Stories

The name of Pangu is first heard deep within the chaos. Before the beginning had been decided, before yin and yang had parted, a single mass of primal vapour lay whole as an egg, and inside it something with a shape lay dormant for a long age, neither head nor tail to be made out, with only a muffled thunder sounding from within.

How many years passed nobody knows. Cracks began to run through the chaos, and the sleeping shape suddenly opened its eyes. All around was dimness, without light and without shadow, without edge or end, and only a dead stillness that would not lift.

Pangu put out an arm to feel his way and touched the wall of the chaos, tough and unbreakable. At his waist he found a great axe, its blade blue-black and cold to the touch, and to hold it was to hold a mountain.

Pangu swung the axe and struck. With a roar the chaos split open, turbid vapour surged up, and light and shadow appeared for the first time. The first sound between heaven and earth was that opening blow.

Once the crack had opened, the clear rose slowly and set as sky; the turbid sank heavily and gathered as earth. In the moment they first parted, cloud and mist rolled over one another and thunder came without a break, and there was nobody in any quarter to see it.

Heaven and earth were parted, yet still tended to close, pressing together by day and rejoining by night. Pangu stood between them, his head against the sky and his feet on the ground, holding them apart without a pause and never daring to rest.

How many more years went by is again unknown. The sky rose ten feet each day and the earth thickened ten feet each day, and Pangu’s body grew with them, never bending, never bowing its head.

When at last heaven and earth held and would no longer close, Pangu’s strength was spent and his frame worn away. His limbs stiffened, his breath grew faint, and he sank slowly down in the middle of the land of Honghuang.

When Pangu died, the breath from his mouth became the wind and the cloud and spread through every quarter; the sound from his throat became thunder, rumbling low above the nine heavens.

His left eye became the sun, hung in the east, fierce with light; his right eye became the moon, hung in the west, cold and clear. The two have turned through day and night ever since.

His blood flowed out and gathered into rivers, lakes and seas; his sinews stretched out into roads and mountain chains; his flesh decayed and settled into rich farmland; his bones stood up as peaks and rock.

His hair scattered into stars and plants, filling the night sky and the open country; his teeth and bones became metal and stone, and his marrow became pearl and jade, scattered through deep mountains and great marshes.

In the same account, Pangu’s blood was not wholly dispersed either. It fell across the land, and over long years engendered twelve bloodlines that woke and took shape one by one — the Twelve Ancestral Witches, each holding one of the authorities of the world.

When Pangu had passed, his body, his blood, his bones and his breath had all gone into the world, and no trace of him remained; only the sun and moon, the mountains and rivers, the lakes and seas stayed behind.

A later telling adds that with the same axe-stroke that opened the chaos, Pangu also cut down the gods who stood in his way — a line that does not appear in the older texts and belongs to the novelists.

The same expansion says that the great axe was not destroyed when it split the sky; instead it scattered across the world with Pangu’s blood at the moment of his death, and over the ages condensed into the Pangu Banner and several other supreme treasures familiar from the Investiture cycle, coveted by every immortal.

Another common expansion has Pangu’s spine become Mount Buzhou, propped up in the northwest as the pillar of the world. Gonggong and Zhurong later fought, and Gonggong in his rage broke Mount Buzhou, so that the sky tilted to the northwest and the earth sank to the southeast — an episode also absent from the earliest texts and added by later hands.