The Giant Who Separated Heaven and Earth
Pangu is the primordial giant of the Chinese creation story. According to the Sanwu Liji by Xu Zheng, a scholar of the third-century state of Wu, the cosmos began as a chaos shaped like a hen's egg, with Pangu gestating inside it. After eighteen thousand years the egg split: the light, clear part rose to become heaven, and the heavy, murky part sank to become earth. Pangu then grew ten feet taller each day, and heaven rose ten feet with him, until after another eighteen thousand years sky and ground stood immensely far apart.
The Wuyun Linian Ji records his death. His breath became wind and cloud, his voice thunder; his left eye turned into the sun and his right eye into the moon. His limbs and trunk became the four quarters and the five sacred peaks, his blood the rivers, his flesh the fields, his hair the stars, his skin and body hair the plants and trees, his teeth and bones metals and stones, his sweat the falling rain.
No pre-Qin text mentions Pangu, and scholars generally date the myth's entry into written literature to the late Han or Three Kingdoms period, possibly drawing on traditions of southern peoples. The sixth-century Shuyiji already notes a tomb of Pangu by the southern sea and a shrine to him near Guilin, and his world-opening act became the standard opening of Chinese cosmogony.
