# Jingwei (精卫): The Chinese Bird Who Fills the Sea, and Why English Calls It Futile > Jingwei, the bird who fills the sea: the drowned princess of the Classic of Mountains and Seas, and why Chinese hears resolve where English hears futility. Canonical: https://jadealmanac.com/chinese-mythology/jingwei Author: Julian (祝君瑜), Jade Almanac · https://jadealmanac.com/about Method and sourcing: https://jadealmanac.com/sources Jingwei 精卫 (Jīngwèi, roughly "jing way") is a small bird from Chinese myth that was once a girl. In the Classic of Mountains and Seas she is the Flame Emperor's youngest daughter, who drowned in the Eastern Sea and came back as a crow-like bird with a white beak and red feet, carrying twigs and stones to fill the sea in. In Chinese the story means unbreakable resolve. The most widely used free Chinese-English dictionary hears something else: futility. ## Who Jingwei is There is a bird that is trying to fill the sea. It is a small bird, about the size of a crow, and the oldest description of it is exact to the point of fussiness: a patterned head, a white beak, red feet. It lives on a mountain in the north, and every day it picks up a twig or a stone from the western hills, flies east, and drops it into the ocean. Then it goes back for another. Its name is Jingwei, and when it calls, it calls its own name. The bird used to be a girl. The *Classic of Mountains and Seas*, the great bestiary-cum-atlas of Chinese myth, says she was the youngest daughter of the Flame Emperor, one of the legendary founding rulers, and that her name was Nüwa. She went swimming in the Eastern Sea, drowned, and did not come back. She came back as this. Two warnings before we go on, because both trip people up. Her human name, Nüwa, is written 女娃, "girl child," and is not the same name as the creator goddess [Nüwa](/chinese-mythology/nuwa), written 女媧, who shaped people from yellow clay and patched the broken sky. Same sound in Mandarin, different characters, different woman. And the Wang Jingwei who fills half the search results was a twentieth-century politician who borrowed the bird's name, of whom more below. From her comes one of the best-known four-character idioms in Chinese, 精卫填海, *jīngwèi tián hǎi*, "Jingwei fills the sea." And here is the interesting thing. Ask a Chinese speaker what it means and you get a compliment. Ask an English dictionary and you get something closer to a diagnosis. ## What "Jingwei fills the sea" means, depending on who you ask Put the same four characters into three standard dictionaries and you get three moral verdicts. | Dictionary | What it says the idiom means | Verdict | |---|---|---| | Hanyu Dictionary (zdic), main entry | A figure for firm will that does not fear hardship | Resolve | | Taiwan Ministry of Education dictionary, as quoted by zdic | First, nursing a grievance and vowing revenge; also, firm will undaunted by hardship | Revenge, then resolve | | CC-CEDICT, the open Chinese-English dictionary behind MDBG | "futile ambition / task of Sisyphus / determination in the face of impossible odds" | Futility first | The Chinese entries agree that this is a thing you would like to be said of you. The Taiwan dictionary's own example sentence promises that however many hardships stand in the way, "we will overcome them one by one in the spirit of Jingwei filling the sea," and it is not being ironic. The Taiwan dictionary keeps the older layer that everybody else has sanded off: before she was a model of perseverance she was a model of grievance, a girl with a score to settle with the ocean. CC-CEDICT, which a great many English-speaking learners meet first, leads with "futile ambition" and reaches for Sisyphus, the Greek king condemned to roll a boulder up a hill forever. It does get to determination, third. But the order tells you how the story lands in English. A small bird, a whole sea, no end in sight: that sounds less like a virtue than a sentence. It would be easy to stop there and call it a translation problem, the West missing the point. It is not quite that. The futility reading is not an English invention at all. It is Chinese, it is very old, and it lost the argument. The English dictionary has simply kept the losing side. We will come to the argument; first, where the bird lives now. ## Where you still meet her Every child in mainland China meets Jingwei at about the age of nine, in the original. The unified primary-school Chinese textbook puts her in the first volume of grade four, in a unit on myths, as a short passage of classical Chinese lifted almost straight from the *Classic of Mountains and Seas*. The exercise, as a teacher writing in *China Teachers' News* in 2021 laid it out, is to read it with the footnotes and then retell it in your own words. Her neighbors in that unit are Pangu separating heaven and earth, Nüwa mending the sky, and, rather wonderfully, Prometheus stealing fire. Not Sisyphus. Prometheus. She is on the ceiling of a railway station. In the late 1980s, the art historian Eugene Wang recounts, Tianjin's city leaders came back from Italy moved by the Sistine Chapel and asked local painters for a dome of their own, on a Chinese subject. The first suggestion from above was [Nezha](/chinese-mythology/nezha) stirring up the sea. The painters, a team under Qin Zheng and Wang Yuqi, objected that a brawl overhead was hardly the thing for a station hall, and chose Jingwei instead. The dome was finished in 1988 and was for a time the largest in the country. Wang reads it as a portrait of its decade: a country just out of the Cultural Revolution, painting a drowned girl who will not stop, and finding in her a tragic heroism it badly wanted. She has a hometown, or a county that claims to be one. Changzi, in the Changzhi region of Shanxi, identifies its Mount Fajiu with the mountain in the classic. According to the *Shanxi Evening News*, the county's old Linqiu temple, at a spring below the mountain, was for centuries a place to pray for rain in a dry country, and a restoration record of 1606 identifies its goddess with the Flame Emperor's daughter who became Jingwei. So the girl who drowned became, in one corner of north China, the goddess you asked for water. The county now has a wetland park with a six-meter statue of the bird, stone in beak. She was a revolutionary pseudonym. In 1905 a young radical named Wang Zhaoming, writing for the anti-Qing press, took the pen name Jingwei, and the name swallowed him: he is known to history as Wang Jingwei, the Nationalist leader who ended his career heading a Japanese-sponsored government. Within a couple of years the feminist revolutionary Qiu Jin began a novel in verse and prose called *Stones of the Jingwei*, meant to run to twenty chapters, about women breaking out of the old order. Six survive. She was executed by the Qing in 1907. Both of them, notice, reached for the bird as an image of a vow that would outlast the person making it. She is a video-game god. In *SMITE*, where she has been playable since 2016, she is "Jing Wei, the Oathkeeper," a Chinese-pantheon hunter whose lore says plainly that she will not cease until the ocean is filled. The game's writers, whatever they knew of dictionaries, read her the Chinese way. And she is a gene. In 1993 the geneticists Manyuan Long and Charles Langley described a gene in fruit flies built from a copy of another gene that had been written off as dead, a pseudogene, which turned out to have picked up new parts and come back to life with a new job. They called it *jingwei*. The name fits better than most gene names: a thing that died and returned in another form. Seven years later, when a Chicago team traced the other parent gene it had borrowed from, they named that one *yellow emperor*. In the myth, as it happens, her father is the other emperor. ## The story in the Classic of Mountains and Seas The whole original is a single paragraph, one of hundreds in the *Classic of Mountains and Seas*, which walks the reader across the known and unknown world mountain by mountain, listing the plants, stones and animals of each. Jingwei's entry sits in the section on the northern mountains, and it reads like every other entry until, abruptly, it doesn't. Two hundred li further north, it says, is Mount Fajiu, thick with thorny mulberry trees. There is a bird there shaped like a crow, with a patterned head, a white beak and red feet. It is called Jingwei, and its cry is its own name. So far, a field guide. Then: it was the Flame Emperor's youngest daughter, whose name was Nüwa. Nüwa went swimming in the Eastern Sea, drowned, and did not come back, and so became Jingwei. She is forever carrying wood and stones from the Western Hills to fill up the Eastern Sea. That is all. There is no speech, no confrontation with the sea, no explanation of why she wants to fill it. The popular retellings, including the one on English Wikipedia, add a dialogue in which the ocean mocks her and she answers that she will go on for a hundred million years; none of that is in the classic. What the classic has is the flat fact of the drowning and the flat fact of the task, side by side, and it leaves you to supply the motive. The motive arrived later, and it was revenge. The *Records of Strange Things*, a book of marvels attributed to the sixth-century writer Ren Fang, fills in what the classic left out. Jingwei, it says, paired with a sea swallow and raised chicks, the daughters looking like her and the sons like their father. At the spot on the coast where she took her vow, having drowned in that water, she swore never to drink it. And it gives her a string of other names, each one an interpretation: the Oath Bird, the Bird of Grievance, the Resolute Bird, and, in common speech, the Emperor's Daughter Sparrow. Grievance and resolve, in the same list. The argument about what she means has already begun. ## The Flame Emperor's family A word on the father, because English retellings often call her the daughter of Shennong, the Divine Farmer. The classic does not. It says the Flame Emperor, Yan Di, and in the oldest texts the Flame Emperor and the Divine Farmer are two different figures, joined into one man only in the Han, as the page on [Shennong](/chinese-mythology/shennong) explains. Jingwei's story comes from the older side of that seam. The Flame Emperor's family, in the *Classic of Mountains and Seas*, is not a happy one around water. Another chapter traces his descendants through four generations to the fire god Zhurong, who settles by the Yangtze and fathers [Gonggong](/chinese-mythology/gonggong), the water god who in later myth smashes the pillar holding up the sky and tips the rivers of China toward the east. The same line, then, produced the girl who was drowned by the sea and the god who flooded the world. Whether anyone in antiquity noticed the symmetry is another matter. ## Fifteen hundred years of arguing about a bird Here is the part the dictionary table does not show. Chinese writers have been asking whether Jingwei is magnificent or ridiculous for about as long as they have been writing about her, and they did not agree. It starts with the most famous lines ever written about her. Tao Yuanming, the fifth-century poet who gave up office to farm, wrote a sequence of thirteen poems on reading the *Classic of Mountains and Seas*, and the tenth opens with a couplet every educated Chinese reader knows: Jingwei carries a tiny twig, meaning to fill the vast sea with it; the headless warrior Xingtian still brandishes shield and axe, his fierce will as strong as ever. That is the praise line, quoted on posters and in exam essays. What is quoted much less is how the same eight-line poem ends. Transformed, they have nothing left to fear and no regrets, Tao says; yet in vain they keep the hearts they had before, and the good morning they are waiting for will never come. The most admiring poem in the canon closes on *in vain*. Li Bai, three centuries later, is blunter. In one of his *Fables* the phoenixes and the blue birds sing and dance for the Queen Mother of the West and win her heart, while the tiny Jingwei holds its twig and grieves in vain. Here the bird is not heroic at all. It is the one nobody at court is listening to, and Li Bai, who spent less than three years at court before being eased out of it, is plainly not writing about birds. Then Han Yu takes the other side, and does it in an unexpected place. His poem is titled as an exercise written after the manner of the examination candidates, on the theme "Jingwei carries stones to fill the sea"; the bird was, in other words, the kind of topic you got in an exam. Han Yu admits the whole case against her: the work is so vast its progress cannot be seen, and her small life counts for little. Then he makes the turn: everyone mocks it as rash; I alone admire its single-mindedness. She is not counting on a day to stop. She means only to spend her life on it. The Song poets split the same way. Wang Anshi's Jingwei knows full well that wood and stone are no help, and waits instead to see the mulberry fields change a few more times. His contemporary Zhang Lei, pairing her with the Foolish Old Man who moved a mountain, puts the defense in one line: Jingwei filling the sea is not necessarily mad. After that the bird stops being a debating topic and becomes a banner. When the Song dynasty fell to the Mongols, its last great minister, Wen Tianxiang, wrote in captivity that he had the heart to hold up the sun and moon and no strength left to repay heaven and earth, and ended: on the blue sea of a thousand years, Jingwei is my soul. He was executed rather than serve the new dynasty. Three and a half centuries later, after the Ming fell, the loyalist scholar Gu Yanwu wrote a *Jingwei* built as a conversation. Someone asks the bird: the world is full of things not made level, why torment yourself for nothing? The bird answers: I mean to make the Eastern Sea level. The great sea will never be level, and my heart will never be done. That last exchange is the whole argument in four lines. The objection is Sisyphus, precisely stated. The answer does not deny it. ## Brave or futile? So the English reading is not a misunderstanding. It is one half of a Chinese conversation, preserved without its reply. What the Chinese side added, and what CC-CEDICT's "futile ambition" leaves out, are two ideas that English does not carry around with it. The first is a phrase with Confucius's name attached. In the *Analects*, the Master's disciple Zilu spends a night at a place called Stone Gate, and the gatekeeper asks where he is from. From Master Kong's, says Zilu. The gatekeeper's reply is a sneer: isn't that the one who knows it can't be done and does it anyway? The line was meant as mockery. Chinese took it as a description of the admirable life, and it is still used that way, as praise. Eugene Wang, writing about the Tianjin dome, points out that the 1980s turned exactly this phrase into an aesthetic, citing the philosopher Li Zehou: knowing it cannot be done and doing it, he says, is what the tragic-heroic is. Jingwei is that sentence with wings. The second is a cosmology. In the story of the immortal Magu, from Ge Hong's fourth-century *Traditions of Divine Transcendents* and retold by the calligrapher Yan Zhenqing in a stele inscription of 771, Magu remarks that since she last saw her friend she has watched the Eastern Sea turn into mulberry fields three times, and that the water at Penglai is getting shallow again; he laughs and says the sages all agree the sea will be throwing up dust before long. From this comes one of the most common idioms in the language, the blue sea turning into mulberry fields, for the way the world changes past recognition. In that world a sea is not permanent. It has dried up before and it will again. Look back at the Song poets: Wang Anshi's bird is "waiting to see the mulberry fields change," and Zhang Lei's defense goes on to say that valleys become hills and the sea, too, has its time of dust. Their answer to "the sea can't be filled" is not courage in the face of impossibility. It is a flat denial that the thing is impossible, given enough time. Set beside that, Sisyphus looks very different. (This is our reading, not a claim any of these writers made.) Sisyphus is punished; his rock is a sentence handed down by gods, in an underworld where nothing ever changes, and its point is that the task can never end. Jingwei is not sentenced by anyone. She chose the task herself, the *Records of Strange Things* calls her the Oath Bird, and the world she flies over is one where oceans come and go. The English dictionary saw a small bird and a big sea and reached for the nearest Greek. The Chinese tradition saw the same bird and asked how long she had. She is still at it, presumably. The classic never says she stopped. It says she is forever carrying wood and stones from the Western Hills to fill up the Eastern Sea, and then, without comment, it moves on to the next river. ## Primary sources - The Classic of Mountains and Seas (山海经), Classic of the Northern Mountains, Mount Fajiu and the bird that fills the sea, tr. Jade Almanac, from the original, Warring States to Han > 又北二百里，曰發鳩之山，其上多柘木。有鳥焉，其狀如烏，文首、白喙、赤足，名曰精衛，其鳴自詨。是炎帝之少女，名曰女娃，女娃游于東海，溺而不返，故為精衛，常銜西山之木石，以堙于東海。 > Two hundred li further north is Mount Fajiu, thick with thorny mulberry trees. There is a bird there shaped like a crow, with a patterned head, a white beak and red feet. It is called Jingwei, and its cry is its own name. It was the Flame Emperor's youngest daughter, whose name was Nüwa. Nüwa went swimming in the Eastern Sea, drowned, and did not come back, and so she became Jingwei. She is forever carrying wood and stones from the Western Hills to fill up the Eastern Sea. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/山海經/北山經 - Ren Fang (attributed), Records of Strange Things (述异记), the petrel, the vow, and four more names, tr. Jade Almanac, from the original, Liang dynasty, early 6th century (attribution disputed) > 昔炎帝女溺死東海中，化爲精衞，其名自呼。毎銜西山木石填東海。偶海燕而生子，生雌狀如精衞，生雄如海燕。今東海精衞誓水處，曽溺於此川，誓不飲其水。一名鳥誓，一名寃禽，又名志鳥，俗呼帝女雀。 > Long ago the Flame Emperor's daughter drowned in the Eastern Sea and turned into the Jingwei, which calls out its own name. It is forever carrying wood and stone from the Western Hills to fill the Eastern Sea. It paired with a sea swallow and had young: the females look like Jingwei, the males like sea swallows. At the place on the Eastern Sea where Jingwei made her vow, having once drowned in that water, she swore never to drink it. She is also called the Oath Bird, the Bird of Grievance and the Resolute Bird, and commonly the Emperor's Daughter Sparrow. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/述異記 - Tao Yuanming, Reading the Classic of Mountains and Seas (读山海经), no. 10, the famous praise, and the ending nobody quotes, tr. Jade Almanac, from the original, early 5th century > 精衛銜微木，將以填滄海；刑天舞干戚，猛志故常在。同物既無慮，化去不復悔。徒設在昔心，良晨詎可待？ > Jingwei carries a tiny twig, meaning to fill the vast sea with it; Xingtian brandishes shield and axe, his fierce will as strong as ever. Changed into other creatures, they have nothing left to fear; transformed and gone, they have no regrets. Yet in vain they keep the hearts they had before: how can the good morning ever be waited for? https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/讀《山海經》 - Li Bai, Fables (寓言三首), no. 2, the favored birds and the ignored one, tr. Jade Almanac, from the original, 8th century > 搖裔雙彩鳳，婉孌三青禽。往還瑤臺裏，鳴舞玉山岑。以歡秦娥意，復得王母心。區區精衛鳥，銜木空哀吟。 > Two bright phoenixes, swaying; three blue birds, lovely and sweet. They come and go about the jasper terrace and sing and dance on the jade mountain's peak. They delight the lady of Qin and win the Queen Mother's heart. The tiny Jingwei holds its twig and grieves in vain. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/寓言_(搖裔雙彩鳳) - Han Yu, Written after the Examination Candidates on 'Jingwei Carries Stones to Fill the Sea' (学诸进士作精卫衔石填海), everyone mocks it; I alone admire it, tr. Jade Almanac, from the original, late 8th to early 9th century > 鳥有償冤者，終年抱寸誠。口銜山石細，心望海波平。渺渺功難見，區區命已輕。人皆譏造次，我獨賞專精。豈計休無日，惟應盡此生。何慚刺客傳，不著報仇名。 > There is a bird that seeks redress for a wrong, holding its inch of sincerity year after year. In its beak, a fleck of mountain stone; in its heart, the hope of a level sea. The work is so vast its progress cannot be seen; the small life counts for little. Everyone mocks it as rash; I alone admire its single-mindedness. Why reckon on a day to stop? It means only to spend this life to the end. Why should it mind that the Biographies of the Assassins never recorded its name for vengeance? https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/學諸進士作精衛銜石填海 - Wang Anshi, Jingwei (精卫), waiting for the mulberry fields, tr. Jade Almanac, from the original, 11th century > 帝子銜冤久未平，區區微意欲何成。情知木石無云補，待見桑田幾變更。 > The emperor's daughter has carried her grievance a long time, and it is still not settled; what can so small a purpose hope to achieve? She knows full well that wood and stone are no help. She is waiting to see the mulberry fields change a few more times. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/王臨川集/卷033 - Zhang Lei, Mountains and Seas (山海), in the Keshan Collection, scroll 10, not necessarily mad, tr. Jade Almanac, from the original, late 11th to early 12th century > 愚公移山寜不智，精衛填海未必癡。深谷為陵岸為谷 > Was the Foolish Old Man who moved the mountain not wise after all? Jingwei filling the sea is not necessarily mad. Deep valleys become hills, and shores become valleys. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/柯山集_(四庫全書本)/卷10 - Wen Tianxiang, Of Myself (自述), Jingwei is my soul, tr. Jade Almanac, from the original, written in captivity in Dadu, before his execution in 1283 > 有心扶日月，無力報乾坤。……千年滄海上，精衛是吾魂。 > I had the heart to hold up the sun and moon, and no strength left to repay heaven and earth. … On the blue sea of a thousand years, Jingwei is my soul. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/自述_(文天祥) - Gu Yanwu, Jingwei (精卫), the question and the answer, tr. Jade Almanac, from the original, 17th century > 萬事有不平，爾何空自苦。……我願平東海，大海無平期，我心無絕時！ > "The world is full of things not made level; why torment yourself for nothing?" … "I mean to make the Eastern Sea level. The great sea will never be level, and my heart will never be done." https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/精衛_(顧炎武) - Analects (论语), Book 14, Xian Wen, the gatekeeper at Stone Gate, tr. Jade Almanac, from the original, 5th to 4th century BCE > 子路宿於石門。晨門曰：「奚自？」子路曰：「自孔氏。」曰：「是知其不可而爲之者與？」 > Zilu spent the night at Stone Gate. The gatekeeper asked, "Where are you from?" Zilu said, "From Master Kong's." "Isn't that the one who knows it can't be done and does it anyway?" https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/論語/憲問第十四 - Yan Zhenqing, Record of the Altar of the Immortal Magu (麻姑仙坛记), retelling Ge Hong's Traditions of Divine Transcendents, the Eastern Sea three times a mulberry field, tr. Jade Almanac, from the original, 771 > 麻姑自言：「接待以來，見東海三為桑田。向間蓬萊水，乃淺於往者，會時略半也，豈將復還為陸陵乎？」方平笑曰：「聖人皆言，海中行復揚塵也。」 > Magu said: "Since we last met, I have seen the Eastern Sea turn into mulberry fields three times. Just now the water at Penglai was shallower than before, about half what it was when we met. Is it going to turn back into dry land?" Wang Fangping laughed and said, "The sages all say that the sea will be throwing up dust again." https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/撫州南城縣麻姑山仙壇記 - The Classic of Mountains and Seas (山海经), Classic of Regions Within the Seas, the Flame Emperor's line runs to Gonggong, tr. Jade Almanac, from the original, Warring States to Han > 炎帝之妻，赤水之子聽訞生炎居……祝融降處於江水，生共工。 > The Flame Emperor's wife, Tingyao, daughter of the Red River, bore Yanju … Zhurong came down to live by the Yangtze and fathered Gonggong. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/山海經/海內經 ## Pop culture appearances - SMITE · game · 2016 · released · Playable god in the Chinese pantheon, a hunter who flies back into battle after every death · Jing Wei, the Oathkeeper · Released April 12, 2016. Her lore reads the myth as an oath rather than a punishment: she will not stop until the ocean is filled. ## Sources - Classic of Mountains and Seas, Classic of the Northern Mountains: Mount Fajiu and Jingwei (Wikisource): https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/山海經/北山經 - Records of Strange Things, attributed to Ren Fang: the petrel, the vow, and Jingwei's other names (Wikisource): https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/述異記 - Tao Yuanming, Reading the Classic of Mountains and Seas, thirteen poems (Wikisource): https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/讀《山海經》 - Li Bai, Fables, no. 2 (Wikisource): https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/寓言_(搖裔雙彩鳳) - Han Yu, Written after the Examination Candidates on 'Jingwei Carries Stones to Fill the Sea' (Wikisource): https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/學諸進士作精衛銜石填海 - Wang Anshi, Jingwei, in the Collected Works of Wang Linchuan, scroll 33 (Wikisource): https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/王臨川集/卷033 - Zhang Lei, Mountains and Seas, Keshan Collection, scroll 10 (Wikisource): https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/柯山集_(四庫全書本)/卷10 - Wen Tianxiang, Of Myself (Wikisource): https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/自述_(文天祥) - Gu Yanwu, Jingwei (Wikisource): https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/精衛_(顧炎武) - Analects, Book 14: the gatekeeper at Stone Gate (Wikisource): https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/論語/憲問第十四 - Yan Zhenqing, Record of the Altar of the Immortal Magu: the Eastern Sea three times a mulberry field (Wikisource): https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/撫州南城縣麻姑山仙壇記 - Classic of Mountains and Seas, Classic of Regions Within the Seas: the Flame Emperor's descendants to Gonggong (Wikisource): https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/山海經/海內經 - Hanyu Dictionary (zdic), entry for the idiom Jingwei fills the sea, with the Taiwan Ministry of Education and CC-CEDICT glosses: https://www.zdic.net/hans/精卫填海 - MDBG Chinese Dictionary (CC-CEDICT): 'futile ambition / task of Sisyphus / determination in the face of impossible odds': https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?page=worddict&wdrst=0&wdqb=精卫填海 - Zhu Yu, How to Set Unit Goals, China Teachers' News, March 3, 2021: the grade-four myth unit of the unified Chinese textbook (China Education News Network): http://www.jyb.cn/rmtzgjsb/202103/t20210302_402178.html - Eugene Y. Wang, From 'Nezha Stirs Up the Sea' to 'Jingwei Fills the Sea': on the Tianjin Railway Station dome, Wenhui, July 29, 2019: https://wenhui.whb.cn/zhuzhan/xueren/20190729/279985.html - Shanxi Evening News, Jingwei Fills the Sea: the myth from the Warring States to Changzi County, November 18, 2025: https://www.sxwbs.com/detail/9bc97df8ee46430898ac7a7c0946b889?t=MjAyNS0xMS0xOA==&contentType=1 - Qiu Jin, Stones of the Jingwei, an unfinished novel in verse and prose (Wikisource): https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/精衛石 - Zhiyi Yang, Poetry, History, Memory: Wang Jingwei and China in Dark Times (University of Michigan Press, 2023, open access): https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.12697845 - Manyuan Long and Charles Langley, Natural selection and the origin of jingwei, a chimeric processed functional gene in Drosophila, Science 260 (1993) (PubMed): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7682012/ - Wang Wen et al., The origin of the Jingwei gene and the complex modular structure of its parental gene, yellow emperor, Molecular Biology and Evolution 17 (2000) (PubMed): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10958846/ - Official SMITE Wiki: Jing Wei, the Oathkeeper: https://smite.fandom.com/wiki/Jing_Wei ## FAQ **Who is Jingwei in Chinese mythology?** Jingwei is a small bird in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, a book of mythical geography compiled between the Warring States and the Han. She was once Nüwa, the Flame Emperor's youngest daughter, who drowned while swimming in the Eastern Sea. She came back as a crow-like bird with a patterned head, a white beak and red feet, and she carries twigs and stones from the Western Hills to drop into the sea, meaning to fill it in. Her cry is her own name. **What does jingwei mean?** As a name, Jingwei is simply what the bird is called, after the sound of its cry; the text treats it as her call, not a meaningful phrase. As an idiom, "Jingwei fills the sea" means refusing to give up against impossible odds. Chinese dictionaries read that as praise: the Hanyu Dictionary glosses it as firm will that does not fear hardship, and the Taiwan Ministry of Education dictionary adds an older sense, nursing a grievance and vowing revenge. The open CC-CEDICT dictionary used by many English learners lists "futile ambition" and "task of Sisyphus" first. The story's significance is that argument: brave, or pointless. **How do you pronounce the name Jingwei?** Jīngwèi is two syllables: "jing," as in the English word, held on a high level tone, then "way," falling sharply. Roughly "jing way." The older Wade-Giles spelling is Ching-wei, which is how some older English books write her name. **Is Jingwei the same as Nüwa?** No, though the confusion is understandable. Jingwei's human name was Nüwa, written 女娃, "girl child." The creator goddess who made people from clay and mended the sky is also Nüwa, but written 女媧, with a different second character. Same sound, different woman: one is a drowned princess who became a bird, the other a goddess who repaired the world. **Is Jingwei the same as Wang Jingwei?** No. Wang Jingwei was a man, the Chinese revolutionary and later wartime collaborator Wang Zhaoming (1883 to 1944). He adopted Jingwei as a pen name in 1905, after the bird, as the literary scholar Zhiyi Yang notes in her 2023 study of his poetry. That borrowing is why searches for the bird so often turn up the politician.