A boy is told his mother lies pinned under Mount Hua for the crime of marrying his father: how a folk-and-theatre tale of the Ming and Qing borrowed its splitting axe from a river-god fifteen centuries older.
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The four brothers surnamed Ao who rule the seas from crystal palaces are the youngest thing about the dragon king: a Ming novelist's quartet laid over a rain-dragon the Han knew seventeen centuries before, and a royal title borrowed from India in between.
A sage-emperor hands the whole apparatus of punishment to one upright man, whose aim is to punish until no one need be punished. The beast that made him famous for smelling out the guilty is known to us only from the pen of a man calling it a fraud.
The dead did not vanish. One soul rose bright into the air and one sank into the ground, and between them the living built a temple, seated a grandson in the ancestor's chair, and fed him until he spoke the blessing back.
Every child knows the archer who shot down the suns. Almost no one can say who he was: a god sent from heaven, a mortal who seized a throne, or two men fused into one by centuries of retelling.
He conquered the four quarters, named his ministers after clouds, and fathered the whole line of emperors, then cast a cauldron, mounted a whiskered dragon, and rose into heaven while the people below clutched at his falling bow.
Nine heads on one blue-green coil, feeding on nine mountains at once: Gonggong's minister, whose foul blood poisoned the ground so no grain would grow and no beast could live there.
Every retelling is drawn from the poets who first told it. Hesiod, Homer, Ovid, the Eddas. The sources are kept honest.
