Nüwa begins her story kneeling in river mud, shaping humans from yellow clay to cure her own loneliness, and ends it engineering the collapse of the Shang dynasty because a king wrote an erotic poem on her temple wall. This deep dive traces the biography of one of ancient China’s supreme mother goddesses, from the cosmic egg and the death of the giant Pangu, through her reluctant marriage to her twin brother Fuxi, to her rescue of a broken world and her later role as an unseen political prime mover.

We look at how the shift from hand-molded clay figures to mud flicked from a rope was used by nobility to justify class hierarchy, why the Han dynasty murals show the serpent-tailed pair holding a compass and a carpenter’s square, and how the five colored stones Nüwa smelts to patch the sky map onto the Wuxing elements. The episode also explains the turtle legs that replaced the shattered pillar Mount Buzhou, the resulting tilt that sends stars northwest and rivers southeast, and the fox spirit Daji she dispatches in Investiture of the Gods.

• Pangu, Huaxu and the serpent-bodied twins at the dawn of Chinese creation myth
• The wedding fan on Mount Kunlun and its link to the bride’s fan in traditional marriages
• Compass and square as symbols of round heaven, square earth, yin and yang
• Gonggong’s tantrum, the falling sky and cosmic welding with five elemental stones
• Qu Yuan’s question in the Songs of Chu: who shaped the body of Nüwa?