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.
A Three Kingdoms general, whom his own historian called proud and self-defeated, was raised over fourteen centuries into a god of war, loyalty, and finally money. Almost every prop the temples paint on him, the great blade, the red horse and the sworn oath, was added a thousand years after he died.
She promised to marry the horse that brought her father home. From the killing that followed came silk and the mulberry tree, and centuries later a goddess.
A wall and its dry ditch deified into a magistrate for the unseen. He keeps the census of the dead and can be whipped when rain fails. Ming edicts ranked him Earl to Prince, then stripped the titles a year later.
A Lin shamaness of Meizhou died around 987 and rose, edict by edict, to Empress of Heaven. The sailors she guards still call her Mazu, their word for Grandmother.
King Yama, imported from India as sole ruler of hell, then broken by Chinese folk religion into the fifth of ten magistrates on a paperwork assembly-line for the dead.
Before his war with Heaven, Sun Wukong is a stone monkey born from a rock on Flower-Fruit Mountain. At a feast he weeps when he learns the ledger of the dead holds his name, and sails off to learn how not to die.
The moon's cold lady was not always a lady, and not always called Chang'e. Before the jade palace and the tender wife, she was a name in flux and a creature crouched on the lunar face.
The nephew of the Jade Emperor, famous for the eye in his forehead and the hound at his heel: except that in the two novels that made him, he catches his quarry with ordinary sharp sight and a borrowed mirror, and the third eye is nowhere in the text.
A boy-god who gave his own flesh and bone back to his parents to cancel the debt of his body, then rose again out of lotus stalks: reborn twice over, and by two rival religions.
Pangu is the whole visible world, yet he has a corpse with a marked grave. He is a cosmic principle, yet also a family name people still carry.
Said to have dredged the rivers and founded the Xia, Yu appears only in texts written more than a thousand years later. The earliest to name him is a bronze bowl, and even that already calls his flood ancient history.
The first man to sit on the throne of the world reigned a hundred and eleven years, ordered his court by dragons, and drew eight three-line figures that held the whole cosmos in a ladder of doublings.
The four brothers surnamed Ao who rule the seas from crystal palaces are the youngest thing about the dragon king: a Ming novelist's quartet laid over a rain-dragon the Han knew seventeen centuries before, and a royal title borrowed from India in between.
Every child knows the archer who shot down the suns. Almost no one can say who he was: a god sent from heaven, a mortal who seized a throne, or two men fused into one by centuries of retelling.
Huangdi conquered the four quarters, named his ministers after clouds, and fathered the whole line of emperors. Then he cast a cauldron, mounted a whiskered dragon, and rose into heaven while the people below clutched at his falling bow.
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.
Shennong hewed the first plough from raw wood. Then he turned his own body into the test ground, tasting the hundred plants and meeting seventy poisons in a single day so 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.
A Wuling fisherman follows a stream into a corridor of falling peach-blossom and out the other side of history, where refugees from a fallen empire have kept their gentle world for six hundred years: he leaves, marks the road, and can never find it again.
A tale stitched together over a thousand years: a Spring-and-Autumn widow who refused a graveside condolence becomes, by the Ming, the wife whose wailing brings down the Great Wall and lays bare her conscript husband's bones.
On a terrace before Mount Qi, the old strategist reads out a roster that drafts the war dead of both sides into a celestial civil service, a mass consolation of the slain that a Ming novelist invented some two thousand six hundred years after the war it crowns.
In the moon an exiled woman keeps a white hare that pounds the elixir of immortality. Yet the oldest moon riddle names no hare at all and may mean a toad.
After years of drought, a new king walked into a sacred grove. He cut his hair, bound his hands, and laid himself on the altar in place of the beast.
A love story assembled over seventeen centuries: two idle stars in a Zhou complaint poem become longing lovers under the Han, then a married couple punished with a single night's reunion a year, ferried across the Silver River on a bridge of magpies.
A boy is told his mother lies pinned under Mount Hua for the crime of marrying his father: how a folk-and-theatre tale of the Ming and Qing borrowed its splitting axe from a river-god fifteen centuries older.
The youngest daughter of the Flame Emperor drowned while playing in the water, and came back as a small bird carrying twigs and pebbles to fill in the sea that took her.
The waters had swallowed the hills and were climbing towards heaven, and the father who tried to wall them out failed and died for it; only his son, cut from the same body, found the way to let the flood run home to the sea.
The four pillars of the sky had snapped and the world was drowning in fire and flood; a serpent-bodied goddess answered not with thunderbolts but with a forge, a butchered turtle, and a heap of burnt reeds.
When the storm-monster Chiyou summoned the Wind Earl and the Rain Master against the young sovereign of heaven, the war for mastery of the world was decided not by armies but by a hoarded flood, a drought-goddess in blue-green, and a drum cut from the hide of a one-legged thunder-ox.
The archer won the one drug of no-death from the Queen Mother of the West. His wife stole it, fled to the moon, and left him with nothing to continue: the oldest telling is a theft, not a love story.
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.
One ruler had the father executed for failing at the flood and in the next breath set the same charge on his son; between the two men lie power denied to the father then given to the son, a son born from his father's body, and three conflicting accounts of who killed Gun.
Carved on Han tomb walls their two serpent tails twist together like rope; the story of how the brother and sister came to marry arrives seven centuries later.
Their heaven is a single administrative fact: her peaches grow in his garden, and he posts a guard over her trees. The paired sovereigns are a late invention, and the primary sources never once call them married.
A sage-emperor hands the whole apparatus of punishment to one upright man, whose aim is to punish until no one need be punished. The beast that made him famous for smelling out the guilty is known to us only from the pen of a man calling it a fraud.
At the eastern sea a speaking beast told the Yellow Emperor of every spirit in the world. So a medieval telling claims, two thousand years after his age. The chart made from its words is lost.
Nine heads on one blue-green coil, feeding on nine mountains at once: Gonggong's minister, whose foul blood poisoned the ground so no grain would grow and no beast could live there.
A five-coloured bird, the five virtues written in its feathers. It eats and drinks as nature provides and appears only when the realm is at peace.
A gentle one-horned beast seen only under a true king. Its capture on a hunt west of Lu forms the closing entry of the Spring and Autumn Annals.
A face that is all mouth and no belly, cast into the bronze of ancient cauldrons: it devours a man and, before it can swallow, the harm rebounds and destroys the devourer itself.
A thousand-li serpent lies in the sunless north: when his eyes open it is day, when they close it is night, and his slow breath is the winter and summer winds.
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.
In a valley of boiling water at the eastern edge of the world stands a giant mulberry, and in its branches roost ten suns: nine below, one above, waiting its turn to cross the sky.
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.
On the longest night of the year the Son of Heaven went out to the southern edge of his city, to a patch of ground swept bare, and welcomed the return of the light with a single red calf and vessels of clay and gourd.
The dead did not vanish. One soul rose bright into the air and one sank into the ground, and between them the living built a temple, seated a grandson in the ancestor's chair, and fed him until he spoke the blessing back.
The Zhou had just destroyed the Shang. Now they had to explain why it was right that they had won, and the answer they gave hung a blade over their own heads.
Confucius almost never called anyone humane, not even the sage-kings. Yet he swore the virtue was one act of will away: I desire it, and it is here.
