Chinese Myth Tuesdays: Nüwa

Last week we talked about Pan Gu and how he awesomely created the world by holding up the sky for 18,000 years, and when he died his body parts became the hills and valleys.

After that came Nüwa, who is a badass female creation goddess (half human half serpent in some images) who came to earth from the heavens, and made all the animals. She did this for six days: as the legend goes, on the first day she made chickens, on the second, dogs, then sheep, pigs, cows and horses. Then on the seventh day she still felt lonely, so she created people.

She painstakingly made each and every human out of yellow clay, but after a while she got tired (the assembly line hadn’t been invented yet) so she started making them haphazardly, flinging the clay off the end of a branch or piece of rope. This is why there are nobles and peasants – the nobles were the ones that were made first.

Oh, and there’s also the time when she mended heaven. You see, another god, Gong Gong, had headbutted a mountain that was a pillar holding up the sky. So the sky tilted over to one side, and there were floods and fires and other disasters. Oops.

To make things right again, Nüwa cut off the legs of a giant tortoise to replace the pillar, and patched up the sky with seven colourful stones. Voila. Only the sky still tilted a little, which is why the sun, moon and stars keep moving.

Nüwa was married to a dude called Fu Xi, but that’s for next week.

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Fuck Yeah Chinese Myths! is a tumblr of Chinese myth, history and culture written by Min Xie