THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
The Classic of Regions Within the Seas: East places Lake Lei west of the land of Wu and gives it a resident: the thunder god, dragon-bodied and human-headed, who drums on his own belly. No hammer, no drumhead; the rumble of that belly is what men below hear as thunder. The Huainanzi repeats the description and adds one telling word: he drums his belly in play. Thunder, in this oldest version, is a god amusing himself.
The god was drafted into one of China's founding conception myths. The Han apocryphon Shi Han Shen Wu, quoted in the Taiping Yulan encyclopedia, relates that a giant footprint appeared by Lake Lei; the maiden Huaxu stepped into it and conceived Fuxi, the snake-bodied first sage who would devise the trigrams. Commentators took the footprint to be the lake-god's own, which makes the belly-drumming thunderer Fuxi's father. Later ages gave China's thunder deity a bird's beak, a mallet, and a ring of sky-drums; the older image of thunder as a dragon slapping its own stomach survives only in lines like this one.
