Gonggong: The Water God Who Broke a Pillar of Heaven

A red-haired serpent water god who rammed a pillar of heaven, tilting the sky to the northwest and the land to the southeast.

Gonggong is a destructive water god in Chinese myth. In the Huainanzi he butts Mount Buzhou, a pillar of the sky, so heaven tilts northwest and the earth sinks southeast.

Gonggong is a destructive water god in Chinese mythology, usually described with a human head, red hair and the body of a serpent. He is linked with floods and chaos, and in many stories he works with his nine-headed minister Xiangliu, whose poison fouls the land. He appears in several early texts, including the Shan Hai Jing and the Huainanzi.

His most famous act comes from the Huainanzi, chapter 3. Gonggong fought the ruler Zhuanxu for the right to be emperor. In his rage he butted his head against Mount Buzhou, one of the pillars that held up the sky. The pillar broke and the cords holding the earth snapped. Heaven tilted toward the northwest, so the sun, moon and stars moved in that direction, and the earth sank in the southeast, so water and silt flowed there.

The story is an explanation of real observations. In China, the celestial pole sits well above the northern horizon and the stars wheel around it, and the country's great rivers flow east and southeast to the sea. Later tradition merged Gonggong's damage with Nüwa's repair of the sky. In other texts he causes the great flood that the heroes Gun and Yu must control.

Scholars see him as one of several figures of cosmic disorder defeated by rulers in early Chinese myth. Catastrophe-minded readers note that his story joins a flood, a broken sky and a shift in the heavens into one event, the kind of sequence many cultures describe. His defeat is usually credited to rulers who restore order, a recurring pattern in Chinese political myth.