Nüwa, the goddess who mended the sky

Nüwa (女娲) is one of the great figures of Chinese myth. The Encyclopaedia Britannica describes her as the wife or sister of Fuxi (伏羲), a legendary ruler, and as the patroness of matchmakers: together with him she is said to have set the norms of marriage.

There is no single account of her life. What is told about her comes from passages scattered across texts of different periods, which do not all say the same thing. This page follows three sources and names each one:

• the Huainanzi (淮南子), a collection compiled under the Western Han at the court of Liu An (刘安), king of Huainan. In it Nüwa mends the sky ("Lanming" chapter, 览冥训), and another chapter ("Tianwen", 天文训) tells how Gonggong broke a pillar of heaven;

• the Fengsu tongyi (风俗通义), a work on customs, which reports that she shaped humans out of yellow earth; the passage has come down to us as a quotation in a later encyclopedia;

• funerary art, which shows her with Fuxi, both half human and half snake.

Each episode is told here from its own text, without merging them into a single story.

The best-known account is in the sixth chapter of the Huainanzi, "Lanming" (览冥训). It opens with a disaster: "in ancient times" the four pillars of the world collapse and the nine provinces (九州) split apart. The sky no longer covers everything and the earth no longer carries everything. Fires burn without going out, waters flood without receding; wild beasts devour the people and birds of prey carry off the old and the weak.

Nüwa then sets the world right in four acts:

• she melts stones of five colours to patch the blue sky;

• she cuts off the legs of a giant turtle (鳌) to set up the four pillars;

• she kills the black dragon to save the province of Ji (冀州);

• she piles up reed ashes to stop the floodwaters.

The text then lists the result: the sky is mended, the four pillars stand straight, the waters dry up, Ji is at peace, the harmful creatures die and the people can live. It ends with an age of harmony in which beasts and snakes hide their claws and venom and no longer seek to devour anyone.

Note that this chapter does not say what caused the collapse. It names no culprit and no cause.

Another story about the world's fragility is in the third chapter of the same book, "Tianwen" (天文训). It takes two sentences. Long ago, Gonggong (共工) fought Zhuanxu (颛顼) for the throne. In his fury he struck Mount Buzhou (不周山): the pillar of heaven broke and the cords holding the earth snapped.

The rest explains the shape of the world. Ever since, heaven has tilted to the northwest, which is why the sun, moon and stars move that way; the earth sank in the southeast, which is why waters and dust gather there. The myth accounts both for the motion of the heavenly bodies and for the way the waters run, within the ancient "canopy heaven" cosmology (盖天说).

In the Huainanzi this story and Nüwa's stay apart: the "Lanming" chapter does not mention Gonggong, and the "Tianwen" chapter says nothing of Nüwa. Both describe a world whose supports break, but the text itself does not make Gonggong's rage the cause of the disaster Nüwa repairs.

The episode is known by the title 共工怒触不周山, "Gonggong in his rage strikes Mount Buzhou".

The account of Nüwa creating humans comes from another book, the Fengsu tongyi (风俗通义), a work on customs. The passage is not known directly: it is quoted in the Taiping yulan (太平御览), a vast encyclopedia compiled from 977 to 983, in chapter 78.

The text opens with 俗说, "popular belief has it": it presents itself as a story people tell. When heaven and earth have just been separated, there are no people yet. Nüwa kneads yellow earth to shape them. But the work is exhausting and she cannot keep up, so she drags a rope through the mud, lifts it, and makes people from it.

The ending is social rather than cosmic: the rich and noble are the yellow-earth people, shaped by hand; the poor and lowly are the people made with the rope. The myth thus explains inequality between people by the way they were made.

The phrase 抟土作人 (tuán tǔ zuò rén), "kneading earth to make people", is listed in idiom dictionaries.

In funerary art, Nüwa is shown as a couple with Fuxi: both have a human upper body and a long snake's tail. From the Han onwards they are often shown each holding an instrument, Nüwa a compass and Fuxi a carpenter's square.

• Under the Eastern Han, the stone reliefs of the Wu Liang shrine (武梁祠) at Jiaxiang, in Shandong, show them with their snake tails intertwined.

• The same couple appears on silk paintings found in the tombs of the Astana cemetery (阿斯塔那), near Turpan (吐鲁番) in Xinjiang. One of them, excavated in 1965 and now in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region Museum, shows the two embracing in profile, their snake tails coiled in a spiral, Fuxi with the square and Nüwa with the compass. The sun, the moon and the stars are drawn around them.

According to the description of this painting reported by China Daily, the square and the compass stand for the balance of heaven and earth.