Xihe, Mother of the Suns

At the edge of the world, beyond the southeastern sea and among sweet waters, a woman knelt in a gulf and bathed her children. There were ten of them, and each one was a sun. She lifted them from the Sweet Gulf one at a time. When a sun was clean and burning, she sent it across the sky from east to west. It came home at dusk, and the next morning she sent another in its place. Her name was Xihe. The oldest account gives us only this: at the rim of the earth lived a woman who washed the suns.

The book that records this says little more about her. Xihe was the wife of the high god Di Jun and the mother of the ten suns. That is nearly the whole of her genealogy in the Classic of Mountains and Seas. The passage surfaces twice, once placed beyond the southeast sea and once beyond the East Sea, and the old editor Yuan Ke, reading the two against each other, judged that the eastern placement was the right one, since the Sweet Gulf and the Boiling Valley of the sunrise both belong in the east. It is a small textual disagreement, but it points the reader the right way: toward the sunrise, where the ten suns lived.

They lived in a tree. Far in the east, in the hot water of the Boiling Valley, stood a colossal mulberry called the Fusang, and the ten suns roosted in its branches: nine of them on the lower boughs and one, whose turn had come, waiting on the topmost branch. Each sun was carried across the heavens by a crow, and they went in strict rotation, so that as one arrived at the day’s end another was already setting out, borne on black wings out of the tree. That is the mechanism of the world in these texts. Ten suns, one tree, one crow apiece, and a mother who kept the order of them.

She was not only their nurse. In the Songs of the South, the great southern poems gathered under the name Qu Yuan, Xihe becomes the driver of the sun itself, and the poet, riding his own visionary flight across the sky, gives her an order. He commands her to slow down. Let Xihe slacken the pace, he says, gazing toward the western mountain of Yanzi but not pressing on toward it, so that the long day of the journey will not end too soon.

In the same breath the landmarks of the solar road appear: the horses watered at the Xianchi pool, the reins made fast at the Fusang. Elsewhere in the same poems her name is tied to the dawn, in a question flung at heaven: before Xihe rises, whence comes the light of the Ruo-flower? She is the one who lifts the sun, and the sky is dark until she does.

Then there is the day the order broke. The Huainanzi, compiled in the second century BCE, tells how in the reign of the sage-emperor Yao the ten suns all rose at once. The crops charred where they stood, the plants and trees died, and the people had nothing left to eat, so Yao sent for the archer Yi, who shot at the suns overhead.

The text does not name Xihe in this catastrophe, and it does not say how many suns fell; it says only that Yi shot at the ten. But the suns are hers by the older genealogy, and the disaster is what happens when ten children who should go out one at a time all take wing together. The mother who bathed them and sent them up in turn is, by implication, the keeper of the very order that failed.

Here the honest telling has to slow down, because two familiar pictures of Xihe are not as old as they look. The first is the rationalists’ Xihe. In the Book of Documents, in the Canon of Yao, the same name is read not as a goddess at all but as calendar officials: Yao commands Xi-He to observe the heavens and regulate the seasons, and the name splits into two clans, the Xi and the He, sent to the four directions to mark the solstices and the equinoxes. This is euhemerism, myth combed into administration, and it runs alongside the solar goddess rather than beneath her. Where one tradition sees a woman washing suns, another sees a bureau of astronomers.

The second picture is the one most retellings reach for first: Xihe reining a chariot drawn by six dragons across the sky. It is a magnificent image, and it is late. No pre-Han or Han text names her with six dragons. The six dragons come from the Yijing, from the Qian hexagram, where they are a cosmological figure and nothing to do with the sun or with Xihe. The idea of Xihe as the sun’s driver comes from a different place again, the Eastern Han commentator Wang Yi, who glossed her in the Songs of the South as the sun’s charioteer: a driver, but with no dragons.

And the actual sun-chariot, horse-drawn, belongs to the anonymous attendant of the Huainanzi, who is never called Xihe. Only much later, in the commentaries and above all in Tang poetry, were these three strands braided into the single dazzling figure of the dragon-charioteer. The mother of the suns and the driver of the sun are ancient. The six dragons are a poet’s flourish laid over her centuries afterward.

What remains, stripped back, is stranger and quieter than the dragon-chariot: a woman at the eastern edge of the world with ten burning children and a tree to keep them in, bathing each in turn and sending it up to cross the sky. She has a lunar twin, too, in the same book.

Where Xihe is wife of Di Jun and mother of ten suns, Changxi is wife of Di Jun and mother of twelve moons, and between them they hold the two halves of the sky. That is the shape of her at the beginning, before the astronomers and the poets had their turn: not a charioteer trailing dragons, but the mother of the daylight, kneeling in sweet water with a sun in her hands.

I ordered Xihe to slacken the pace, gazing toward Mount Yanzi but pressing on no further. (Chuci, “Li Sao”; author’s rendering from the Chinese)