Chinese Mythology

Chinese myth reaches us mostly through the hands of people who wanted it to be history. Sima Qian dates the reigns of figures other traditions would leave timeless; the sage-kings Yao, Shun and Yu are given regnal years. Reading it means constantly asking what has been euhemerised — turned from a god into an ancestor with a birthdate.

The sources are scattered rather than canonical. The Shanhaijing, the Huainanzi, the Chuci, fragments in philosophical texts, and much later vernacular novels that fixed in the popular imagination what no classical text ever settled. Pangu separates heaven from earth and his body becomes the world; Nüwa repairs the sky with smelted stone and makes people out of loess; Yu the Great controls the flood not by surviving it but by engineering.

That last point is characteristic. The heroic act is frequently public works.