Pangu

The fullest surviving version of Pangu's story opens before the world existed in any recognizable form, when heaven and earth were fused together inside a single mass shaped like a chicken's egg, formless and dark. Pangu forms inside that chaos and sleeps within it for eighteen thousand years before waking, at which point he splits the egg apart, in most tellings with a great axe, releasing the clear, light yang element to rise and become the sky and letting the heavy, murky yin element sink to become the earth. Fearing the two might rejoin and collapse back into their original undivided state, Pangu plants himself between them and grows at the same rate the sky rises and the earth thickens, a full ten Chinese feet taller each day, for another eighteen thousand years, until sky and earth are separated by ninety thousand li and can no longer come back together on their own.

Only then, his work complete and his enormous strength finally spent, does Pangu lie down and die, and it is his death rather than his labor that finishes the creation: his breath becomes the wind and the clouds, his voice the rolling thunder, his left eye the sun and his right eye the moon, his four limbs and torso the mountains at the four directions and the center, his blood the rivers, his muscles the fertile soil, and, in some versions of the text, the parasites living on his body become the first human beings, carried by the fleas and lice that fed on him into the newly finished world.

Pangu is, by the standard of Chinese mythological texts, a surprisingly late arrival on the page. His fullest surviving account comes from the Sanwu Liji, Historical Records of the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors, compiled by the scholar Xu Zheng in the third century CE, centuries after texts such as the Shanhaijing had already fixed a great deal of Chinese cosmological and geographical myth in writing. That lateness has led scholars including Anne Birrell, in her survey of Chinese mythology, to note that Pangu is largely absent from the earlier classical corpus and to suggest the story may reflect a southern or non-Han source, absorbed into the mainstream literary tradition only once China's cultural contact with its southern frontier had deepened, rather than an original element of the oldest northern cosmogonic material. The image at the story's center, a cosmic giant whose dead body becomes the substance of the visible world, belongs to a pattern found in several unrelated mythological traditions around the world, and scholars typically treat these as independent developments of a recurring human way of imagining creation rather than evidence of any direct historical connection between the traditions that produced them.

Within China itself, Pangu's story went on to become one of the most widely recognized cosmogonic accounts despite its late textual entry, absorbed into popular religion, printed almanacs and folk art, and place names and local shrines associated with him can still be found today, evidence of how thoroughly a comparatively late literary account can take root as living tradition.