Zhurong is the Chinese god of fire and of the south, a bringer of fire and light to humankind and a fierce warrior of the heavens. In the correlative system that ordered so much of Chinese thought, in which the directions, seasons, colours and elements were matched together, fire is paired with the south and with the colour red, and Zhurong is the divine power presiding over that whole complex, the spirit of fire and of the southern quarter of the world. As a culture-bringer he is associated with the gift of fire and its beneficial use, one of the powers that raised early humanity toward civilised life. But his most dramatic appearance is martial.
In the great cosmic myth he does battle with the water god Gonggong, fire against water, in a natural opposition, and defeats him; and it is the enraged, defeated Gonggong who then hurls himself against the pillar of heaven, Mount Buzhou, snapping it and tilting the whole cosmos out of true, so that Zhurong's victory becomes, indirectly, the cause of the great disordering of the world that the goddess Nuwa must afterward repair. Zhurong thus stands at the centre of one of the foundational combat-myths of Chinese cosmology, the personified force of fire set against the force of flood. He belongs to the archaic layer of Chinese divine figures, honoured as the fiery power of the south and remembered as the heavenly warrior who mastered the god of the destroying waters.