Pangu (盘古): China's Creation Myth, and Why It Is the Youngest One

In the beginning there was an egg, and inside it a man

Heaven and earth were not yet separate. They were a single murky mass, dark and stirred together, and the shape the text reaches for is a chicken's egg. Somewhere inside that egg was Pangu, and he had been in there for eighteen thousand years.

Then the egg opened. Everything clear and light in it rose and became the sky. Everything murky and heavy sank and became the ground. And Pangu, who was between them, stood up.

Now, this is where the story does something that no other creation myth quite does, and it is worth slowing down for. The sky and the earth do not simply spring apart and stay apart. They creep. Every day the sky rose by one zhang, roughly ten feet. Every day the ground thickened by the same amount. And every day Pangu grew ten feet taller, holding his position between them like a man bracing a jack under a collapsing ceiling, for another eighteen thousand years.

Do the arithmetic, because the text certainly did. Ten feet a day for eighteen thousand years, and at the end of it the sky stands ninety thousand li above the earth, Pangu is ninety thousand li tall, and there is nothing left for him to do.

So he dies. And here the story turns from cosmic engineering into something much stranger and much better.

His breath became the wind and the clouds. His voice became the thunder. His left eye became the sun and his right eye became the moon. His arms and legs became the four poles of the world and its five sacred mountains. His blood became the rivers, his sinews the ridges and contours of the land, his flesh the fields, his hair and beard the stars, his skin and its hair the grass and the trees, his teeth and bones the metals and the stones, his marrow the pearls and the jade, and his sweat the rain.

And then the last line, the one that gets left out of every children's version, and, as we shall see, out of most of the English ones too. The vermin on his body, stirred by the wind, became the common people.

That is you. In the oldest Chinese account of where humanity comes from, we are the lice on the corpse of a dead giant, blown loose by a breeze. Say what you like about it, it is not flattering, and it is not vague.

The word you have already used, if you speak any Chinese at all

Before the textual archaeology, notice how alive this is.

If you have spent five minutes learning Chinese idioms you have met kāi tiān pì dì, "split open heaven, break open earth". It means since the dawn of time, or, applied to a person's achievement, utterly unprecedented, the first of its kind. Chinese speakers use it constantly and cheerfully, in newspapers and in ordinary conversation, mostly without a passing thought for the enormous dead man it describes. It is the Chinese equivalent of saying something is epoch-making, except that the epoch in question is the literal one.

When Chinese needed a name for Pangaea, the single landmass that geologists reconstruct behind the modern continents, it did not transliterate. It called it the Pangu continent. When a team of Chinese security researchers released the jailbreak tools that let people take control of their own iPhones, they called themselves Pangu, on the reasonable grounds that prying open something sealed was the family business.

He is also still, in the most literal sense, on people's walls. In the Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archives there is a woodblock print catalogued as MS 7322, printed in red and green on oiled paper, about ten inches by twenty-four. Pangu stands in the middle of it holding the sun in one hand and the moon in the other, the two of them marked with yang and yin. There is an axe resting on a tree stump beside him, which we will come back to. Across the top run Daoist magic credentials, the eight trigrams and a yin-yang, and an inscription that the catalogue glosses as an amulet to dispel evil, guard the home and bestow good fortune.

That is the detail I would keep if I could keep only one. This object was not made for a museum or a temple or a scholar. It was made cheaply, in quantity, to be pinned up in an ordinary house by an ordinary family who wanted their home protected. It reached the Smithsonian with no record of where it came from, which is exactly what happens to things that are too common to be worth documenting. The creator of the universe ended his career as a door charm, and there is something rather moving about that.

The temples are real too. There is a Pangu King temple in Huadu district in Guangdong, built in 1809 and still standing, and the tradition of temples to him goes back much further, as we are about to see, to the fifth century.

The axe he does not have

Look at the Smithsonian print again, and at essentially every other picture of Pangu ever made: the school textbook illustration, the temple mural, the Shen Yun stage version, the cover of any children's book of Chinese myths. He is a muscular giant with an enormous axe, and he has just brought it down on the darkness and cleaved the world in two.

There is no axe in the oldest account. There is no chisel, no hammer, no blade and no blow. In Xu Zheng's text the egg simply opens, and Pangu separates heaven and earth by the slow, unglamorous, faintly absurd method of standing in the gap and getting taller.

The axe arrives more than a thousand years later, in Ming-dynasty vernacular fiction, and from there it goes into the popular prints, and from the prints into every illustration since. This is not a small edit. A god who splits the world with an axe is a hero, a craftsman, a laborer whose achievement is an act. A god who splits the world by growing is something much odder and much more Chinese: a process rather than a person, closer to yeast than to Hercules.

Both versions are legitimately part of the tradition. Only one of them is thirteen centuries older than the other, and it is not the one you have seen.

The oldest account, and the sum it is doing

So where does the story actually come from?

One man, more or less. His name was Xu Zheng, he lived in the kingdom of Wu during the Three Kingdoms period, roughly 220 to 265 CE, and he wrote a book called the Sanwu Liji, the Records of Cycles of Three and Five. The book is lost. Every word of Pangu we have from it survives because Tang-dynasty encyclopedists, compiling the Yiwen Leiju in 624 CE and the Taiping Yulan later, copied the passage out into their collections of things worth knowing. The foundation of Chinese cosmogony reaches us as a quotation in somebody else's reference book.

And read to the end, that passage does something you would not expect a myth to do. It stops telling a story and starts explaining a number.

Number begins at one, is established at three, completed at five, abundant at seven, and reaches its limit at nine. That is why the sky stands ninety thousand li above the ground.

That is the sound of a cosmology being reverse-engineered. The figure of ninety thousand li is not something Pangu's biography produced; it is a figure the numerologists already held, and the eighteen thousand years and the ten feet a day are the arithmetic that gets you there. The title of the book gives the game away: three and five, the odd numbers, the sequence the last line recites. This is a myth written by somebody who was principally interested in sums.

The egg is borrowed too, and from a rather grander source than folklore. When Xu Zheng compares primordial chaos to a chicken's egg he is using the standard scientific image of his own century. The huntian or celestial-sphere model was the leading Han cosmological theory, and Zhang Heng, the polymath who built the water-driven armillary sphere and the first seismoscope, put it like this in his commentary on the instrument: the heavens are like a chicken's egg, round as a crossbow pellet; the earth is like the yolk, lying alone inside; heaven is large and earth is small.

So the egg in the creation myth is not a piece of peasant poetry. It is the astronomy of the day, dropped into a story, the way a myth written now might reach for a singularity or a big bang. Once you know that, the opening line stops being quaint and starts being rather sophisticated.

The word that got softened on its way into English

Now the small thing that is actually a large thing.

The transformation passage ends: 身之諸蟲，因風所感，化為黎甿. The vermin on his body, stirred by the wind, became 黎甿.

English retellings, including the current English Wikipedia article, render that last word as animals. The parasites became the animals. It is a tidy image, it makes a pleasing final flourish to the list, and it is wrong.

黎甿, also written 黎氓, is an ordinary classical term for the common people, a variant of 黎民, the black-haired multitude, the general population, the ordinary run of humanity. Chinese dictionaries gloss it flatly as 百姓, the people. There is no ambiguity in it and no scholarly dispute about it. The line says that the vermin on the dead giant's body became us.

This matters more than a translator's slip usually does, because it changes what kind of creation myth this is. If the parasites become animals, then the passage is a charming account of where wildlife comes from, and human origins are simply not addressed. If the parasites become people, then the oldest Chinese cosmogony is telling you that humanity is an afterthought, an infestation, the thing that was living on the world-maker rather than the thing he made. That is a genuinely unusual claim, and it is the sort of claim that gets quietly sanded off in translation because it is uncomfortable.

I would not go to the stake for many things on this page. I will go to the stake for this one.

He is not in any of the old books

Here is the fact that reorganizes everything else.

Pangu does not appear in the Classic of Mountains and Seas. He does not appear in the Huainanzi. He is not in the Zhuangzi, not in the Chuci, not in any surviving pre-Han text at all. China had been producing written records for well over a thousand years before anybody wrote his name down.

The sharpest illustration of that silence is in the Heavenly Questions, the extraordinary poem in the Songs of Chu, which consists of nothing but questions fired at the universe, and which opens by asking who could possibly report what things were like before heaven and earth had taken shape, when there was only darkness and no form to see. That is Pangu's question. That is the precise gap he exists to fill. And the poet asking it, several centuries before Xu Zheng, plainly had never heard of him.

Which produces the pleasant paradox this page is built on: the Chinese story about the beginning of everything is the most recent major myth in the Chinese repertoire. The dragon is older. The archer Yi is older. The oracle bones are more than a thousand years older. The supposed first thing that ever happened was the last thing to be written down.

Two honest cautions, because certainty here would be cheap. First, absence of evidence in a textual record this badly damaged is an argument and not a proof; the First Emperor's book-burning and eighteen centuries of ordinary attrition have eaten most of what was written, and an oral Pangu could have circulated for a long time before anyone thought him worth committing to bamboo. Second, some scholars think the material was there all along under other names. Wei Juxian traced the idea back to the Zhou account in the Guoyu of Zhong and Li severing the connection between heaven and earth, which is a separation myth without a giant in it.

Still. The name and the story we have arrive in the third century CE, and the fact that they arrive so late is the single most interesting thing about them.

Where he came from, which nobody agrees on

Three explanations are on the table, each with real scholars behind it, and none of them has won.

He was always Chinese. This is Wei Juxian's line, above: an old indigenous separation myth, present in the record under other names, that eventually acquired a protagonist and a biography. The strength of the argument is that the raw idea of prying heaven and earth apart is demonstrably old in China. The weakness is that it does not explain the giant, the egg, or the body.

He came up from the south. The sinologist Derk Bodde connected the material to the ancestral traditions of the Miao and Yao peoples, and there is a phonetic road in: Panhu, the dog ancestor from whom the Yao and She peoples traced their descent, a figure who is genuinely old and genuinely non-Han. Wen Yiduo pursued that connection, and Qin Naichang has argued from Zhuang that the two syllables of the name mean whetstone and gourd, out of the widespread southern flood myth in which a brother and sister ride out the deluge inside a gourd and repopulate the earth. The strength here is the name, which means nothing in Chinese; the weakness is that the phonetic resemblance is doing an awful lot of work.

He came from India. Xu Zheng was writing in the kingdom of Wu in the third century, which is precisely when and where Buddhism was arriving in the Chinese south, and the Purusha Sukta of the Rigveda describes a cosmic man dismembered so that the universe can be assembled from his parts. Lü Simian argued for the connection, as did the Japanese scholar Takagi Toshio, and the Chinese-language encyclopedia treatment now calls this the mainstream academic position, though one encyclopedia's characterization is not a survey of the field and I would not repeat it as a verdict. The strength is the timing and the extremely specific structural match. The weakness is that dying-god cosmogonies turn up in places India never reached; Paul Carus was already noting the parallels with the Norse Ymir and the Babylonian Tiamat over a century ago, and Ymir did not come from the Vedas either.

Set the two body-lists side by side and judge for yourself.

The first five rows are close enough to make anyone uneasy. The sixth is where the two myths part company completely, and the difference tells you what each society was trying to say. The Vedic hymn takes humanity out of the noble parts of the body and uses the division to explain, and justify, the four social classes: priests from the mouth, warriors from the arms, and so on down. The Chinese text takes all of humanity, undifferentiated, off the giant's skin along with the fleas.

One of these is a charter for a social order. The other is a shrug.

The wife, and the four who come after

One last thing, because people always ask, and because there is an actual source for it.

Did Pangu have a wife? Not in Xu Zheng. He is alone in that text, thoroughly and structurally alone, and the loneliness is doing work: there is nobody else, because everything else is still him. But two and a half centuries later the Shuyi Ji, attributed to Ren Fang, reports in a single clause that in the country between Wu and Chu they said Pangu and his wife were the beginning of yin and yang. She gets no name and no story. She looks very much like the sibling-couple of the southern flood myths, drifting across and attaching herself to a famous figure, which is how these things generally happen.

That same fifth-century passage is worth reading whole, because it shows the myth in the act of growing. It reports that earlier scholars said his weeping became the rivers and the pupils of his eyes became the lightning; that an older account said clear weather was Pangu pleased and overcast skies were Pangu angry; that there was a tomb of his in the southern sea running more than three hundred li, where people believed later generations had buried his soul; and that there was a temple to him at Guilin where people still made offerings. Four competing versions and two cult sites, less than three hundred years after the first surviving mention. Myths do not arrive finished. They accumulate, and this one accumulated fast.

Which brings us to the company he keeps. Pangu is usually presented as the first of a sequence: Pangu separates heaven and earth, Nüwa makes people and later mends the sky, Fuxi gives humanity the trigrams and the arts of civilization, Shennong gives it farming and medicine, the Yellow Emperor gives it a state. It is a satisfying progression, and it is a retrospective arrangement. These figures come from different regions, different centuries and different books, and were tidied into a line long after the fact by people who wanted Chinese antiquity to have a table of contents.

Note where that leaves the human-origin question, incidentally. Pangu's text says we came off his body with the parasites. Nüwa's text says she knelt by a river and pinched us out of yellow clay, and got bored, and finished the job by flicking mud off a rope. Those are not two chapters of one story. They are two different answers to the same question, from two different places, sitting in the same tradition without ever being reconciled, and any account that stitches them into a smooth sequence is doing the tidying rather than reporting it.

Pangu was the first thing that happened and the last thing anyone wrote down. He built nothing, ruled nothing, and was worshipped mostly by people who wanted him to keep burglars and bad luck out of the house. He grew for thirty-six thousand years, lay down, and turned into the scenery.

If you like the sensation of a famous story turning out to be younger than its own reputation, the taotie is the same trick played on a piece of Bronze Age metalwork, where the monster everybody knows turns out to be a label somebody applied nine hundred years after the fact.