Pangu's Creation of the World

Before heaven and earth existed, the third-century CE text Sanwu Liji relates, the universe was an amorphous chaos shaped like a great egg, in which the giant Pangu formed and slept undisturbed for eighteen thousand years. When he finally woke inside the darkness, Pangu split the egg open with a great axe he held; the light, pure elements suspended within it, the yang, rose slowly upward to become the sky, while the heavy, turbid elements, the yin, sank to become the earth. Fearing that sky and earth might drift back together and return the world to chaos, Pangu placed himself standing between them, his feet on the earth and his head supporting the sky, and pushed the two further apart.

As sky and earth continued to separate over the following eighteen thousand years, Pangu grew with them, adding ten feet to his height each day, so that by the time the two were finally fixed at a safe distance from one another, he had grown to an immense size, holding the entire structure of the world in the space of his own body until the separation was permanent and stable and his labor was finally complete.

The attribution of this account to the third-century compiler Xu Zheng means it survives only as a fragment quoted in a later encyclopedic work, the Yiwen Leiju, rather than as a complete original text, which is typical of how much early Chinese cosmogonic material has come down to modern readers in pieces rather than whole. Some strands of the wider tradition give the egg itself a color, black outside and yellow within, likening its shape and division to a chicken's egg, imagery scholars have connected to divination and cosmological diagrams that treat the egg as a compact model of the ordered universe still folded shut.

Exhausted by the eighteen-thousand-year labor of holding heaven and earth apart, Pangu finally died, and his body's transformation completes the world's creation. His breath became 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 became the four cardinal directions and the mountains that anchor them, his blood the rivers that run through the land, and his muscles and veins the roads and fertile fields that people would later till. His hair and beard scattered to become the stars strung across the night sky, his skin and the fine hairs on his body became the grasses and trees, his teeth and bones the metals and rock, and his marrow became precious jade and stone.

In some versions of the story, the parasites living on Pangu's body, warmed and nourished by the wind, are transformed into the first human beings, though this detail is recorded later and less consistently than the rest of the transformation. The Pangu cosmogony is notably later in written record than most other major world creation stories, first appearing centuries after texts like the Daodejing had already discussed cosmic origins in more abstract terms, and some scholars have proposed it may show influence transmitted along trade routes from South or Central Asia, a question that remains unsettled.