The Five-Coloured Stones

Nuwa's second great deed is the repair of a broken cosmos. When one of the pillars supporting the sky is toppled, in the linked myths, through the rampage of the water god Gonggong, who smashes Mount Buzhou, the heavens crack, fire and flood pour through, and the world is thrown into ruin. Nuwa sets it right: she smelts stones of five colours to patch the torn sky, cuts the legs from a giant turtle to prop up its four corners, dams the flooding waters with the ashes of burnt reeds, and drives off the beasts that prey on the people. Her mending of the sky is one of the most beloved images in Chinese myth, a picture of the maternal power that not only creates the world but restores it when it is broken. She is often paired with Fuxi, another serpent-bodied culture-hero, as sister and consort or as a complementary couple, the two shown with their serpent tails intertwined and holding the compass and the set-square, the instruments of cosmic order. Nuwa is thus both the mother of humankind and the goddess who keeps the very frame of the world from falling apart.