Chinese Mythology A to Z

193 Pages·2009·8.99 MB·English

by  Jeremy Roberts

Chinese
Mythology
A to Z
second edition
MMYYTTHHOOLLOOGGYY AA TTOO ZZ
African Mythology A to Z
Celtic Mythology A to Z
Chinese Mythology A to Z
Egyptian Mythology A to Z
Japanese Mythology A to Z
Greek and Roman Mythology A to Z
Native American Mythology A to Z
Norse Mythology A to Z
South and Meso-American Mythology A to Z
MMYYTTHHOOLLOOGGYY AA TTOO ZZ
Chinese
Mythology
A to Z
second edition
8
Jeremy Roberts
[
Chinese Mythology A to Z, Second Edition
Copyright © 2010 by Jim DeFelice
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or
retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information contact:
Chelsea House
An imprint of Infobase Publishing
132 West 31st Street
New York NY 10001
ISBN-13: 978-1-60413-436-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Roberts, Jeremy, 1956–
Chinese mythology, A to Z / Jeremy Roberts. — 2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60413-436-0 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4381-2799-6 (e-book)
1. Mythology, Chinese—Juvenile literature. I. Title.
BL1825.R575 2009
299.5'111303—dc22 2009010176
Chelsea House books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for
businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department
in New York at [phone] or [phone].
You can find Chelsea House on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com
Text design by Lina Farinella
Cover design by Alicia Post
Maps by Patricia Meschino
Printed in the United States of America
Bang EJB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Contents
8
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction ix
Map of China xxi
A-to-Z Entries 1
Important Gods and Mythic Figures 156
Selected Bibliography 160
Index 161
Acknowledgments
8
I wish to thank my wife, Debra Scacciaferro, for her help in researching and
preparing this book.
Also I would like to thank Dorothy Cummings; Jeff Soloway; Miranda Ganzer;
and everyone else at Facts On File and Chelsea House who helped prepare this
volume.
vii
Introduction
8
China covers nearly 4 billion square miles in Asia, roughly 14 percent of the
world’s landmass. It has grasslands and deserts, a long coastline, and some of the
highest mountains in the world. Its rich river valleys have hosted civilizations for
thousands and thousands of years. When Rome was still young, China’s ancestors
were wrestling with the problems of governing an empire as populous and diverse
as any ever known. When Europe was struggling to recover from the Dark Ages,
China was outfitting merchant vessels to sail across the oceans.
So it is not surprising that China has a long history, rich with events and
achievements. This long history has produced a tapestry of interwoven myths,
religious stories, legends, and folk beliefs, which have all changed over time. Even
today, as the stories are told to a new generation, the tellers transform them in the
very process of preserving them—one more reminder that myths and mythmaking
are a vital part of the human experience.
First civilizations
One of humankind’s oldest ancestors, Homo erectus, was discovered in China during
the early part of the 20th century. Named “Peking man” or “Beijing man” in honor
of the city near where the remains were found, this forerunner of present-day
Homo sapiens roamed China between 400,000 and 200,000 years ago. (Peking is an
old way of saying Beijing, the capital city of China.)
Archaeologists learned a great deal from digging up artifacts in what is now
called the Peking Man World Heritage Site in the village of Zhoukoudian. Peking
man knew how to build and control fire to cook food and warm caves. These
hominids made tools from bone and stone and were able to communicate well
enough to work together in groups to hunt larger animals for food.
Peking man’s offspring eventually turned from hunting to farming as a way
of life. The Neolithic Age—sometimes called the end of the Stone Age—started
in China perhaps 5,000 years ago. Archaeological sites along the Yellow River
(Huang Ho in Chinese) show that the early Chinese in this area had thriving
industries of pottery, cloth making, and farming.
Neolithic Chinese were clearly curious and inventive. They built houses of mud
and straw and pounded the dirt to make hearths to build their fires. They learned
to grow and store such crops as soy, millet, and rice for the winter. Somehow, they
discovered that the cocoons of silkworms could be boiled to produce raw silk and
they invented methods of spinning the silk into thread, weaving the thread into
cloth, and sewing the cloth into garments. They experimented with clay, molding
the material into bowls and pots and then baking the finished pieces in a very hot
fire to create pottery utensils to store food, water, and herbs. They invented symbols
ix
x  Greek and Roman Mythology A to Z
to keep records, which archaeologists found on the remains of pottery, and which
they think indicated the particular clan or group of families who made the piece.
Archaeological evidence left behind by three such clans have given scholars
a good picture of Neolithic life. The Yangshao clan was named after a village in
the mountainous, northern Henan Province, which archaeologists excavated in
1921. A second branch of this clan, the Majiayao, was discovered in 1929 in Gansu
Province near Tibet, at the northernmost tip of the Yellow River. The Longshan
(or Lungshan) clan, from a slightly later period, lived in the flat grasslands of
eastern China.
A pottery jar from the late Neolithic period of China (3300–2200 b.c.), painted with the traditional colors of
the Yangshao clan. (Photo by Editor at Large/Used under a Creative Commons license)
IInnttrroodduuccttiioonn   xxii
The Yangshao and Majiayao clans formed their pottery by hand, then painted
it with colorful geometric designs in colors of black, orange, and yellow. They
clustered their individual houses together to form villages, built low walls of earth
to protect their land, and raised pigs and domesticated dogs.
The Longshan clan’s pottery was more refined than the Yangshao’s. Shaped on
a potter’s wheel into a thin-walled vessel, it was fired and polished to produce a dis-
tinctive smooth black finish with little or no decoration. While the Longshan also
clustered their homes together in villages, they built large fortresses surrounded by
high walls made of layers of earth pressed together by a wooden frame to achieve
a rock-like hardness. In addition to domesticating the pig and the dog, they raised
sheep and used oxen to help farm their fields.
In order to do all these things, Neolithic people had to invent ways to pass
along complicated information about such industries as silk making or pottery to
each new generation. One of those ways may have been to tell stories about gods
or rulers who taught humans how to weave or how to divert water to flood a rice
field.
Because survival depended on the whims of nature, many ancient myths also
taught people how to worship the gods who controlled everything from rain
(dragons) and storms (Lei Gong) to the harvest of millet (Lord of the Granary).
Although these early myths aren’t literally true, some do provide important clues
to the country’s actual history.
For instance, popular Chinese histories have traced the names of its rulers as
far back as the Three Sovereigns, Fu Xi (29th century b.c.), Shen Nong (28th
century b.c.) and Huang Di (27th century b.c.), along with the two Sage Kings,
Emperor Yao and Emperor Shun (both 23rd century b.c.), who appointed a loyal
political minister and engineer named Yu of Xia to rule after them. All of the
sovereigns and sages appointed someone to take over as ruler based on his skills
and knowledge. But when Yu died, according to the stories, the people of the Xia
kingdom ignored the official Yu had chosen to succeed him and declared that Yu’s
son should rule instead. That was the beginning of China’s first dynasty, known
as the Xia dynasty, in 221 b.c. (The word dynasty refers to the ruler of a country
and his or her successors, which were generally chosen from the ruler’s children;
the first-born son, for example. Archaeologists and historians break up much of
China’s history according to these different families of rulers.)
Because written records of Chinese life and government only go back as far
as the 8th century b.c., most historians once believed that the Three Sovereigns,
two Sage Kings, and the Xia and Shang dynasties were simply made-up stories or
legends. But in 1959, archaeologists excavated a site at Erlitous in the city of Yanshi
that dated back to the Chinese Bronze Age (between 2100 to 1800 b.c.). Evidence
from the site suggested that the inhabitants were probably direct descendants of
the Neolithic Longshan clan and the ancestors of the later Shang dynasty.
As more archaeological evidence is uncovered, experts are beginning to believe
that the Xia and Shang dynasties were probably real and might have co-existed
with each other and the later Zhou dynasty at a certain point in their histories.
the Xia
“Tia ¯ n Xia” translates roughly as “land under Heaven” or “the world.” (One transla-
tion of tia ¯ n means sky or heaven, while xia means “under.”) The ancient Chinese
referred to their country or empire as Tia ¯ n Xia, and many popular histories use the
word Xia to refer to a prehistoric period or Golden Age.