The primal creators, the immortals, and the beasts of the wilds — told from the Classic of Mountains and Seas, the Songs of Chu, and the Huainanzi, with every claim kept honest to its source.
The god whose name every herbalist invokes governs a pharmacy of three hundred and sixty-five drugs ranked like a royal court, yet the tradition itself admits he could not have written a word of the book that bears his name.
When the old order collapsed and the fiercest of the warlords could not be subdued, a man who could speak from the cradle trained in shield and dagger-axe, broke the rebel Chiyou on the wilderness of Zhuolu, and was raised up as the first Son of Heaven of a civilised world.
She had ten children and every one of them was a sun. In a gulf of sweet water at the edge of the world she bathed them, and sent them out one at a time to cross the sky.
Before she was the jade-decked matron of the immortals, she was a cave-dwelling numen with a tiger's teeth and a leopard's tail, whistling on a western mountain and presiding over plague and ruin.
He hewed the first plough from raw wood, then turned on his own body as a laboratory, tasting the hundred plants and meeting seventy poisons in a single day so that his people would know what to eat and what to fear.
He looked up at the images in heaven and down at the patterns on earth, and out of that reading drew the eight trigrams, the fishing-net, and the first law of husband and wife.
Supreme sovereign of Heaven and head of a celestial civil service, whose whole war machine could not subdue one stone monkey, and who had to send west for the Buddha to save his own throne.
Serpent-bodied and human-faced, she patted the first people out of yellow mud, then smelted five-coloured stones to patch a sky that had split from pole to pole.
Ten suns climbed into the sky at once and the world began to cook: the crops charred, the trees died, and the people had nothing left to eat. So the sage-emperor Yao sent for an archer.
Dig in the fields of the old north country and you may turn up a skull hard as bronze, or a tooth two inches long that no hammer will break: the bones, people said, of the horned god of war the Yellow Emperor could kill but never quite be rid of.
For eighteen thousand years a giant grew inside a shell of chaos, holding the raw sky and the raw earth apart with his own body; when at last he died, there was nowhere left for him to go but into the world.
A jade-railed paradise in the northwest where four world-rivers rise, deathless trees grow and a stair of three tiers climbs out of the earth and into Heaven itself.
