Myths and Legends of China by E. T. C. Werner: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
Myths and Legends of China
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The Nü Kua Creation Legend
Another account separates the name and makes Nü and Kua brother and sister, describing them as the only two human beings in existence. At the creation they were placed at the foot of the K’un-lun Mountains. Then they prayed, saying, “If thou, O God, hast sent us to be man and wife, the smoke of our sacrifice will stay in one place; but if not, it will be scattered.” The smoke remained stationary.
But though Nü Kua is said to have moulded the first man (or the first human beings) out of clay, it is to be noted that, being only the successor of Fu Hsi, long lines of rulers had preceded her of whom no account is given, and also that, as regards the heavens and the earth at least, she is regarded as the repairer and not the creator of them.
Heaven-deaf (T’ien-lung) and Earth-dumb (Ti-ya), the two attendants of Wên Ch’ang, the God of Literature (see following chapter), have also been drawn into the cosmogonical net. From their union came the heavens and the earth, mankind, and all living things.
The opening pages of the cosmogony chapter are shown here; the full account, with the rival versions Werner sets beside it, continues in the free edition below.
Download Full EPUB1922
~136,000 words (estimated)
Approx. 7.6 hours
Standalone
China
Sixteen chapters
EPUB · AZW3 · KEPUB
2.08 MB (EPUB) · 2.69 MB (AZW3) · 2.16 MB (KEPUB)
Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg #15250
E. T. C. Werner, British consul at Foochow, published this survey in 1922 as, he claimed, the only monograph on Chinese mythology in a non-Chinese language. It opens with a compressed sociology of China, then states the problem: a people with an enormous pantheon and hardly any connected creation story. From there he works through P’an Ku and Nü Kua, the gods of literature and war, the ministry of thunder, dragons and plague, the merciful Kuan Yin, the Eight Immortals, and a long retelling of the Monkey pilgrimage to the Western Heaven.
Werner translates and paraphrases from the Li tai shên hsien t’ung chien, the Fêng shên yen i and the Sou shên chi, and quotes Père Henri Doré on Chinese superstition. He keeps rival sources side by side instead of harmonising them, so one god may appear twice with two different careers. The result is an old-fashioned but unusually well furnished handbook: dates, titles, temple customs and the exact wording of the tales. This page summarises all sixteen chapters and gives the download links. The text is available via Project Gutenberg.
Myths and Legends of China by E. T. C. Werner: Summary, Characters & Themes
This summary and analysis follows E. T. C. Werner’s Myths and Legends of China chapter by chapter. Werner (1864-1954) spent most of his working life in the Chinese consular service and wrote several books on the country; the preface here thanks the scholar Mu Hsüeh-hsün for the run of his library and states the aim plainly, to give the accredited stories, the ones people actually tell, in “a true, not a distorted image”. He was not a field collector, and the preface admits as much: the tales come from printed books, some of them encyclopedias put together centuries after the events they describe. He read Chinese, worked from printed compendia, and wrote for readers who knew nothing of the country. The book appeared with thirty-two colour plates by Chinese artists, and its author believed it was the only monograph on the subject in any European language.
The structure is unusual for a book of tales. Two long opening chapters come first, a compressed sociology of China and then a chapter on why Chinese myth is thin where Greek myth is thick. Only in chapter three does the storytelling begin, and it runs from cosmogony to local legend without much pause. Werner’s argument is that Confucian scholarship starved the speculative faculty, so China produced “a large number of little hills rather than a few great mountains”. Whether or not one accepts the theory, it shapes the book: he is always explaining why a story is short, late or borrowed. The pages on stars, thunder, dragon-kings and foxes are dense with titles, dates, temple customs and the odd aside about the weather.
Read against Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome, the difference is immediate. Berens can tell a story straight through because the Greeks told it that way; Werner keeps interrupting to say that this version comes from a Sung encyclopedia, that a god was promoted by an emperor in 1128, that a tale survives in three incompatible forms. His chapters are better described as dossiers, and that is also their value: the reader gets the state cult, the temple image, the festival date and the official title along with the narrative. Where a European parallel exists he names it, sometimes past the point of patience, and leaves the reader to judge what the resemblance is worth. He is a good guide to what a story meant to the people who told it, and a weaker one on where it came from.
The tone is that of an official writing for a general audience, and it dates. Werner compares Chinese myth with Hebrew scripture, with Norse cosmology and with the Arabian Nights, and he is confident about races, climates and national character in a way no editor would now allow. He is also, on his own evidence, a close reader of Chinese texts and a good hater of humbug: he notes that the Great Wall cannot be seen from the moon, that the kitchen-god’s picture sold for a farthing, and that a Taoist pope “confers buttons like an emperor”. Readers who want the same mixture of erudition and story in another key may enjoy The Jungle Book, where Kipling’s India is equally a place of talking animals and binding custom.
The last chapter is a short defence of the book’s own subject. Werner asks whether a nation should be judged by the greatness of its myths, answers no, and then adds that if the test were purity and justice Chinese myth would rank with the best, “for it is not obscene, and it is invariably just”. It is a curious close for a collection of dragon stories, and it shows what the book is for: not to amuse but to correct a foreigner’s impression of a country he had lived in. The tales are told plainly and the apparatus is left visible. The underlying text is the Project Gutenberg #15250 transcription, and nothing in the prose below has been modernised.
Historical Context
Werner published in 1922, a decade after the Qing dynasty fell and four years before the Nationalists’ Northern Expedition. He had spent his career inside the old consular and judicial machinery, and the book carries that world’s assumptions: China as an ancient civilisation to be explained to Europeans, its religion as superstition with a few philosophical exceptions. He mentions having sat as a joint judge in Chinese trials, and he was in the building in February 1917 when the Chinese parliament debated making Confucius the god of China and voted the motion down. Such asides give the book a documentary value apart from its subject, and they date the prose more sharply than any reference.
The frame is the comparative religion of the period. Werner cites the Jesuit-trained Père Henri Doré, whose Recherches sur les superstitions en Chine were being printed at the Catholic Mission Press in Shanghai, and he leans on the great Chinese compendia: the Li tai shên hsien t’ung chien in thirty-two volumes, the Shên hsien lieh chuan in eight, the Fêng shên yen i in eight and the Sou shên chi in ten. For the fox chapter he used H. A. Giles’s Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, with his publishers’ permission. Greek, Norse, Egyptian and Hebrew parallels run through the footnotes, and the theory of myth as a stage in intellectual progress is stated without argument.
What has changed since 1922 is the tone more than the material. The evolutionary scheme, the talk of races, and the assumption that Buddhist influence is a borrowing to be traced have all been revised; the stories themselves are still the ones told. Werner’s own caution helps here, because he regularly prints two versions and declines to choose between them, and he separates what a text says from what he thinks happened. A reader who wants a modern synthesis will not find it in these pages, but will find the primary narratives in English, dated and sourced, which is what the preface promised.
Key Characters & Literary Archetypes
- P’an Ku: The cosmic craftsman. Werner’s P’an Ku is a dwarfish figure in a bearskin, two horns on his head, a hammer in one hand and a chisel in the other, chipping the universe out of chaos for eighteen thousand years, growing six feet a day. His body becomes the world when he dies: breath the wind, voice the thunder, blood the rivers, beard the constellations, and the insects on his skin the first people. Werner notes that the Taoists invented him in the fourth century A.D., long after the philosophers had done without him.
- Nü Kua: Sister and successor of Fu Hsi, serpent-bodied and ox-headed in the old descriptions, said to have moulded the first people from yellow earth. Werner is firm that she repairs rather than creates: when Kung Kung butted the pillar of heaven and the sky cracked, she melted five-coloured stones, cut off the tortoise’s feet to prop up the corners, and burned reeds to dam the flood. Another tale makes her and her brother the only survivors of a deluge, married after a smoke test at the foot of K’un-lun.
- Yü Huang: The Jade Emperor, a very Chinese Jupiter. Werner’s account is unusually political: the Sung emperor Ch’êng Tsung, humiliated by a treaty with the Kitans in 1005, announced a dream-letter from Yü Huang in 1012 and so promoted him to head the pantheon. The supreme deity of popular Taoism, in Werner’s phrase, “came ready-made from the brain of an emperor”. Bribes, forged revelations and a cask of pearls belong to his file, alongside the older legend of the prince who abdicated after a few days and died a hermit.
- Kuan Yin: The Goddess of Mercy, whose chapter is the longest single legend in the book. Werner prints the full story of Miao Shan: the king’s third daughter refuses marriage, is set to kitchen work, survives fire and execution, descends to hell and empties it with her prayers, and gives her hands and eyes to cure her father’s ulcers. She ends as sovereign of the Southern Seas on P’u T’o Island. Werner notes that she was represented as a man in early images and as a woman from the T’ang and the Five Dynasties onward.
- Sun Hou-tzŭ: The Monkey King. Hatched from a stone egg on Hua-kuo Shan, he learns seventy-two transformations, takes the dragon-king’s iron rod, tears his own page out of the register of the dead, and eats the peaches and pills of immortality. Buddha traps him under the Mountain of the Five Elements, and he repays his release by guarding the pilgrim Hsüan Chuang through eighty-one calamities. Werner reads the Hsi yu chi as a dramatisation of Buddhism’s entry into China, while doubting that the allegory was ever worked out in detail.
- Kuan Ti: The God of War, and the book’s clearest case of a man becoming a god. Werner follows him from a third-century general who killed a bullying official, swore brotherhood with Liu Pei and Chang Fei in a peach orchard, and was put to death by Sun Ch’üan in 219, through a series of imperial promotions: faithful and loyal duke in 1120, magnificent prince in 1128, great emperor in 1594, state temples from 1600. Werner observes that the god of war is invoked to avert war, and that his portrait hung in every military tent.
Core Literary Themes
- Creation without a creator: China’s cosmogonies are impersonal. Werner lines up the I ching, Lao Tzŭ, Confucius, Mencius, Chuang Tzŭ and the yin-yang school, and finds a universe that differentiates itself rather than one that is made. P’an Ku arrives late, in the fourth century A.D., and even he is a craftsman rather than a god; Nü Kua mends instead of making. The result is a mythology with a beginning but no first person, which is why Werner can say that, with one exception, Chinese cosmogony is non-mythological. The sources describe a world that folds out of itself, unowned.
- The celestial bureaucracy: Heaven is administered. Gods hold levees, receive titles, are promoted for good service, rotated every three years, fined, exiled, even executed. Werner quotes Du Bose on a spirit world that is “China ploughed under”, with its own provinces, yamêns, runners and executioners. Every department has a celestial double: thunder, fire, epidemics, waters, literature, war. Prayer becomes a petition, sacrifice a fee, and the kitchen-god’s annual report a piece of domestic politics with honey rubbed on his lips to keep him quiet. The same paperwork runs in hell, where the dead are registered, judged and filed.
- Men made into gods: The pantheon is largely a register of dead officials. Kuan Ti rises by imperial decree; Chung K’uei, a rejected examination candidate, becomes the empire’s demon-queller; Chang Tao-ling becomes the first Taoist pope; the Eight Immortals include a general, a scholar, a magician and a runaway bride. Werner treats apotheosis as an administrative act with dates, and the effect is oddly modern: sanctity as a career, with examinations, patronage and posthumous promotion, and with demotion always possible if the rains fail. Even the Eight Immortals are a committee rather than a pantheon.
- Philosophy against myth: Werner’s central argument is that Confucian rationalism starved the imagination. Confucius would not discuss the supernatural, the word for history implies impartiality, and by the Sung the scholars had, in his phrase, given myth its death-blow. What survived is scattered: local cults, Buddhist imports, Taoist fictions. He insists this is not a loss, since a nation that conquered myth with philosophy while the medieval West was steeped in what he calls the grossest superstition deserves thanks rather than pity, but the theory explains the shape of his own book.
- Household and comic religion: Away from the great gods the book is full of small ones: the kitchen-god in his niche above the stove, the door-gods pasted on the panels, the god of the light of the eye, the fox who drinks your wine and leaves pewter in your cupboard. Werner’s comic sense is reliable here, and the fox chapter, borrowed from P’u Sung-ling by way of Giles, is the most enjoyable in the book. These are the stories that survived philosophy, and they survived because they are domestic, useful and funny, and because nobody has ever needed a metaphysician to explain a burnt chop.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of Myths and Legends of China?
This edition is made for reading a long survey from 1922 on a phone. The text is Werner’s, unabridged, with his chapter divisions, his notes and his transliterated names — P’an Ku, Nü Kua, Yü Huang — rather than a pinyin rewrite that would make the index useless. Nothing has been annotated or modernised, and nothing has been cut from the tales. The only additions are the summary above, which tells you where each legend sits, and working navigation.
The three formats are unlocked and complete. EPUB suits most readers and every phone; AZW3 is for Kindle devices that accept sideloaded books; KEPUB is for Kobo, where it gives proper chapter marks and page counts. All three carry the same text, the same cover and the same table of contents, and the colour plates of the 1922 edition are included, so changing device costs nothing and the book looks as it was meant to look.
Werner is out of copyright and the Project Gutenberg transcription is free, so this page exists to make the book easy to find and easy to carry. If you want a critical edition with a modern introduction, this is not it; if you want the stories as an Edwardian consul told them, with his dates, his doubts and his prejudices left in, the text here is complete. The chapter summaries will tell you where to start.
- Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #15250 — the complete 1922 text, unabridged, with the author’s chapter headings, notes and plate captions.
- Made for reading Modern serif, generous line spacing and real chapter breaks, so a book of this length stays readable on a phone or a large screen.
- Werner’s own apparatus The glossary, the pronouncing index and the transliterations are kept, so the names read as the author printed them rather than as a pinyin rewrite.
- Three formats, no DRM EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB are each unlocked and complete, and can be moved between devices, backed up and kept without an account.
- Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Jungle Book — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Iliad — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
Werner’s sixteen chapters run from a survey of Chinese society to the local legends of his own day. They are summarised here in twelve entries: the two opening framing chapters are taken together, as are the two drawn from the Fêng shên yen i, and the last two, which collect popular tales. Summaries follow the order of the book.
- Chapters I-II · The Sociology of the Chinese; On Chinese Mythology: Two framing chapters before any story. The first compresses Chinese origins, government, law, marriage, festivals and burial into a survey of a people whose customs the myths must explain; the second argues that China had little myth because Confucian rationalism discouraged it. Werner’s villains are the Sung scholars, and his image for the result is a landscape of “a large number of little hills rather than a few great mountains”: many small tales, no single epic. Dense, opinionated, and the necessary key to everything after it.
- Chapter III · Cosmogony: P’an Ku and the Creation Myth: The creation story and its archaeology. P’an Ku chisels order out of chaos and his body becomes the world; Nü Kua mends the broken sky with five-coloured stones. Werner then dates both, making P’an Ku the invention of a fourth-century Taoist recluse and Nü Kua a repairer rather than a creator. The chapter ends with the philosophers, Lao Tzŭ’s tao, Confucius’s silence, Mo Tzŭ’s personal Heaven and Chuang Tzŭ’s butterfly, and with the claim that Chinese cosmogony is, with one exception, non-mythological.
- Chapter IV · The Gods of China: The longest chapter and the centre of the book. It begins with the soul and a spirit world that duplicates the state, then takes the pantheon in order: Shang Ti and Heaven, the super-triad of Confucius, Lao Tzŭ and Buddha, the gods of literature and war, the Buddhist Diamond Kings, the Taoist Three Pure Ones, the Jade Emperor, the goddess of the North Star, the immortals of K’un-lun, Chiang Tzŭ-ya’s investiture, and the household gods of city, kitchen, wealth, longevity and door, ending with a list of divinities so long that it disproves Chinese monotheism by catalogue.
- Chapter V · Myths of the Stars: The sky as administration and as omen. Sun, moon and planets govern weather and fate; the Great Bear is the residence of the Fates; sixty year-gods wait on birthdays. Werner retells the archer Shên I, who shot the nine false suns and was given the pill of immortality, and his wife Hêng O, who stole it and flew to the moon, where she became a toad. The Herdsman and the Weaver-girl meet once a year over a bridge of magpies. T’ai Sui, president of the Ministry of Time, closes a chapter about calendars, constellations and unlucky stars.
- Chapter VI · Myths of Thunder, Lightning, Wind, and Rain: A ministry with a staff list. Wên Chung, the three-eyed ancestor of thunder, is canonised by Chiang Tzŭ-ya; Lei Kung beats the drums that, in Chinese reasoning, actually kill; Tien Mu flashes her mirrors, Fêng Po opens his sack, Yü Shih tips his watering-can. Werner shows the Buddhist overlay, since the winged thunder-demon may owe his wings to Vajrapani while the drums are older than Buddhism in China. Odd local legends, a woodcutter who frees a trapped thunder-god and a bottle of medicine for a woman struck by mistake, keep the chapter from being a mere roster.
- Chapter VII · Myths of the Waters: Dragons, rivers and drowned cities. Chinese dragons are the essence of yang, rain-bringers and chiefs of the scaly tribes, with nine resemblances assembled from other animals, and the five sea-dragon kings go to Heaven once a year. Werner gives the Foolish Dragon, the Dragon-king’s daughter, the Old Mother of the Waters who sank Ssŭ-chou, the dragon-slayer Hsü Chên-chün, and the founding of Peking by a prince and a Taoist. He also explains the water-repressing pagoda that still floats, they say, on its spring.
- Chapters VIII-IX · Fire; Epidemics, Medicine and Exorcism: Two ministries of harm. Fire has a president with a jujube-red face, three eyes and a wheel of fire-dragons, plus the Red Emperor Chu Jung, who taught men to burn brushwood and to forge metal. Plague has five marshals in coloured robes who appeared in the sky in 599; medicine has Fu Hsi, Shên Nung and a King of Remedies; exorcism has Chung K’uei, the rejected candidate who killed himself on the palace steps and came back to eat demons. Smallpox, Werner observes, was once as ordinary as teething.
- Chapter X · The Goddess of Mercy: The book’s one sustained narrative, and its best. Miao Shan, third daughter of a king, refuses marriage, is set to kitchen work and then to death, descends into hell and empties it by praying, and finally gives her hands and eyes to cure her father’s ulcers. Werner supplies the whole apparatus: the reincarnation intrigue, the nunnery of the White Bird, the tiger that carries her body, the false suitor who tests her, the canonisation decree. He adds the obvious note, that she is a man in early images and a woman from the T’ang onward.
- Chapter XI · The Eight Immortals: Eight figures on a porcelain vase, each with an attribute: Li with his iron crutch and gourd, Chung-li with his fan, Chang Kuo with his paper mule, Lü with his sword, Han Hsiang with his flower-basket, Ho Hsien-ku with her lotus, Lan with his castanets, Ts’ao with his court tablet. Werner dates the set to the Sung or the Yüan, gives each a biography, and ends with the crossing of the sea, where a dragon-prince covets an instrument and loses a war. Much of it is late, literary and cheerfully implausible.
- Chapters XII-XIII · The Guardian of the Gate of Heaven; A Battle of the Gods: Two chapters taken from the Fêng shên yen i. First Li the Pagoda-bearer and his son No-cha, who boils a dragon-king’s palace, pulls out a dragon’s sinews for a belt, kills himself to save his parents, and is rebuilt from lotus-stalks by his master. Then the Investiture of the Gods itself: Chun T’i with eighteen arms and twenty-four heads, a sword that kills anyone who crosses a threshold, and a defeated patriarch carried off in a whirlwind of dust.
- Chapter XIV · How the Monkey Became a God: Roughly ninety pages retelling the Hsi yu chi. The stone monkey is born from an egg, takes the dragon-king’s iron rod, deletes himself from the register of the dead, eats the peaches and the pills, and is pinned under a mountain by Buddha’s hand. Released, he guards the pilgrim Hsüan Chuang through eighty-one disasters: false marriages, bottled monkeys, a demon that lives on smoke, an iron fan, spiders, and a whole shaved city. Werner reads the novel as an allegory of Buddhism entering China, though he doubts the allegory was intended.
- Chapters XV-XVI · Fox Legends; Miscellaneous Legends: The tail of the book, and the lightest. Foxes live eight hundred years, see the future, turn into scholars and girls, and pay for their mischief; the five tales here come from P’u Sung-ling by way of Giles, including a marriage lottery and an alchemist who punishes avarice. Then the Shan hai ching’s unnatural peoples, pygmies, giants, headless men and a women’s kingdom, followed by local legends: the bell that moans for its caster’s shoe, the cursed temple, the city-god with no face, and the dog-headed Jung tribe.
Myths and Legends of China: Frequently Asked Questions
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