she punished them.