Pangu: The Giant Who Separated Heaven and Earth

Who is Pangu?

Pangu is the giant at the start of the Chinese creation myth. In the best-known version, the universe begins as a dark, shapeless mass like an egg. Pangu is born inside it. When the egg opens, the light, clear part rises to become the sky and the heavy, murky part sinks to become the earth. Pangu stands between them and grows taller every day, pushing them apart, until after eighteen thousand years they reach their present distance. When he dies, his body turns into the world: his breath becomes the wind, his voice the thunder, his eyes the sun and moon, his blood the rivers.

This makes Pangu the first being in Chinese myth. Later histories and almanacs put him at the head of all time, before the Three Sovereigns and the sage kings. But there is a twist that most short retellings leave out: Pangu is one of the last major figures of Chinese myth to appear in writing. The goddess Nuwa, who in later chronologies comes long after him, is attested many centuries earlier.

When does Pangu first appear?

Pangu first appears in the 3rd century CE, in the Three Kingdoms period, in the work of Xu Zheng, an official of the southern kingdom of Wu. This is late. By then Chinese writing was more than a thousand years old, and the classics of Confucianism and Daoism had long been written.

The older books are silent about him. The Book of Changes, the Classic of Poetry, the Shan Hai Jing, the Huainanzi and the Records of the Grand Historian, which begins with the Yellow Emperor, never mention Pangu. Nuwa, by contrast, appears in the Songs of Chu in the Warring States period and in the Huainanzi in the 2nd century BCE. So in the written record, the mother goddess is roughly five hundred years older than the giant who supposedly came before her.

Even Xu Zheng's books do not survive. His Sanwu Liji, the "Record of the Three and Five", is lost, and so is the Wuyun Linian Ji usually credited to him. What remains are quotations in later collections:

• The Yiwen Leiju, an encyclopedia compiled in 624 CE under the Tang dynasty, quotes the Sanwu Liji on the cosmic egg in its first book, on heaven.
• The Shuyi Ji, a book of marvels credited to Ren Fang of the Liang dynasty in the early 6th century, collects several versions of Pangu's death and body.
• The Yi Shi, a history of antiquity compiled by the Qing scholar Ma Su in the 17th century, quotes the Wuyun Linian Ji on Pangu's body becoming the world.

Ma Su himself did not believe it. In his own note on these passages he wrote that the name of Pangu came from miscellaneous books full of vague and absurd talk, and that historians who treated Pangu as the first ruler were no different from people recounting a dream. That doubt matters for readers today: the Pangu story is a real and old part of Chinese tradition, but it is not one of its oldest layers.

The cosmic egg

The oldest surviving Pangu passage begins with chaos shaped like a hen's egg. The word used for that original blur is hundun, the same chaos that the philosopher Zhuangzi turned into a faceless emperor and that the Shan Hai Jing describes as a faceless god on Mount Tian (see our page on Hundun). Out of it, light and heavy separate:

Two features are typical of Chinese thinking about the cosmos. First, heaven and earth are not built by a god from outside. They separate by their own nature, the light rising and the heavy sinking, as yin and yang divide. Pangu is inside the process, not its designer. Second, the numbers are exact and enormous: eighteen thousand years is a recurring unit in early Chinese chronologies of the first rulers.

How Pangu pushed heaven and earth apart

The same quotation goes on to describe how the gap between sky and earth grew. Pangu does not lift the sky in one heroic act. He grows a little every day, and the world grows with him:

A zhang was a unit of length of a little under two and a half meters at the time. The passage ends with a calculation built on the odd numbers one, three, five, seven and nine, and concludes that heaven is ninety thousand li above the earth. A li is a traditional unit of distance of a little under half a kilometer.

In this oldest version Pangu has no axe and no chisel. The popular image of a bearded giant swinging an axe to crack the egg open belongs to later art and storytelling. It is now the most common way Pangu is drawn, but the early sources simply say he grew.

Pangu's body becomes the world

The second famous part of the myth tells what happened when Pangu died. It survives in a passage that the Yi Shi quotes from the Wuyun Linian Ji, the "Chronicle of the Five Cycles". It is one of the most detailed lists of its kind in any mythology:

The last line is the one retellings often soften. In this version human beings are not Pangu's children or his finest work. They are the small creatures that lived on his body, turned into people by the wind. It is a very different picture from the story of Nuwa carefully shaping people out of yellow earth.

The Five Great Mountains, the Wuyue, are the five sacred peaks of China: Tai in the east, Heng in the south, Hua in the west, Heng in the north and Song in the center. Emperors offered sacrifices at them, and the Pangu myth explains them as parts of a single giant body.

Other versions: tears, moods and a tomb

Pangu's story never had one fixed form. The Shuyi Ji, a book of marvels credited to Ren Fang of the Liang dynasty, opens with a short version and then lists the different ways people told it. Qing dynasty scholars doubted that Ren Fang wrote the book in its present form, but its Pangu passage is old and much quoted:

The book goes on to record further variants, each attributed to a different group of storytellers:

The claim about the Qin and Han dynasties cannot be checked, since no Qin or Han text names Pangu. But the last variant is striking: in the lands of Wu and Chu in the south, Pangu was a couple, not a single giant. The Shuyi Ji also says there was a tomb of Pangu in Nanhai, in the far south, stretching more than three hundred li, and a temple to him in Guilin where people still made offerings. Both places are in the south, the same region where Xu Zheng's kingdom of Wu lay.

Where did the Pangu myth come from?

Because Pangu appears so late and so suddenly, scholars have long asked where his story came from. No answer is certain, and the main ideas are best treated as theories:

• A southern origin. Both the earliest author and the earliest tomb and temple are in the south, and some scholars link Pangu to the creation stories of peoples of southern China, including the ancestral dog Panhu of the Yao and She peoples, whose name sounds similar.
• Outside influence. The idea of a primordial giant whose body becomes the world is also found in India, in the hymn of the cosmic man Purusha, and in Norse myth, where the world is made from the giant Ymir. Some scholars think the idea reached China along trade routes, possibly with Buddhism; others think similar myths arose independently.
• Native ideas in a new form. The cosmic egg, the splitting of yin and yang and the image of chaos as hundun were all part of Chinese thought before Pangu. On this view, Xu Zheng gave these older ideas a body and a name.

These theories are not exclusive. What is clear from the sources is that Pangu was absent from the classics, appears first in southern writing of the 3rd century, and then spread until he became the standard beginning of Chinese history in popular books.

Pangu in Daoism and later tradition

Once Pangu existed, later writers fitted him into larger systems. Some Daoist texts made him a god of the highest rank. A text known as the Record of the True Immortals of the Primordial, traditionally credited to Ge Hong but probably later, describes the palace of the Jade Capital above the highest heaven as ruled by "Pangu the Perfected One, the Primordial Heavenly King". The Daoist encyclopedia Yunji Qiqian, compiled in the Song dynasty, says that Pangu ruled by the Way for many thousands of years, rose to heaven by way of Mount Kunlun and received that title there.

Popular history books, almanacs and novels made Pangu the first name in the list of Chinese rulers. Journey to the West opens with a poem that begins with Pangu breaking through the primordial chaos, before the story turns to the stone egg from which Sun Wukong is born. The Jade Emperor and the other gods of the heavenly court come later in this sequence.

Pangu is still honored today in temples in several parts of China, and some communities hold festivals in his name. In paintings and statues he is usually shown as a giant with a beard, dressed in leaves, holding an axe or a chisel, sometimes with the sun in one hand and the moon in the other.

Pangu, Nuwa and the order of creation

In the later standard order of Chinese myth, Pangu comes first and separates heaven and earth. After him come the Heavenly, Earthly and Human Sovereigns, who ruled for tens of thousands of years, and then the culture heroes Fuxi and Nuwa, who repair the world, create people and teach them to live in families. That neat sequence was assembled by later writers out of sources that were written in almost the reverse order.

There are also parallels within older myth. The Shan Hai Jing describes Zhulong, the Torch Dragon of the far north, a god with a human face and the body of a snake whose opening eyes make day and whose closing eyes make night, and whose breath makes winter and summer. Some scholars have seen in Zhulong an older figure of the same kind as Pangu, a cosmic body whose eyes control light. Its full entry is in our Shan Hai Jing bestiary.

The gods and monsters of this ancient world appear in our free browser game Beasts of Shanhai. For the goddess who patched the sky, read our entry on Nuwa, and for the whole pantheon see Chinese gods.