Mythology

Wangdi, the first king of Shu, fell out of the sky, taught his people to farm, and could not tame the flood that filled the plain ringed by mountains. When a man floated up the river and cut the mountain open to let the water out, Wangdi gave him the throne and walked into the western hills, and came back every spring as the cuckoo that sings until its mouth bleeds.

East of the sea there is a bottomless abyss called Guixu, and above it float five mountains of gold and jade where the immortal sages live. Because the mountains have no roots, the Emperor of Heaven sets fifteen giant turtles beneath them in three shifts. Then a giant from the country of Longbo comes fishing, catches six turtles in one cast, and two of the mountains drift north and sink.

The oldest Chinese image of the Queen Mother of the West is not a kindly lady with peaches: she has a leopard tail, tiger teeth, loose hair, and she governs plagues and executions on Jade Mountain in the far west. She holds the only elixir of deathlessness in the world, and one king who traveled to drink with her at the Jade Pool sang a song about coming back in three years and never came.

In the age before fire, people ate their meat raw and the smell of blood made them sick. A man walked south until he reached the Land of Bright Fire, where he watched an owl strike a dead branch and send a spark flying, and understood that fire was not in the sky but inside the wood. He drilled two sticks together, carried the fire home, and was made a king.

After she mended the sky, the goddess Nuwa sat down by a river and found the world empty. She shaped the first people out of yellow clay in her own image and breathed life into them, and when the work grew too heavy for one pair of hands, she dipped a rope in the mud and swung it, and every drop that landed stood up as a person.

He was the scribe of the Yellow Emperor, and he read the first characters off the tracks that birds and deer left in wet ground. On the night writing was made, heaven rained millet and the ghosts wept: heaven was afraid people would stop farming, and the ghosts were afraid of being written down.

Long before anyone knew which plants could be eaten, one man put them into his own mouth, one after another, and found out. On a single day he ran into seventy poisons. He taught the world to plant grain and opened the first market, and at the end of the hillside he found a yellow flower that looks exactly like honeysuckle.

The tree on the moon is one and a half kilometers tall. A man with an axe cuts into it, and before he can lift the axe again the wound has closed. He was sent there for a fault committed while he was studying to become an immortal, and the old books never say what the fault was.

She wove the clouds of heaven. He owned one ox and nothing else. When soldiers from the sky took her back, the ox gave him its hide and he went up after her with a child in each basket. He almost caught her, and then a hand drew a line across the sky.

There was one dose of the elixir of immortality, and it was only enough for one person. When a man came through the door for it, Chang E swallowed it, and her feet left the ground. She was given a life without death, and it cost her every dinner she would ever have missed.