Pangu is, by the standard of Chinese mythological texts, a surprisingly late arrival on the page. His fullest surviving account comes from the Sanwu Liji, Historical Records of the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors, compiled by the scholar Xu Zheng in the third century CE, centuries after texts such as the Shanhaijing had already fixed a great deal of Chinese cosmological and geographical myth in writing. That lateness has led scholars including Anne Birrell, in her survey of Chinese mythology, to note that Pangu is largely absent from the earlier classical corpus and to suggest the story may reflect a southern or non-Han source, absorbed into the mainstream literary tradition only once China's cultural contact with its southern frontier had deepened, rather than an original element of the oldest northern cosmogonic material. The image at the story's center, a cosmic giant whose dead body becomes the substance of the visible world, belongs to a pattern found in several unrelated mythological traditions around the world, and scholars typically treat these as independent developments of a recurring human way of imagining creation rather than evidence of any direct historical connection between the traditions that produced them.
Within China itself, Pangu's story went on to become one of the most widely recognized cosmogonic accounts despite its late textual entry, absorbed into popular religion, printed almanacs and folk art, and place names and local shrines associated with him can still be found today, evidence of how thoroughly a comparatively late literary account can take root as living tradition.