Nuwa

Nuwa is the great creator goddess and repairer of the world in Chinese mythology, most often shown with the upper body of a woman and the lower body of a serpent, and she stands among the oldest and most important divine figures of the tradition. In the best-known account of the making of humanity, Nuwa fashions the first human beings out of yellow earth, moulding them one by one with her hands; but finding the work slow, she dips a cord or vine into the mud and trails it, and the drops that fall from it become people too. A tradition preserved from early times draws from this a striking social explanation: those she shaped carefully by hand became the noble and prosperous, while those flicked from the muddy rope became the poor and humble, an origin myth that reflected, and in its telling reinforced, the hierarchies of the society that told it.

Nuwa's name first appears in Chinese literature in the Chuci ("Songs of Chu"), in its poem "Tianwen" ("Heavenly Questions"), usually dated to around the third century BCE, though there she is named without the later elaborated mending-the-sky narrative. That fuller story, of the four pillars of heaven collapsing, the earth cracking, fire raging unchecked and floodwaters rising until Nuwa smelted five-coloured stones to patch the sky and cut the legs from a great turtle to prop up its corners, is set out only later, in the Huainanzi, a philosophical compendium sponsored by the prince Liu An and completed by about 139 BCE. The gap between the two texts, several generations, shows the myth accreting narrative detail over time rather than arriving complete in its earliest attestation.

Nuwa's second great deed is the repair of a broken cosmos. When one of the pillars supporting the sky is toppled, in the linked myths, through the rampage of the water god Gonggong, who smashes Mount Buzhou, the heavens crack, fire and flood pour through, and the world is thrown into ruin. Nuwa sets it right: she smelts stones of five colours to patch the torn sky, cuts the legs from a giant turtle to prop up its four corners, dams the flooding waters with the ashes of burnt reeds, and drives off the beasts that prey on the people. Her mending of the sky is one of the most beloved images in Chinese myth, a picture of the maternal power that not only creates the world but restores it when it is broken. She is often paired with Fuxi, another serpent-bodied culture-hero, as sister and consort or as a complementary couple, the two shown with their serpent tails intertwined and holding the compass and the set-square, the instruments of cosmic order. Nuwa is thus both the mother of humankind and the goddess who keeps the very frame of the world from falling apart.