Pangu, the giant who separated heaven and earth

The oldest known version of the myth of Pangu (盘古) comes from the Sanwu liji (三五历纪, sometimes written 三五历记), the "Records of the Three and Five". Its author, Xu Zheng (徐整), was an official of the kingdom of Wu (吴) in the Three Kingdoms period, in the 3rd century CE. The book is lost: the passage survives only because later encyclopedias copied it.

The story takes a few lines. At first, heaven and earth are mixed together in a chaos "like a hen's egg". Pangu is born inside it. After eighteen thousand years, heaven and earth open up: what is clear, the yang, becomes heaven; what is murky, the yin, becomes earth. Pangu, between the two, changes nine times a day.

Each day heaven rises by one zhang (丈, a unit of length), the earth grows one zhang thicker and Pangu grows one zhang taller. This goes on for another eighteen thousand years, until heaven is extremely high, the earth extremely deep and Pangu extremely tall. Only then do the Three Sovereigns (三皇), legendary rulers, appear, and the text concludes that heaven lies ninety thousand li above the earth.

In this text the separation happens as Pangu grows, and nothing is said about his death: another book tells the rest.

The rest of the story is in a second book attributed to Xu Zheng, the Wuyun linianji (五运历年纪), "Chronicle of the Five Cycles". It is lost too and known only through quotations in much later compilations, above all the Yishi (绎史), a history of antiquity compiled in the 17th century by Ma Su (马骕).

In this text Pangu is the first being to be born and, as he dies, his body is transformed:

• his breath becomes wind and clouds, his voice thunder;

• his left eye becomes the sun, his right eye the moon;

• his four limbs and his body form the four ends of the world and the five sacred mountains;

• his blood becomes the rivers, his flesh the fields;

• his hair and beard become the stars, his skin and body hair the grass and trees;

• his teeth and bones become metals and stones, his marrow pearls and jade, his sweat the rain.

Finally, the tiny creatures living on his body, touched by the wind, become the common people: in this version humans are born from the giant's parasites.

Another quotation from the same book gives Pangu a dragon's head and a snake's body: his breath makes wind and rain, and day and night depend on whether his eyes are open or shut.

The Shuyi ji (述异记), "Accounts of Strange Things", gathers several versions of the myth. It is attributed to the scholar Ren Fang (任昉), who died in 508 under the Liang dynasty, but the Qing imperial catalogue, the Siku quanshu zongmu (四库全书总目), judges it a later compilation put under his name: the text mentions a reign era that began after his death. The collection does not merge the versions into one: it lists them side by side and, for most of them, says where they come from.

• When Pangu dies, his head becomes the four sacred mountains, his eyes the sun and moon, his fat the rivers and seas, his hair the plants.

• According to a popular saying "of the Qin and Han period", his head becomes the sacred mountain of the East, his belly that of the Centre, his arms those of the South and North, his feet that of the West.

• According to "the earlier scholars", his tears become the rivers, his breath the wind, his voice thunder, his pupils lightning.

• According to an old tradition, when he is happy the weather is fine, and when he is angry the sky clouds over.

• In the regions of Wu and Chu, people say that Pangu and his wife are the beginning of yin and yang.

The collection adds that in the Nanhai (南海, the "Southern Sea") there is a tomb of Pangu stretching over three hundred li, that Guilin (桂林) has a temple to Pangu where offerings are still made, and that in a "land of Pangu" in the Southern Sea everyone bears the surname Pangu. It concludes that Pangu is the ancestor of heaven, earth and all living things.

Pangu is often presented as the first figure of Chinese mythology, yet he is one of the last to appear in writing. Xu Zheng's books, from the 3rd century CE, are the earliest known texts to tell his story, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica dates these creation myths to the 3rd to 6th centuries. Nüwa mending the sky, by comparison, is already in the Huainanzi, compiled under the Han.

Xu Zheng's two books are themselves lost. The egg story reached us through quotations, notably in two encyclopedias: the Yiwen leiju (艺文类聚), completed in 624 under the Tang, and the Taiping yulan (太平御览), compiled from 977 to 983.

Where does the giant come from? In a 2001 article in the journal Oral Tradition, Wu Xiaodong sums up the three proposed answers: India, the Central Plains of China, or the South.

• India: Pangu's body turning into the universe recalls the Vedic Purusha sukta, in which the cosmic being Purusha forms the world from the parts of his body; he too makes the sun from his eyes.

• The South: Derk Bodde linked the myth to the origin stories of the Miao and Yao peoples; other scholars have suggested that the name Pangu comes from Panhu (盘瓠), the dog ancestor worshipped by the Yao and She.

• Both the Central Plains and the South: Wu Xiaodong ties the myth to the Miao-Yao-speaking peoples, who in his view migrated from the Central Plains to the South.

None of these hypotheses is universally accepted.

The myth left a phrase still in everyday use: 开天辟地 (kāi tiān pì dì), literally "to open heaven and split the earth". Dictionaries link it to Pangu and cite the Sanwu liji passage of Xu Zheng as its source.

It first refers to the moment Pangu opened heaven and earth, that is, the beginning of human history. By extension it describes something unprecedented, something happening "for the first time since the world began". It works as a predicate or as a modifier, often to describe a great, unprecedented undertaking.

For a learner, the idiom is a handy way to fix some very useful characters: 开 (to open), the same as in 开门 (to open the door), and the pair 天 (heaven, sky) and 地 (earth, ground), which run through Xu Zheng's text. The rarer character 辟 here means "to open up, to clear".