Nuwa

In Chinese mythology Nuwa (女娲) is the goddess credited with creating human-kind - although other traditions would attribute this feat to either Pangu or Yu Huang.

She and her husband Fu Xi, the first of the San Huang are often called the "parents of human-kind", as along with creating them they each taught the first humans many things. With Fu Xi she is often depicted with the upper body of a woman and the lower body of a snake or dragon as it was in the form of dragons that she and her husband carved out the rivers of the world and drained the floods.

The Creation of the Human Race

It is said that Nuwa began creating men from yellow clay sculpting each one individually yet after she had created hundreds of figures in this way she still had more to make but had grown tired of the laborious process. So instead of hand crafting each figure she dipped a rope in clay and flicked it so blobs of clay landed everywhere each of these blobs became a person. In this way, the story relates were nobles and commoners created from the hand crafted figures and the blobs respectivly. Another variation on this story relates that some of the figures melted in the rain as Nuwa was waiting for them to dry and in this way sickness and physical abnormalities came into existence.