Xihe is a solar goddess of ancient Chinese myth, the mother of the ten suns. In the old cosmology the sky held not one sun but ten, and these suns took the form of three-legged crows that roosted in the branches of a vast mulberry tree, the Fusang, which grew in a hot valley of the far eastern sea. Xihe is their mother, and each day, the tradition tells, she would bathe one of her sun-children in the eastern waters and set it in the sky to make its journey, so that the ten suns took their turns, one each day, in orderly succession. In some accounts she is also the driver of the sun's chariot, conducting it across the heavens.
The myth turns dramatic in the famous story of the archer Yi: on one occasion all ten suns rose into the sky together, and their combined heat scorched the earth, withered the crops and threatened to destroy every living thing. To save the world the great archer Yi shot down nine of the ten crow-suns with his bow, leaving the single sun that lights the sky today. Xihe belongs to the earliest layers of Chinese mythology, preserved in ancient texts such as the Classic of Mountains and Seas and the poems of the Chuci, and she stands as one of the archaic personifications of the sun, the mother who tends and launches the daily light, and whose too-numerous children once had to be thinned to make the world habitable.