Nüwa Makes Humankind

Birds, beasts, scaled creatures and the spirits of plants already lived on the earth, and as Nüwa walked among the mountains and rivers she saw them fly and creep in every shape. Coming to a bend in the river, she looked down and saw her own face reflected in the water.

Nüwa took up yellow earth from the bank, worked it with water, shaped first the head and face and then the body and limbs. She set the first clay figure on the ground, and it opened its mouth and breathed; the wet earth fell away from it in the wind, and it stood up on the sand.

Honghuang web fiction usually writes that yellow earth as the breathing soil of the nine heavens and the water as the divine water of the three lights. Nüwa shaped them one after another, and the new-made people gathered about her and then went off into the valleys and the woods.

As their numbers grew, two hands could not people the whole country. Nüwa took a long vine, dipped it in the muddy water and flicked it towards the four quarters. The drops crossed the river and fell on grass, on stone and on hillside, and each became a man or a woman; the vine, soaked with that soil and water, was gathered up again in the golden light of merit.

Nüwa then had the new men and women pair and multiply of themselves. So humankind spread from the riverbank in every direction, finding caves below the hills, gathering fruit in the woods, and building shelters of branch and leaf beside the water.

The new race had no scales, horns or feathers, and moved in bands when wind, rain or beasts came. They carried fire from one hillside to the next, so that the smoke ran along the river through the night, and settlements large and small began to appear on the plains.

When the making of humankind was done, the merit of heaven and earth came down from above: part of it into Nüwa herself, and part onto the breathing soil and the long vine. The common Honghuang account has Nüwa attain sainthood by it, and the living things of the country bow at the sound.

Nüwa left the valleys where humankind had settled and returned to her own seat, while humankind went on moving and multiplying along the water, and grew from the first clay figures into the tribes scattered across the world.