{"it":{"id":"TX036","kind":"text","sub":"Chinese","name":"Nüwa makes humans from yellow earth (Fengsu Tongyi)","place":"Held in several collections","date":"Ying Shao, c.195 CE","oldest":"medieval quotations (Taiping Yulan 983 CE)","inst":"n/a","lang":"Classical Chinese","src":[234,602],"tags":["Asia"],"sum":"\"Nü-kua created men by patting yellow earth together\" (Ying Shao, Fengsu Tongyi, about 140–206 CE, in Bodde's translation). Tiring of the work, she dragged a cord through mud to make the rest.","why":"It is a creation myth that ranks people at the moment of making.","nfacts":0,"nsrc":2,"yt":"Nüwa makes nobles by hand and commoners with a cord. Was this myth recording an idea of how we were made, or just justifying who rules?","rel":["TX034","TX051"],"hook":"Nüwa shaped nobles from yellow earth by hand, then dragged a cord through mud to make everyone else."},"S":{"234":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%BCwa"],"602":["Ying Shao, Fengsu Tongyi (Chinese Text Project)","https://ctext.org/fengsutongyi"]},"rec":{"id":"TX036","alias":[],"ms":[],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA137","a":"Non-human (serpent-bodied) creator.","who":"AA writers","main":"Etiology of social rank; late Han.","ms":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%BCwa","st":"unresolved","n":"interpretive claim; no measurable data","nl":1}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"pas":[{"ref":"Fengsu Tongyi (via Taiping Yulan 78)","q":"Nüwa moulds people from yellow earth. [paraphrase]","exact":"no","tr":"various","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%BCwa","mo":"clay"}],"tr":[],"mo":[{"v":"clay_or_earth","ev":"P027","n":"no documented link","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%BCwa"}],"tl":[],"wit":[],"tx":{"mainstream_reading":"Etiology of social rank; late Han.","alternative_reading":"Non-human (serpent-bodied) creator.","alt_proponent":"AA writers","mistranslation_or_dispute":"Text survives via quotation.","key_theme":"Nüwa moulds nobles from yellow clay, commoners from mud-dragged rope","language":"Classical Chinese","physical_object_institution":"n/a","composition_date":"Ying Shao, c.195 CE","oldest_ms_date":"medieval quotations (Taiping Yulan 983 CE)","b":"S"},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"S0549","t":"en.wikipedia.org","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%BCwa"},{"id":"S2603","t":"Ying Shao, Fengsu Tongyi (Chinese Text Project)","u":"https://ctext.org/fengsutongyi"},{"id":"VTX036-3","t":"Chinese Wikipedia: 女娲 (Nüwa)","u":"https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%A5%B3%E5%A8%B2"}],"sum":"# Nüwa and the Yellow Earth: The Chinese Goddess Who Made People Twice Over\n\nThe sky had broken. The four pillars that held up heaven had snapped, the land was in tatters, and heaven no longer covered the earth. \"Fires blazed out of control and could not be extinguished,\" says the Huainanzi, a Chinese compendium of the second century BC; \"water flooded in great expanses and would not recede. Ferocious animals ate blameless people; predatory birds snatched the elderly and the weak.\" Into that ruin came a goddess. She \"smelted together five-colored stones in order to patch up the azure sky, cut off the legs of the great turtle to set them up as the four pillars, killed the black dragon,\" and piled up reeds and ashes to stop the surging waters. When she had finished, the sky was whole again and the people lived.\n\nHer name was Nüwa, and in Chinese tradition she did more than mend the world. She made the people in it. And in one famous version of that story, she made them in two different ways, and the difference between the two decided who would rule and who would serve.\n\n## The passage\n\nThe story is credited to Ying Shao, a scholar of the late Eastern Han dynasty, in his book Fengsu Tongyi, \"Comprehensive Meaning of Customs and Mores,\" written around 195 CE. It is a kind of almanac of the curious, describing customs, beliefs, rituals and musical instruments that interested the educated men of his time. In Derk Bodde's translation the passage reads:\n\n\"It is popularly said that when Heaven and Earth had opened forth, but before there were human beings, Nü-kua created men by patting yellow earth together. But the work tasked her strength and left her no free time, so that she then dragged a string through mud, thus heaping it up so as to make it into men. Therefore the rich and the noble are those men of yellow earth, whereas the poor and the lowly, all ordinary people, are those cord-made men.\"\n\nThe first people are shaped one by one, by hand, from fine yellow earth. Then the goddess tires. To finish the job she takes a cord, drags it through mud, and lets what falls from it become people too. The method of making becomes the measure of a person's worth.\n\n## A story without its own book\n\nThere is an odd problem with this famous passage. It is not in the Fengsu Tongyi. Ying Shao's book originally had thirty chapters, and only ten survive; they were gathered together again centuries later, in the Northern Song dynasty. The Nüwa story belongs to the lost twenty. It survives only because the Taiping Yulan, a giant imperial encyclopedia compiled between 977 and 983 by a team of scholars, quotes it in its 78th chapter, citing \"Customs\" by Ying Shao of the Han.\n\nThe Taiping Yulan is enormous, 1,000 volumes and roughly 4.7 million characters drawing on about 2,579 earlier works, and much of what it preserves exists nowhere else. One retelling of its passage even gives a different reason for the cord: the clay was not strong enough, so she put ropes into it to make the bodies stand upright. The best-known Chinese creation story of human beings rests, in other words, on a quotation in a reference book compiled nearly eight centuries after the original.\n\n## Who Nüwa was\n\nNüwa is much older than Ying Shao. In the Songs of Chu, from the fourth century BC, the poet Qu Yuan asks, in a poem of riddling questions to heaven, \"Who shaped the body of Nüwa?\" It is among the earliest mentions of her, and it has been read as a question of infinite regress: if she made people, who made her? China's earliest dictionary, the Shuowen Jiezi, describes her as both sister and wife of Fuxi, a culture-bringing god. Han dynasty tomb art shows the two of them with human heads and serpent bodies, often with their tails intertwined, often holding the sun and the moon, or a carpenter's square and a pair of compasses, the tools of measuring and laying out. A later tradition counts Nüwa among the Three August Ones, the first sovereigns of China.\n\nThe character for her name is unique to her. The translator Anne Birrell renders it \"lovely,\" but notes it could be read as \"frog,\" in keeping with her watery myths.\n\n## The mainstream reading\n\nScholars read the yellow earth passage as an origin story for social hierarchy. It explains, as a matter of cosmic fact, why some people are born high and some low. That makes it unusual. Many cultures say that humans were shaped from clay, from the Greek Prometheus to the Babylonian creation stories, but few sort people by rank at the moment of making. In Ying Shao's Han world, an empire run by an elite of officials and great families, a story in which nobility was moulded by a goddess's own hands, and the common people were splashed from a string, said something useful about the natural order. Ying Shao himself presents it as what \"is popularly said,\" not as doctrine.\n\nThe record marks the modern idea of Nüwa as a non-human, serpent-bodied creator as unresolved interpretation, with no measurable data. Read literally, as two production methods, careful handwork for a few and a faster mass process for the many, the passage begins to sound technical. Nothing in the text supports that reading. It works as a moral and social story about rank, told by and for people who sat near the top.\n\n## What remains\n\nStill, the figure at the centre stays remarkable. Across the oldest Chinese sources she is a maker and a repairer: she shapes the first people, she patches the broken sky, she sets the world back on its legs when the gods' own war has knocked it down. In her pictures she holds the compasses that draw true circles. The texts that preserve her are scattered and late, quoted and requoted. The image survives anyway.\n\nPicture the goddess as the Han tomb painters saw her, serpent-tailed beside her brother, the moon held up in one hand and the compasses in the other, above a world she had once patched together with molten stones of five colours, and below her two kinds of people, those shaped by hand from yellow earth and those flung from a cord dragged through the mud.","qs":["Nüwa makes nobles by hand and commoners with a cord. Was this myth recording an idea of how we were made, or just justifying who rules?","The passage survives only as a quotation in a later book. How much should we trust a story we cannot find in its own source?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/Ping_Sien_Si_-_065_Nu_Wa_Niang_Niang_%2816140351273%29.jpg/1280px-Ping_Sien_Si_-_065_Nu_Wa_Niang_Niang_%2816140351273%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ping_Sien_Si_-_065_Nu_Wa_Niang_Niang_(16140351273).jpg","title":"Ping Sien Si - 065 Nu Wa Niang Niang (16140351273).jpg","lic":"CC BY 2.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0","by":"Photo Dharma from Penang, Malaysia","cap":"065 Nu Wa Niang Niang, Investiture of the Gods at Ping Sien Si, Pasir Panjang, Perak, Malaysia Photograph from the Ping Sien Si Temple in Perak, Malaysia taken ","alt":"065 Nu Wa Niang Niang, Investiture of the Gods at Ping Sien Si, Pasir Panjang, Perak, Malaysia Photograph from the Ping Sien Si Temple in Perak, Malaysia taken"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Anonymous-Fuxi_and_N%C3%BCwa.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anonymous-Fuxi_and_N%C3%BCwa.jpg","title":"Anonymous-Fuxi and Nüwa.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"anonymous","cap":"","alt":"Nüwa makes humans from yellow earth (Fengsu Tongyi): Anonymous-Fuxi and Nüwa"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/77/Fuxi_and_Nvwa%2C_China%2C_collected_from_Chongzhou_City%2C_Sichuan%2C_Eastern_Han_dynasty%2C_25-220_AD%2C_tomb_tile_-_Sichuan_Provincial_Museum_-_Chengdu%2C_China_-_DSC04803.jpg/1280px-thumbnail.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fuxi_and_Nvwa,_China,_collected_from_Chongzhou_City,_Sichuan,_Eastern_Han_dynasty,_25-220_AD,_tomb_tile_-_Sichuan_Provincial_Museum_-_Chengdu,_China_-_DSC04803.jpg","title":"Fuxi and Nvwa, China, collected from Chongzhou City, Sichuan, Eastern Han dynasty, 25-220 AD, tomb tile - Sichuan Provincial Museum - Chengdu, China - DSC04803.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Daderot","cap":"Exhibit in the Sichuan Provincial Museum (四川省博物院), also known as the Sichuan Museum, 251 Huanhua S Road, Chengdu, Sichuan, China. Photography was permitted in t","alt":"Exhibit in the Sichuan Provincial Museum, also known as the Sichuan Museum, 251 Huanhua S Road, Chengdu, Sichuan, China. Photography was permitted in t"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/66/Fuxi_and_Nvwa_with_tower_and_twin_dragons%2C_China%2C_unearthed_from_a_cliff_tomb%2C_Alkali_factory%2C_Pengshan%2C_Eastern_Han_dynasty%2C_25-220_AD%2C_tomb_tile_-_Sichuan_Provincial_Museum_-_Chengdu%2C_China_-_DSC04841.jpg/1280px-thumbnail.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fuxi_and_Nvwa_with_tower_and_twin_dragons,_China,_unearthed_from_a_cliff_tomb,_Alkali_factory,_Pengshan,_Eastern_Han_dynasty,_25-220_AD,_tomb_tile_-_Sichuan_Provincial_Museum_-_Chengdu,_China_-_DSC04841.jpg","title":"Fuxi and Nvwa with tower and twin dragons, China, unearthed from a cliff tomb, Alkali factory, Pengshan, Eastern Han dynasty, 25-220 AD, tomb tile - Sichuan Provincial Museum - Chengdu, China - DSC04841.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Daderot","cap":"Exhibit in the Sichuan Provincial Museum (四川省博物院), also known as the Sichuan Museum, 251 Huanhua S Road, Chengdu, Sichuan, China. Photography was permitted in t","alt":"Exhibit in the Sichuan Provincial Museum, also known as the Sichuan Museum, 251 Huanhua S Road, Chengdu, Sichuan, China. Photography was permitted in t"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Mawangdui_silk_banner_from_tomb_no1.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mawangdui_silk_banner_from_tomb_no1.jpg","title":"Mawangdui silk banner from tomb no1.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"anonymous","cap":"The painting on silk depicts the heaven (upper part), the human realm (middle part), and the netherworld (bottom part). Heaven: Nüwa, depicted as a human with a"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"Ying Shao, c.195 CE","h":"Date","s":[311]},{"v":"983 CE","h":"medieval quotations (Taiping Yulan 983 CE)","s":[311]},{"v":"Classical Chinese","h":"Language","s":[311]}],"hs":{"311":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%BCwa"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/TX036.webp","w":1280,"h":2313,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/Ping_Sien_Si_-_065_Nu_Wa_Niang_Niang_%2816140351273%29.jpg/1280px-Ping_Sien_Si_-_065_Nu_Wa_Niang_Niang_%2816140351273%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}