Nuwa: The Goddess Who Mended the Sky and Made Humankind

Who is Nuwa?

Nuwa is the mother goddess of Chinese mythology: the woman with a snake's tail who mended the sky when it broke and shaped the first human beings out of yellow earth. Her name is written with two characters, nu, meaning woman, and wa, a character used for almost nothing except her name. She is one of the oldest named gods in China. She appears in poetry of the Warring States period, in the Shan Hai Jing and in Han dynasty books of the 2nd century BCE, long before the giant Pangu enters the written record.

Nuwa is not a single story but a cluster of them, written down in different books over more than a thousand years. In one she repairs a ruined world. In another she makes people by hand and then with a rope. In a third she and her brother marry on a mountain to start the human race again. China's first dictionary, compiled by Xu Shen around 100 CE, gives her character this definition:

The phrase "transformed the ten thousand things" is the key to her. Nuwa is less a ruler of heaven than a maker: someone who shapes, changes and repairs the world with her own hands.

Nuwa in the oldest texts

The earliest mention of Nuwa is a question. Heavenly Questions, a long poem in the Songs of Chu traditionally credited to the poet Qu Yuan of the 4th century BCE, asks well over a hundred riddles about the sky, the earth and the past. One of them is about her body:

The riddle only works if the listener already knows that Nuwa made other bodies. If she shaped everyone else, who shaped her? So by the time this poem was written, the idea of Nuwa as a maker of bodies was already familiar.

The Shan Hai Jing, the Classic of Mountains and Seas, has a stranger trace of her. In the Great Wilderness of the West it lists a group of ten gods who were born from Nuwa's guts:

The book does not explain how her guts came to be gods, and the line suggests that Nuwa had died or been transformed by the time it was written. Guo Pu, who wrote the standard commentary on the Shan Hai Jing in the 4th century CE, explains that Nuwa was a goddess of ancient times who ruled as an emperor, had a human face and a snake's body, and changed seventy times in a single day. You can explore the rest of this book's gods and monsters in our Shan Hai Jing bestiary.

How Nuwa mended the sky

The story that made Nuwa famous is the repair of the sky. It is told in the Huainanzi, a book of philosophy and lore compiled at the court of Liu An, king of Huainan, in the 2nd century BCE. In the chapter Surveying Obscurities, the world has fallen apart. The four pillars that held up the sky have collapsed, the land of the nine provinces has cracked, fires burn without stopping, floods spread without ebbing, and wild beasts and birds of prey eat the people. Then Nuwa sets to work:

Each of her four acts answers one of the disasters. The colored stones close the holes in the sky. The turtle's legs replace the broken pillars at the four corners of the earth. Killing the black dragon, a creature of water, ends the flood at its source, and the reed ashes soak up what is left. Ji, or Jizhou, was the central province of ancient China, so saving it means saving the heart of the world.

The same chapter then praises her achievement in grand terms: her merit reached up to the ninth heaven and down to the yellow springs under the earth. It says she rode a chariot of thunder drawn by Yinglong, the winged dragon of rain, with green horned dragons running alongside. After her work was done, she did not boast of it but withdrew and kept her virtue hidden.

Later readers found many meanings in the five-colored stones. Some linked them to the five elements; some to the colors of clouds at sunrise and sunset, which looked like the patches she had left. The novel Dream of the Red Chamber begins with a single stone that was left over when Nuwa finished the repair, and the whole story grows from it.

Why the sky broke: Gonggong and Mount Buzhou

The Huainanzi does not say why the sky collapsed. A famous answer comes from the water god Gonggong, who lost a fight for the throne and in his fury rammed his head into Mount Buzhou, one of the pillars of the sky. But the Liezi, an early text that tells both stories side by side, puts them in the opposite order from the version most people know. In this Daoist book, whose surviving text is usually dated to around the 4th century CE, Nuwa first repairs a world that was imperfect from the start, and only afterward does Gonggong break the pillar:

This explains two things every Chinese reader could see. The stars appear to wheel toward the northwest, and the great rivers of China run toward the southeast into the sea. In later retellings, including the opening chapter of the Ming novel Investiture of the Gods, the order is simplified: Gonggong breaks the mountain, the sky tears, and Nuwa mends it. That is the version most people know today.

Nuwa creates humans from clay

The story of Nuwa making people comes from the Fengsu Tongyi, a book on customs and popular beliefs written by Ying Shao at the end of the Han dynasty, around 200 CE. The part about Nuwa is lost from the surviving text of that book. It survives because the Taiping Yulan, a huge encyclopedia compiled for the Song emperor in the late 10th century, quoted it in Book 78:

The quotation ends with an explanation of social rank. The rich and noble, it says, are the people of yellow earth, shaped one by one by her hands; the poor and ordinary are the rope people, flung off in drops. The editions of the encyclopedia differ slightly in the wording of this last line, but the meaning is the same.

Notice how Ying Shao introduces the story: "people say". He is recording a folk belief of his own time, not quoting an ancient classic. That is typical of Nuwa. Her stories survive mostly as popular sayings and scattered quotations, not as one sacred text.

Some later retellings add that she made the animals first, one on each of the first days of the new year, and made people on the seventh day. That is why, in some regions, the seventh day of the lunar new year is called Renri, "the day of humans", and is treated as everyone's shared birthday. This version is later folk tradition, not part of the early sources.

Nuwa and Fuxi: snake-tailed siblings and spouses

In art, Nuwa almost never appears alone. Han dynasty tomb carvings and later silk paintings from the tombs of Turfan in the far west show her with Fuxi, the culture hero who drew the eight trigrams. Both have human heads and upper bodies, and their snake tails twist around each other below the waist. Often one holds a carpenter's square and the other a compass, the tools for drawing squares and circles, and so for measuring earth and sky. Sometimes the sun and moon float beside them.

Written texts make them a pair as well. By the 3rd century CE, a history of the early rulers called the Diwang Shiji described Nuwa as having the same clan name as Fuxi and a snake's body with a human head, and counted her among the first sovereigns who ruled after him.

The most striking version is a flood myth recorded in the Duyi Zhi, a Tang dynasty book of strange stories. Here Nuwa and her brother are the only two people alive at the beginning of the world, on Mount Kunlun:

The text ends by saying that this is why brides in its own day held a fan in front of their faces at a wedding. Note that the brother is not named in this passage; later tradition identifies him with Fuxi. Similar stories of a brother and sister who survive a great flood and marry to repopulate the earth are told among many peoples of southern China, and many scholars think the written versions draw on that oral tradition. For more on the sacred mountain where this marriage takes place, see our entry on Kunlun.

Goddess of marriage, music and the first sovereigns

Because she made the first people and, in some stories, the first marriage, Nuwa was also worshipped as a goddess of matchmaking and childbirth. Later tradition calls her the High Matchmaker, the deity to whom people prayed for children.

She was also credited with inventing music. The Taiping Yulan collects an old note from the Shiben, a lost book on the origins of things, saying that Nuwa made the shenghuang, the reed pipe with a vibrating reed that is the ancestor of the sheng mouth organ still played today.

Ancient lists of the Three Sovereigns, the first rulers of China, did not agree with each other. Fuxi and Shennong appear in most lists, and the third place went to different figures in different books. Some lists put Nuwa in it, which made her one of the very few women counted among the founding rulers of Chinese history.

Her traditional roles, side by side:

• Repairer of the world: she patched the sky and propped up its four corners.
• Maker of people: she shaped humans from yellow earth.
• First bride: in the Kunlun story she marries her brother to restart the human race.
• Patron of marriage and children: she was prayed to as the High Matchmaker.
• Inventor of the reed pipe: the Shiben credits her with the shenghuang.

Nuwa in later stories and worship

Nuwa never became a goddess at the top of a heavenly government, as the Jade Emperor did. Instead she remained a revered ancestor, worshipped in her own temples and in popular festivals. Temples to Nuwa, sometimes called the Mother Empress, still stand in parts of northern China, and in some regions a festival in the first lunar month, called the day of piercing the sky, remembers her repair with flat cakes that "patch" the sky.

In the Ming novel Investiture of the Gods she plays a decisive part at the start. When the last Shang king writes a disrespectful poem on the wall of her temple, she sends three demon spirits to bring his dynasty down. One of them is a fox spirit, later revealed in the novel as a nine-tailed fox, who takes over the body of the king's consort Daji. At the end of the novel Nuwa herself helps capture the three spirits.

Today Nuwa appears in films, television dramas, novels and games, usually as a gentle and powerful mother figure. Her five-colored stones, her snake tail and her clay people remain the details that make her recognizable.

Many of the gods and monsters of her world appear in our free browser game Beasts of Shanhai. For the giant who split heaven from earth, read our entry on Pangu, and for an overview of the whole pantheon see Chinese gods.