Nüwa

Nüwa, human-headed and serpent-bodied, lived in the world of Honghuang. Walking one day by a river she saw how lonely her reflection was in the water, took yellow earth and water, and shaped clay figures after her own likeness. They came alive the moment they touched the ground and crowded round her, laughing and talking.

Delighted, she came to the water day after day to shape more; but her hands grew tired and the work went slowly, so she dipped a length of vine into the mud and flicked it in every direction. Wherever the drops fell they too became people, and humankind spread little by little across the world.

With people made, Nüwa established the rites of marriage between man and woman, so that humankind could go on multiplying without having to be shaped by her hands.

Humankind gathered and lived across the world, day and night. Later Gonggong, the water god, and Zhurong, the fire god, went to war; the mountains shook, the four poles broke and the nine regions split, and flood and fire came together upon the settlements of men.

When the vault of heaven cracked, rain poured down day and night, great fires burned on and would not go out, and beasts came running out of the hills. Passing through the ruined country and seeing the roads cut and the people driven from their homes, Nüwa set about finding what she needed to mend the sky.

She went through every river, mountain and marsh gathering stones of five colours — blue, red, yellow, white and black — then built up a furnace and put the stones into it to melt. As the molten stone came, water was still falling through the rent above.

Gonggong and Zhurong had fought, and Gonggong, defeated, had struck Mount Buzhou with his head in his rage. The mountain fell and the earth sank; a great tear opened in the vault of heaven and floodwater poured through it, and many of humankind were drowned.

Seeing this, Nüwa gathered five-coloured stones from the great rivers, refined them in the furnace day and night, and when the five-coloured molten stone was ready she closed the rent in the sky with her own hands.

The sky mended, she cut the four feet from a giant sea-turtle and set them up at the four quarters of the earth to hold the sky. From then on the four poles held and did not fall again.

After the mending, Nüwa lived in her own temple and received the offerings of the human world; through the ages many kings sent envoys to sacrifice there and pray for kind weather.

In the last years of Shang, King Zhou came with his officers to burn incense at Nüwa’s temple. Seeing how beautiful the image in the hall was, he was seized by a moment of disrespect, called for brush and ink, and wrote an insulting poem on the wall while his officers tried in vain to stop him.

Nüwa returned on her cloud and saw the poem on the wall, the ink still fresh and the incense in the hall already cold. She held her anger down, kept the matter in mind and did nothing yet.

Nüwa called out the Demon-Summoning Banner. As its shadow unfurled it drew in three creatures that had cultivated for long ages in the tomb of Xuanyuan: a thousand-year fox spirit, a jade pipa spirit and a nine-headed pheasant spirit.

She told the three that the king had lost his virtue first and had insulted her image with his poem, and ordered them into Chaoge to lead him astray and break the fortune of Shang — warning them not to harm the innocent.

The three took the charge and went. The fox spirit possessed Su Daji, newly chosen for the palace, and stayed at the king’s side deep in the inner court for years; the other two hid themselves and waited their moment.

When the mandate of Shang was spent and the Zhou army entered Chaoge, the three were discovered and fled the palace in disorder, only to have their road cut by Jiang Ziya’s officers.

Nüwa had long known that the three had broken her ban and killed the innocent as they pleased, and she stopped them with the demon-binding cord. By the time Yang Jian and the others came up, the three were bound and could not slip away.

Yang Jian took them back to the Zhou camp, and Jiang Ziya dealt with them under military law. Nüwa took back her cord, returned to her temple, and took no further part in the war at Chaoge.

This sequence is the usual arrangement of later Honghuang novels, not a single record found in the ancient texts.

Other Honghuang novels write Nüwa as head of a Yao teaching, or write only of her dealings with Fuxi, Dijun and the other figures of the Yao clan.