Xihe

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.

Confusingly but interestingly, the name Xihe appears in Chinese tradition in two rather different guises that scholars have long debated the relationship between. Alongside the mythological mother of the ten sun-crows described in works like the Classic of Mountains and Seas, the ancient Book of Documents, one of the oldest strata of Chinese historical and political writing, describes Xi and He as the surnames, or possibly the combined title, of officials appointed by the legendary sage-king Yao to observe the heavens, track the movements of the sun, moon and stars, and regulate the calendar so that agricultural and ritual life could be properly timed.

Some scholars have argued that this bureaucratic Xi-He tradition and the mythological solar mother Xihe share a common origin, perhaps an ancient solar-observation cult later split by Chinese tradition into a divine mother-figure on one hand and a rationalized, historicized pair of court astronomers on the other, part of a broader Chinese tendency, noted also in figures like Zhuanxu and the sage-emperors, to convert older mythic material into the seemingly historical record of a golden administrative age. Other specialists caution that the resemblance may be no more than a shared name applied to unrelated traditions, since the philological evidence connecting a goddess who bathes sun-crows in the eastern sea to a pair or office of terrestrial calendar-officials is suggestive rather than conclusive. Either way, the coexistence of a mythological Xihe and an official Xihe within the same textual tradition captures something distinctive about early Chinese thought, its comfort with letting cosmic myth and dynastic administrative legend sit side by side, without requiring a single tidy resolution of which came first.