Gonggong: The Chinese Water God Who Knocked the Sky Askew

Who Gonggong is

First, the housekeeping. If you searched for Gonggong and wanted the dwarf planet beyond Neptune, you are one step removed: the planet was named after him in 2020, and he is the subject of this page.

Gonggong is the Chinese water god who lost his temper so badly that the universe still leans. He fought for the throne of heaven, lost, and in his rage ran headfirst into Mount Buzhou, the mountain that held up the sky. The mountain broke. The sky tipped toward the northwest, the earth sagged toward the southeast, and everything that was not fastened down began to slide. That, according to a Chinese book of 139 BCE, is why the stars wheel off to the west every night and why China's great rivers all run east to the sea.

He is not only a god. Depending on which ancient book you open, Gonggong is a water deity, a rebel lord, a whole clan that once ruled the nine regions, the first ruler to try to dam the world's rivers, the father of the god of the soil, and, oddly, a job title. He is also, in nearly every old source, the loser. What makes him worth a page is how many different people he managed to lose to.

Where you meet him today

Mostly, these days, in the sky.

In 2007 three astronomers at Palomar, Meg Schwamb, Mike Brown and David Rabinowitz, found a distant, reddish, icy world out past Neptune and spent twelve years calling it 2007 OR10. In 2019 they put a shortlist of names to a public vote. Schwamb announced the result on the Planetary Society's site that May: more than 280,000 votes, a late surge past the Norse god Vili, and the winner was Gonggong. The Minor Planet Center made it official on 5 February 2020, and the citation it published reads like a character reference: "Gonggong is a Chinese water god with red hair and a serpent-like tail. He is known for creating chaos, causing flooding, and tilting the Earth." Its one known moon was named at the same time, and it is called Xiangliu, after the water god's nine-headed serpent minister. Somewhere past Neptune a Chinese water god is still orbiting with his henchman in tow.

He has a political afterlife too, which is rarer for a god who breaks things. Mao Zedong wrote a poem after the Red Army beat off the Nationalists' first "encirclement" campaign in the winter of 1930 to 1931, and before it was published in People's Literature in 1962 he changed its last line to "red flags in wild disorder beneath Mount Buzhou." He also wrote a note of more than four hundred characters, as the People's Daily history channel recounts, lining up the ancient versions of the story and choosing one. "Accounts differ," he wrote. "I take the Huainanzi's Patterns of Heaven: Gonggong is a victorious hero." And then, reading the text with a lawyer's eye: did Gonggong die? "It doesn't say. It seems he did not die. Gonggong really did win." Two thousand years of commentators had treated him as a warning. Mao read the same lines and saw a man who knocked down the old heaven and walked away.

He turns up in games when a game needs a catastrophe. Ubisoft's 2021 expansion Immortals Fenyx Rising: Myths of the Eastern Realm is built around Nüwa mending the heavens, and its writers explained that they had several Gonggongs to choose from, one closer to a demonic monster and one closer to a Chinese Poseidon, and went with the version in which he rebels against the emperor.

And he is in a bowl of beans. A sixth-century almanac of the customs of the Chu region, the Jingchu suishi ji, notes that people cooked red-bean congee on the winter solstice, and its commentary gives the reason: Gonggong had a worthless son who died on the solstice and became a plague demon, and the demon is afraid of red beans. So you cook red beans, and the demon stays away. The bowl later drifted a few weeks down the calendar and became the sweet porridge of Laba.

Finally, the most famous novel in Chinese has him on its first pages, if you know where to look. Dream of the Red Chamber begins its human story in Suzhou with the phrase "in the days when the earth sank in the southeast." An educated reader would have known whose fault that was.

The mountain that held up the sky

The famous version comes from the Huainanzi, a compendium of learning assembled at the court of Liu An, King of Huainan, and presented to Emperor Wu in 139 BCE. It is worth knowing which chapter it sits in, because that changes what kind of story it is. It is not in a chapter of legends. It is in the "Treatise on the Patterns of Heaven," the astronomy chapter.

Here is the whole of it. Long ago Gonggong fought with Zhuanxu, a grandson of the Yellow Emperor, to become emperor. "In his fury he butted Mount Buzhou. The pillar of heaven broke and the cords that tie down the earth snapped. Heaven tilted to the northwest, and so the sun, the moon and the stars move that way; the earth fell short in the southeast, and so the waters and the dust come to rest there." Then, without a paragraph break, the chapter carries on explaining why heaven is round and earth is square.

So the myth is doing a job. Anyone in the Han who looked up saw the whole night sky turn around a point that was not overhead but hung well up in the north, and the stars sinking away westward. Anyone who looked at a map knew that the Yellow River and the Yangtze both rise in the high west and run down to the sea in the east. A cosmology in which heaven is a canopy on pillars and earth is a flat square has to account for both, and the collision accounts for both at once. (That is our reading of why the story sits where it sits; the Huainanzi itself just states the tilt and moves on.) It is the same instinct that, about four centuries later, put a cosmic egg at the start of the Pangu story: a myth drafted by people who were interested in how the sky worked.

Mount Buzhou itself is in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, that gazetteer of monsters and marvels compiled between the Warring States and the Han: beyond the northwest sea, at the corner of the great wilderness, "there is a mountain that does not close," called Buzhou. The name means something like "not whole" or "not joined," as if the gap were already there before anyone ran into it.

And the question the myth answers had already been asked. The Heavenly Questions, a long poem of riddles about the cosmos attributed to Qu Yuan in the third century BCE, simply wants to know: "Kanghui was filled with fury: why then does the earth sink to the southeast?" The poem gives no answer, which is its habit. The second-century commentator Wang Yi supplied one: Kanghui is Gonggong's personal name.

Who was he fighting?

Here the tidy myth falls apart, because the sources cannot agree on who beat him. The Huainanzi alone manages two opponents in two chapters.

The Zhurong version is the one with the neatest symbolism, water against fire, and so it is the one most modern retellings pick. It is also the latest. It comes from Sima Zhen, a Tang scholar who in the eighth century wrote a supplementary chapter for Sima Qian's great history to cover the rulers before the Yellow Emperor, whom Sima Qian had left out. His Gonggong is a lord who "tried to make water ride over wood," which is the theory of the five phases talking, then fights Zhurong, loses, and takes it out on the mountain.

There is an irony buried in the family tree. The Classic of Mountains and Seas, in its chapter on the regions within the seas, traces Gonggong's descent from the Flame Emperor through several generations to Zhurong himself: "Zhurong came down to live by the Yangtze, and fathered Gonggong." In one book the fire god is his father. In another he is the enemy who beats him. Mythology is not a single database, and nobody at the time tried to make it one.

Did Gonggong break the sky Nüwa mended?

Every modern retelling says so. Gonggong smashes the pillar, the sky cracks, fire and flood pour out, and Nüwa smelts five-colored stones to patch it. It makes a very satisfying two-act story. The oldest texts do not tell it.

The Huainanzi has both stories, and keeps them in separate chapters. Its Nüwa passage, in the chapter called "Peering into the Obscure," opens on a world that has already fallen apart, four pillars down and the nine provinces split, and never says why. Its Gonggong passage, in the astronomy chapter, breaks one pillar and tilts the sky, and never mentions a repair. Nobody in the book connects them.

The Liezi, a Daoist book traditionally assigned to a Warring States sage but, in the form we have it, generally dated by scholars to the third or fourth century CE, puts both in one paragraph, and in the opposite order. First, "long ago Nüwa smelted stones of five colors to patch its gaps, and cut the legs off the great turtle to prop up the four corners." Then: "After that, Gonggong fought with Zhuanxu." In the Liezi, Nüwa's repair comes first, and Gonggong breaks the sky afterward. The Liezi mentions no second repair, which is presumably why the sky still leans.

It is Sima Zhen, again, who joins them into cause and effect. His annals give Nüwa a reign, and "in her last years" Gonggong fights Zhurong and breaks the pillar, and "Nüwa then smelted stones of five colors to patch the sky." The story everyone now tells is an eighth-century arrangement of two older myths that had lived side by side for centuries without meeting.

Not everyone had been impressed by either of them. Wang Chong, the great skeptic of the first century CE, took the Gonggong story apart in his Lunheng with the patience of a man checking a bad invoice. "A mountain might be shaken, but Gonggong's strength could not break it. Or was it that, when heaven and earth first parted, mountains were small and people were large?" If the sky had truly been propped on a mountain and Gonggong snapped it, he went on, how did Nüwa reach it to mend it? And if a turtle's legs could hold up heaven, how large was the turtle, and who could have cut them off? He concluded that the scholars who told the story were probably describing something real, and that the details were nonsense.

The first dam-builder

The collision is the part everyone remembers. The part that shaped Chinese thinking about water is older, and it makes Gonggong a civil engineer.

The Discourses of the States, a collection of speeches compiled in the Warring States period, has a Zhou prince lecture his king, around 550 BCE by the book's reckoning, against damming a river that threatened the palace. His first example is Gonggong. "Long ago Gonggong abandoned this way. He sank into pleasure and let himself go, and set out to dam up the hundred rivers, pulling down the heights to fill in the low places, and so did harm to the world." Heaven did not bless him, the people did not help him, "and by them Gonggong was destroyed." Then comes the second example, and it is a name you may know: in the age of Shun, the prince says, Gun, the Earl of Chong, "carried on Gonggong's error," and was put to death for it. After Gun came his son, Yu the Great, who did the opposite: he dredged the rivers and let the water go.

So in this telling Gonggong is the founder of a school of flood control, the wrong school. Wall the water in, level the hills to do it, and you will be destroyed. Gun is his disciple and Yu is the reformer who proved them both wrong. The Huainanzi agrees in its own way: "in the time of Shun, Gonggong stirred up the flood" until it lapped at a place called Kongsang, and Shun had to send Yu to cut channels to the sea.

The Book of Documents gets personal about it. When a courtier recommends Gonggong for high office, the emperor Yao snorts: "Bah! His words are fine and his deeds go against them. He looks respectful, but his arrogance floods the sky." (The scholar Zhao Chaoyang has suggested that the last phrase is a copying error for something plainer, that he "made a flood rise to the sky," which would make it a charge sheet rather than a character sketch. It is an attractive idea and remains an idea.) Shortly afterward Gonggong is banished to Youzhou, in the far north, one of the "four criminals" whose punishment made the whole world submit.

Yu, for his part, finished the job. The philosopher Xunzi in the third century BCE sums up Yu's career in a jingle that ends: he "removed the people's affliction and drove out Gonggong." The Classic of Mountains and Seas gives the gorier version. Gonggong's minister was Xiangliu, a serpent with nine heads that ate from nine mountains, and wherever it touched turned to swamp. Yu killed it, and its blood stank so badly that no grain would grow; three times he filled the ground in and three times it sank. You can find Xiangliu among the creatures of Chinese myth, and, since 2020, in orbit.

A family of water officials

Behind the god there seems to be a people. The Zuo Commentary, a history of the eighth to fifth centuries BCE, has a visiting lord explain how the ancient rulers named their officials: the Yellow Emperor after clouds, the Flame Emperor after fire, "the house of Gonggong recorded things by water, so its officials were water-masters and took water names." The Chinese often write him as Gonggong-shi, "the house of Gonggong," and the books that treat him as a clan rather than a god talk about his rule, his lineage and his extinction, not his tail.

That lineage, in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, runs back to the Flame Emperor, which makes Gonggong a distant relation of Jingwei, the Flame Emperor's daughter who drowned in the Eastern Sea and became a bird that carries twigs and stones from the western hills to fill it in. It is a family that does not get on with water. She tries to fill up the sea; he tries to fill up the low ground and dam the rivers. Neither succeeds.

It runs forward, too, and more respectably. "When the house of Gonggong held sway over the nine regions," says the Book of Rites, its son was called Houtu, "and he was able to level the nine regions, and so he is sacrificed to at the earth altar." The Zuo Commentary names the son Goulong and says the same. So the son of the man who wrecked the land became the god of the land, and every village shrine to the earth god descends, on paper, from Gonggong's household. The worthless son of the solstice congee was, presumably, a different boy.

Then there is the name itself. The characters mean roughly "together" and "work," and in the Book of Documents the word is also a job. When Shun asks who can take charge of his craftsmen, the court names a man called Chui, and Shun says: "Chui, you shall be Gonggong." Sima Qian repeats it: Chui was made Gonggong, the minister of works. Whether the office was named after the ancient water-clan, or the clan and the god grew out of the memory of an office, nobody can now say. It is at least suggestive that the villain of Chinese flood myth shares his name with the title of the man in charge of public works.

Villain, rebel, or winner?

For most of Chinese history the answer was villain, and the portraits got worse as they went. A fragment of the Guicang, a lost divination manual quoted by later commentators, gives him "a human face, a snake's body and red hair." The Shenyi jing, a Han-or-later book of marvels attributed to the court wit Dongfang Shuo, puts him in the northwestern wilderness with the same red hair and serpent's body, human hands and feet, and adds a four-word character assessment that translates, without exaggeration, as greedy, wicked, stupid and stubborn. That is where the red hair and the serpent's tail on the Minor Planet Center's citation come from. The "copper head and iron forehead" some English sources add do not come from any of the texts cited on this page.

Then, in the twentieth century, a revolutionary poet took the same passage the commentators had used as a warning and read it as a victory. Mao's note does not claim that Gonggong was good. It claims that he won, because the Huainanzi never says he died, and that the man who breaks the pillar of an old heaven is the hero of the story, whatever the old heaven thought of him. It is a reading, and a very Mao reading. It is also, strictly, faithful to the text.

The texts themselves do not settle it, and they were never trying to. One book needs a reason for the tilted sky, another a bad example for a king who wants to build a dam, another a founder for the earth god's family, another a demon to scare off with beans. Gonggong serves all of them, and ends up with no fixed character at all, only a fixed consequence. Whoever he was fighting and whatever he was, the rivers still run to the southeast.