Nüwa: The Goddess Who Made Humans and Repaired the Sky

The Chinese goddess who molded humans from yellow earth and repaired a broken sky with molten stones of five colors.

Nüwa is one of the oldest figures in Chinese mythology: a creator goddess who shaped the first humans from yellow earth and repaired a broken sky with melted stones of five colors.

Nüwa is one of the oldest figures in Chinese mythology, a creator goddess often shown in Han dynasty art with a human upper body and a serpent's tail, entwined with her partner Fuxi. They hold a compass and a carpenter's square, tools for measuring and ordering the world. In some traditions she is Fuxi's sister as well as his wife.

Two stories dominate. In the Fengsu Tongyi of Ying Shao (c. 195 CE), Nüwa makes the first humans by shaping them from yellow earth. The work is slow, so she dips a cord in mud and swings it, and every drop becomes a person. The handmade people become the rich and noble, the cord-made people the poor and common.

The second is in the Huainanzi (c. 139 BCE). In a distant age the four pillars holding up the sky collapsed and the earth split. Fires raged and floods would not stop, and beasts preyed on people. Nüwa melted stones of five colors to patch the sky, cut the legs off a giant turtle to set up as new pillars, killed a black dragon, and piled up reed ashes to stop the waters. Later writers connect the broken pillars with the god Gonggong smashing Mount Buzhou.

Scholars see Nüwa as a very old mother goddess whose role shrank as Chinese myth was organized around male culture heroes. People interested in ancient catastrophes point to the repair story as a memory of a sky-and-flood disaster followed by a deliberate, technical fix, and to the two grades of humans as an ancient account of engineered people.