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The Geography of Chinese Mythology: From the Classic of Mountains and Seas to the Local Distribution of Folk Belief
One Classic of Mountains, Half a Map.：The peculiarity of Chinese mythology is that it was geogr
One Classic of Mountains, Half a Map.
The peculiarity of Chinese mythology is that it was geographical from the very beginning. The Classic of Mountains and Seas organises the world by the directional structure of "Classic of Southern Mountains, Classic of Western Mountains, Classic of Northern Mountains, Classic of Eastern Mountains, Classic of Central Mountains": Kunlun is in the west, Qingqiu in the east, Zhulong of Mount Zhangwei in the northwest, and the regions within and beyond the seas and the great wildernesses all have their coordinates. It is not that stories came first and places were found for them afterwards; rather, the mountains and rivers serve as the bookshelf, and gods and strange beasts are set into its compartments one by one. What the following two thousand years did was continually to "land" this conceptual geography on the ground: Emperor Wu of Han, following the Classic of Mountains and Seas and the Yu Benji, named a southern mountain of Khotan "Kunlun"; the route of King Mu's western journey was superimposed onto the Hexi Corridor; Yu's footprints were claimed by every one of the nine provinces — Shaoxing claimed the burial place, western Sichuan the birthplace, the Central Plain the hub of the flood control. The geography of myth has therefore never been a question of textual research but a question of claiming: behind every claim is a local society's effort to win itself a "Genesis." The distribution of this volume's eight Chinese entries happens to replicate that map of claims: Kunlun between Qinghai and Xinjiang, the strange beasts in the bronzes of Sanxingdui and Yinxu, Nüwa and Fuxi in the temple fairs of the middle Yellow River, Hou Yi and Chang'e in the local narratives of the Jiang-Huai region.
Three Belts of Belief.
Seen at a larger scale, the local distribution of Chinese mythology can be summed up in three belts. The first is the "ancestors and sage kings belt" of the middle and upper Yellow River: Fuxi and Nüwa, Yu the Great, the Flame Emperor and the Yellow Emperor, whose narrative core is the building of civilisation — drawing the trigrams, creating humankind, controlling the floods, dividing the nine provinces — and whose sacrificial forms are state public sacrifices and giant temple fairs (the Huaiyang Taihao Mausoleum temple fair, the Tianshui public sacrifice to Fuxi, the Shaoxing public sacrifice to Yu the Great), with time anchors in the 2nd–3rd and 5th lunar months. The second is the "water–love–sea belt" of the Yangtze and the southeast coast: the Legend of the White Snake unfolds along the canals between West Lake and Jinshan Temple; the Mazu faith divides its incense northward along the port chain of Fujian, Guangdong, Taiwan, and Hainan as far as Tianjin and Changdao, its narrative core shifting from the conflict between love and order to the guardian deity of a seafaring community, and its sacrificial forms being incense-sharing, ancestral pilgrimages, and processions. The third is the "immortal mountains and longevity belt" of the western plateaus and oases: the Kunlun–Queen Mother system has absorbed the Jade Pool narratives of Tianchi in the Tianshan Mountains, Qinghai Lake, and the Tarim oases, with longevity and immortal assemblies at its core. Qixi and the Cowherd and Weaver Girl span all three belts: the star lore arose on the Central Plain, the living ingenuity-seeking tradition survives in western mountain villages such as Xihe in Gansu, and the legend's declaring localities are scattered across Yiyuan, Heshun, and Xi'an — one story, three geographies.
How to Read the Map.
In using this mythological map, keep three rules. First, distinguish the textual layer, the archaeological layer, and the claiming layer: the Kunlun of the Classic of Mountains and Seas is the textual layer; the Sanxingdui protruding-pupil mask is the archaeological layer (its connection with Cangcong's "protruding eyes" is one scholarly theory, not inscriptional proof); the Hou Yi of Sheyang and the Cowherd and Weaver Girl of Yiyuan belong to the claiming layer — all three layers are real, but real in different ways, and to write them in confusion is to fabricate. Second, the temple fair is the coordinate: living mythology is not in books but in the calendar — the 2nd day of the 2nd month at the Taihao Mausoleum temple fair, the seven days of performances at Xihe's Qiqiao, and the 23rd day of the 3rd month for Mazu's birthday are the moments when the myths "happen" again each year; miss the dates and only empty buildings remain. Third, beware the single place of origin: wherever many places claim to be the source (Cities of Nüwa, birthplaces of Yu, hometowns of the Cowherd and Weaver Girl), present the declaring claims side by side — this is precisely the most honest, and most enchanting, form of China's mythological geography: a map drawn jointly by countless places.
Image source · chensiyuan · CC BY-SA 4.0