COLLECTION
Explore the stories, beliefs, and extraordinary beings of this tradition.
On a mountain in the far northwest, the old books say, the Lord on High kept his capital on earth, guarded by a nine-headed beast, and the Queen Mother of the West grew peaches that ripen once in three thousand years. A Han emperor gave its name to real mountains, and the historian who recorded it did not believe him.
Read story 13 min readIn India and in early China the bodhisattva who hears the cries of the world was a man, painted at Dunhuang with a moustache more than a thousand years ago. A princess who gave her eyes and arms to save her father, in a legend carved in stone in 1100, gave Guanyin a woman's life.
Read story 11 min readA white snake takes a woman's form, marries a young man of Hangzhou and is shut under Leifeng Pagoda by the monk Fahai. In the oldest full telling, from 1624, she is a demon and the tale a warning; the loving wife and mother were made on the Qing stage.
Read story 11 min readA boy kills the Dragon King's son, gives his flesh and bones back to his parents to spare them, and returns in a body made of lotus. Two Ming novels made him famous, but the boy god had reached China centuries earlier, with Buddhism, from India.
Read story 11 min readThe oldest Chinese dictionary says the long can be dark or bright, tiny or huge, and climbs to heaven at the spring equinox. It brought the rain, became the emperor's sign and gave East Asia its dragon kings, and English calls it, not quite rightly, a dragon.
Read story 13 min readHe beat the storm-calling Chiyou with the help of a drought goddess, and rode a dragon into the sky from the foot of Mount Jing. Sima Qian made him the first sovereign of Chinese history, but no inscription names him before the 4th century BCE.
Read story 10 min readHis father stole a soil that grew by itself to block the flood and was put to death for it; Yu dug the waters a way to the sea and became the founder of China's first dynasty. In the oldest witnesses he is not yet a king, but a worker sent by Heaven.
Read story 10 min readTwo stars face each other across the Milky Way, and once a year, on the seventh night of the seventh month, the Weaver crosses to the Cowherd. In the oldest full telling it was the Lord of Heaven who married them, and he parted them only because she stopped weaving.
Read story 10 min readIn Chinese popular religion the Jade Emperor rules heaven as an emperor rules his officials, and his birthday falls on the ninth day of the first month. Yet he is younger than Heaven itself: Song emperors gave him his titles in the 11th and 12th centuries, and in Daoist doctrine three gods still stand above him.
Read story 11 min readA monkey born from a stone learned the arts of the immortals, ate the peaches of heaven and fought its armies until the Buddha caught him in one hand. The novel that tells it was printed in 1592 without its author's name, and the monkey himself is centuries older.
Read story 14 min readThe world began as an egg, and Pangu grew inside it until heaven and earth stood ninety thousand li apart. When he died, his body became the world. Yet no book names him before the third century CE, and scholars still argue over where he came from.
Read story 8 min readAn archer shot down the suns that were burning the world, and a woman stole the elixir of immortality and fled to the moon. Today they are the married couple of the Mid-Autumn Festival. The oldest texts tell two separate stories.
Read story 8 min readShe shaped people from yellow earth and patched the broken sky with five-coloured stones. But was Nüwa really half serpent? The oldest texts, the tomb art and the later novels give three different answers.
Read story 7 min read
