Where were the Chinese ancestors from? Legend has it that a long long time ago, Heaven and Earth were a chaotic gathering of air masses, just like an egg. A man named Pangu axed the Heaven off from the Earth with a huge axe. Standing right in between the Heaven and the Earth, hands holding out the sky, feet stamping on the ground, he grew taller and taller, hence the sky became higher and higher while the ground became lower and lower. This lasted for 18 000 years. As a result, the Heaven and the Earth were finally driven away from each other to a vast distance of 90 000 li and Pangu became a giant with his head holding up the heaven and his feet stamping on the ground. After his death, his eyes became the Sun and the Moon, his four limbs, the mountains, blood, rivers, lakes and seas, his sinews, the field, his arteries, the roads and ways, his hairs and moustaches, the stars in the sky, his skin and body hairs, flowers, grass and woods, his teeth and bones, the shining metals, hard stones, glittering pearls and pre- cious stones, his sweats, the dews. What is miraculous is that many of the small insects on his body became human beings. This is the legend of Pangu creating the new Heaven and the Earth. This myth has been passed on generation after generation until our time in China.
Besides Pangu’s m y t h , many more myths were created by our Chinese ancestors by their imagination. For instance, the legend of Youchaoshi who taught people how to make houses on the branches of trees; Suirenshi who taught people how to make fire with wood out of chiseling; Fuxishi who taught people to hunt and invented Eight Trigrams (eight combinations of three whole or broken lines formerly used in divination); Shennongshi who grew foods and looked for medicine herbs by tasting more than a hundred kinds of herbs and grasses. All of them are the embodiment of the wisdom of our ancient conscientious Chinese people, the epitome of the invincible Chinese people who transformed and conquered nature.
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