Chinese Mythology

There is no single Chinese creation scripture. The sequence below is stitched together from texts of different periods and different schools, and the stitching itself is a later habit — largely of modern mythography and popular retellings. Running alongside the Pangu line there is a Han-era cosmology with no creator in it at all. The Tianwen chapter of the Huainanzi opens with the Way arising from empty space, empty space giving birth to the cosmos, the cosmos to breath; the clear and light of that breath drifts up and becomes sky, the heavy and turbid congeals into earth. The Jingshen chapter has two gods emerging together out of the murk, laying out heaven and earth and only then dividing yin from yang. Laozi's "the Way bore one, one bore two" and the Book of Changes' "the Supreme Ultimate gave birth to the two modes" belong to the same family. Nobody prises the sky open in these accounts; the world differentiates by itself. They and the Pangu story have separate pedigrees and were layered together only later. Pangu himself is a late arrival: his earliest surviving account is the Sanwu Liji by Xu Zheng of Wu (3rd century CE), a book now lost and known only through quotations in Tang and Song encyclopedias. No pre-Qin text mentions him, and scholars still disagree about where he came from; some argue for indigenous origin, others connect him with the Panhu legend of southern peoples. Human origins likewise come in incompatible versions: the vermin on Pangu's corpse turned into people (Wuyun Linian Ji), and Nuwa moulded people out of yellow earth (Fengsu Tongyi). The Tang-era Duyi Zhi adds a third, in which Nuwa and her elder brother, alone on Mount Kunlun with no people anywhere, agree to marry and populate the world; that text never names the brother as Fuxi and contains no flood, and the flood-survivor framing belongs to later folk and southwestern minority traditions. In the Huainanzi, Gonggong's assault on Mount Buzhou (Tianwen chapter) and Nuwa's repair of the sky (Lanming chapter) sit in separate chapters and the text never says the first caused the second; reading them as cause and effect is attested no later than Wang Chong's Lunheng in the 1st century CE. Gonggong's opponent is not fixed either: Zhuanxu in the Tianwen chapter, Gaoxin in the Yuandao chapter, Zhurong in Sima Zhen's Tang supplement to the Shiji. The Gun-and-Yu flood story is half myth (self-growing soil, a son cut from his father's belly) and half dynastic history (the tribute grades of the Yugong), and the line between them was always blurred. China also has no systematic theogony — the gods after Pangu come from unrelated sources and form no coherent lineage — which is why this timeline has no first-beings stage.