Flood Myths of East Asia

The flood hands out the surnames

Wang Xianzhao read two hundred and thirty-two flood texts from the minority peoples of southern China and sorted them by how they finish. Seventy-nine per cent of them finish the same way: with the production of the surnames, the clans, the languages or the peoples of the present world. The water is not the subject of these stories. The water is the device that clears the stage. What the story is about begins after the water goes down, and what it is about is who you are and whom you may marry.

At Huayuan in the Xiangxi hills the sequence is bare and fast. The water took everything and left a brother and a sister; they married because there was no one else; and what the sister bore was not a child but a lump of flesh. They cut it up and scattered the pieces over the country, and where the pieces fell, people stood up. They were Wu and Long and Shi and Ma and Liao — and those are still the five surnames of the Xiangxi Miao. Every marriage arranged in that country since has been arranged against that list. The flood is not an event these families remember. It is the register they consult.

The same engine runs at every scale. In Taijiang, in the Miao heartland of southeastern Guizhou, Jang Vangb quarrelled with the Thunder God, and the Thunder God answered by drowning the world; Jang Vangb and his sister sealed themselves inside a great gourd and rode the water out, argued long and hard about whether a brother might marry a sister, and in the end did. What was born was a ball of flesh. He took a blade to it, and the pieces became the different peoples, who went off in different directions and have lived apart ever since. At Libo in southern Guizhou the pair bore four lumps and a crow carried them off to the four quarters: the first became the Yao, the second the Shui, the third the Buyi, the fourth the Han. Four peoples who share one valley are told there that they share one birth and one bird.

Among the Jianghua Yao of southern Hunan the survivors’ child is a winter melon. They split it and threw the seed across the country, and the seed that landed on the high mountains came up as Yao while the seed that landed on the flat ground came up as Han. That is an account of a settlement pattern — who has the mountains, who has the plain — converted into an account of descent. It puts the arrangement of the countryside beyond argument by putting it before history. The Landian Yao of Funing tell it with a debt attached: Fuxi and his sister come through the water, the child is again a melon, and it is Pan Wang who puts the knife into their hands and tells them what to do with it, so that the people who come out of the pieces arrive already owing him something.

Where the flood produces surnames rather than peoples, it produces them by the hundred. At Laole, a Gaisu Yi village in Kaiyuan, a brother and sister cling to a tree, survive, and their first child is a mass of flesh; they cut it into one hundred pieces and hang them from trees, from stone and from a cow horn, and the pieces become fifty women and fifty men whose surnames follow the places where they hung. The founding pair are still in the village, embodied in a paired ancestor temple. Among the Buyi of the Guizhou uplands, Fuge and Ximei cut their lump apart and out of it come the hundred surnames, every family name there is. These stories do not produce humanity in general. They produce the specific register of who may marry whom, which is the thing a village actually has to know.

The Naxi of Lijiang push the logic one step further and use the flood to explain not only who the neighbours are but why they cannot be understood. Chongrenli’en was the one man the deluge did not take. He married Chenhongbaobai, a woman of the sky, and they had three sons who were mute for a long time; when at last they spoke, they said the same sentence in three different languages. The eldest went off and fathered the Tibetans, the second the Naxi, the third the Bai. Three brothers, one sentence, three tongues — and the whole linguistic map of the upper Yangtze is thereby a fact about a family rather than a fact about time.

The Yi of Chuxiong keep the fullest version of all, and they keep it in performance. At Mayou village in Yao’an the flood leaves a brother and sister; the sister bears a strange gourd; they pierce it, and out step the Han, the Dai, the Yi, the Lisu, the Miao, the Tibetan, the Bai and the Hui. The singers of Mayou still sing them out in that order, for three nights running, at festivals, at weddings, at funerals and at house-raisings. A wedding in that village is therefore held inside a recitation of where every people on earth came from, and the couple being married are being fitted into a list.

The specialist who carries that recitation is the bimo, the Yi ritual priest — and the bimo’s kit includes a bullroarer. A hundred and forty kilometres south of Mayou, in the Nisu Yi village of Hechamo in the Ailao Mountains, the anthropologist Li Yongxiang sat in on a healing rite against a sickness-bringing spirit called Ni, lodged in an oak tree behind the village, and watched the bimo make and whirl a thing called tatu.

They also make a pine knife, called “tatu.” The pine is shaved very thin, and the wooden knife is tied at the edges with sword-grass; when it is whirled during the ritual it gives off a buzzing sound. This knife is used to cut off the retreat of the “Ni.”

Li Yongxiang, “The Yi People’s Concepts of Illness and Traditional Therapies,” Minzu Yanjiu 2009(4)

The pine slat is shaved to a blade, bound with grass, swung until it buzzes, and used to cut something off — the retreat of a spirit. It is the same office, in the same mountains, that sings the eight peoples out of the gourd.

Further east the survivor pair do not merely found lineages; they become the ritual power those lineages depend on. In Fenghuang, in western Hunan, Rui Yifu’s field materials of the 1930s found flood traditions across the eastern and northern parts of the county in which a brother and sister survive, marry and restore humanity — and then remain, as the ancestors whose authority runs through the Nuo rites that protect later communities. The pair do not vanish when the water falls. They take office.

At Jiaji village in Kaiyuan, recorded from the bema Wang Shaoxian in 2010, the survivors’ marriage has to be licensed before it can found anything: people seize the sky deity’s dragon-horse, thunder and rain destroy the world, a brother and sister ride it out in a wooden tub, and paired millstones and paired winnowing baskets are rolled or thrown to see whether the match is permitted. The tradition is still joined to Pula Yi funerary and ancestral ritual. In the Liangshan Yi epic Le’eoteyi the test comes earlier: a divine messenger disguised as a wild boar warns three brothers, assigns them chests of gold, silver and wood, and only the youngest, in the wooden one, survives to cross a bridge to heaven, marry a celestial daughter and return as an ancestor. And at Xianqin Gorge in Qin’an, Fuxi and Nüwa float out of the Dadiwan country by gourd along the Qingshui and Hulu rivers, and their marriage is sanctioned when smoke from fires lit on facing mountains joins in the sky.

Millstones that meet at the bottom of a slope, smoke columns that braid, winnowing baskets that fall the right way up: the southwest Chinese flood does not end when the water goes. It ends when a marriage has been made legal.

The gourd goes south

The border between China and mainland Southeast Asia is about two hundred years old. The gourd is a great deal older, and it does not stop at it.

Go south-west out of Guizhou and the same machine keeps running. Among the Khmu of northern Laos a brother and sister spare a bamboo rat, and it tells them the water is coming; they get inside a hollow drum and ride the flood in it. What they produce afterwards is not a child but a bottle gourd, and when a red-hot iron is put through the shell the peoples come out one after another — Lamet, Khmu, Chinese, Hmong, Mien — each carrying its own language and its own way of living. In the Lawa villages of Mae Sariang in northern Thailand the pregnancy lasts ten years and produces a gourd, and out of it come the Lawa, the Thai, the Karen, the Chinese and the Europeans; when a bridge breaks under them as they scatter, their speech divides with them. At Pa Pae they will show you two rocks and a tree at abandoned Ban Tau-pung and tell you which is the gourd and which the survivors’ boat.

In the Kachin hills of northern Burma, above Bhamo, the vessel is a drum again — a great oval one, carrying two orphans with nine cocks and nine iron needles, who drop a needle and loose a cock in turn to test for ground, until the last needle rings on something solid and the last cock crows over dry land. What follows is the harsher form of the mechanism. A child of the surviving line is killed, cut apart and scattered, and the renewed human race springs from the pieces.

That is the same operation as the lump of flesh the Buyi cut apart to get the hundred surnames, and the same as the Yi gourd pierced to release the Han, the Dai, the Yi, the Lisu, the Miao, the Tibetan, the Bai and the Hui. The first issue of the flood is never an ordinary child. It has to be opened before there are people, and what comes out is already sorted into nations.

At Muang Thaen, where Điện Biên Phủ now stands, the Lao carry it one step further than anyone in China does. Phya Then’s rain takes a world that would not obey; the gourds are left on the ground and opened, first with a hot iron and then with a chisel, and the peoples come out in their appointed order. Then Khun Borom is sent down to govern, and his seven sons leave to found the kingdoms. The flood does not merely produce peoples in this telling. It produces a political map.

South-east of the gourd country the survivors get scarcer still. In the Katu telling from Ban Kandon, the whole ancestry of a people is a woman and a male dog — Ya Mek and Ma Teuk, alone on two mountains while the world floods — and what the dog carries through the water is fire in a calabash. The peoples come out of the gourd already speaking; the Katu come down off the mountain already warm. Either way the story refuses to restart the world with bare survival. It insists on handing something across the water.

The Wa, the Chin and the Palaung all have origin gourds and origin eggs with no flood anywhere near them, so a gourd on its own is not evidence of a deluge tradition. What travels is the whole sequence — water, siblings, an abnormal birth, an opening, and the nations.

Sky, marriage, reed-pipe

Nüwa does not escape the flood in a vessel. In the Huainanzi the sky itself has broken, the four corners have failed and water is spreading over everything, and she goes to work on the structure: she smelts five-coloured stone and mends the sky with it, cuts the legs off the great turtle and stands them at the four quarters, and drives the flood down. It is the largest size the story is ever told at — not a levee but a cosmos — and it is also the size at which the pattern of the whole region is easiest to see, because what she leaves behind is not simply dry land.

Four hundred kilometres east of the Yellow River bend, at Wahuang Gong on Zhonghuang Mountain in Shexian, the rite that honours her runs for the first fifteen days of the third lunar month, and it praises her, in one breath, for three things: she put down the flood, she instituted marriage, and she made the reed-pipe. A world, a kinship system and a musical instrument, in a single sentence, as one act.

That sentence is the grammar of this entire map. It is not enough for the water to leave. The world that comes back has to arrive complete — with a rule about who may marry whom, and with something to play. The Miao who cut the flesh into five surnames and the liturgy at Shexian that thanks Nüwa for the sheng in the same breath as the flood are doing the same work at different volumes.

The man who cut the channels

If Nüwa rebuilds a cosmos, Yu rebuilds a state. Under Yao the water rises across the land; Gun tries to dam it and fails; Yu cuts channels, orders the rivers and leads the water to the sea, and out of the drained country come the Nine Provinces, an ordered human world with a government on it. Later tradition makes him the founder of the Xia. It is the same completed-world ending as the gourd and the melon, told by a bureaucracy instead of a village: what the flood produces is administrative geography.

The Gun–Yu tradition dates itself to no era and names no gorge, which is why it sits on this map as a broad anchor on the upper Yellow River rather than an event site. A landslide-dam outburst at Jishi Gorge around 1920 BC has been proposed as the flood behind it; that identification is disputed, is absent from the early texts, and falls far outside the postglacial window this map reconstructs. Yu’s flood is better read at the size the texts give it. It is not one valley’s bad year. It is the condition the world was in before there was a world worth governing.

When the lion’s eyes turn red

In the lake-and-marsh country south of the Yangtze the flood arrives with a warning sign attached, and the sign is almost always the same. There is a stone figure at the gate — a lion, a turtle, a guardian beast. Someone has been kind to it, or has been told to watch it. When its eyes turn red, run. Somebody paints them red as a joke, and a city goes under.

The oldest telling on this map is the one the Soushen Ji carries about the sinking of ancient Chao, at Lake Chaohu in Anhui. Floodwater strands a gigantic fish; everyone in the city eats it except one old woman; the fish’s supernatural father tells her that when the stone turtle’s eyes turn red the city will sink. A child paints them. A dragon-child leads the old woman uphill, and behind her the streets of Chao go down into what is now the lake. The moral is exact and unforgiving: the one person who did not take a share of the fish is the one person who gets out.

Liu Xicheng gathered this family of tales as the lu chen or sunken-land legends and traced them back through the literary record to the sixth century, mapping their modern distribution across the Wu-speaking lake country. Its members are strung along the shore and the water like a chain: Lake Tai, where the greedy city of Cizhou goes down and one girl gets out by watching the stone lions at the gate; Dianshan Lake at Qingpu, where the ground gave way one night on a settlement whose warning had been given and ignored; and Shanghai, where an old woman reads the sign, urges flight, and watches the water rise behind her until the plain is an inland sea. In the Lake Tai telling the girl is told to plant a chopstick at every place she stops, and behind her the bamboo shoots push up beside the water jars and the flood comes out of the shoot-holes; Cizhou is the lake now, and her chopsticks are the reed-beds that hold the water at its edge. A neighbouring version puts the drowned place at Shanyang, a county between Suzhou and Wuxi, and says that when the lake is clear you can see its houses on the bottom.

The hinge of the whole family is a telling written down in Fuyang County by the collector Ye Jingming and published in 1930. In Fuyang a boy fed a rice-cake, every day for three years, into the mouth of the stone lion at the gate. One day the lion spoke to him: when there is blood at my mouth, the world will be destroyed — get inside me. A butcher wiped his hands on the stone. The boy saw the blood, fetched his sister, and the two of them climbed into the lion’s belly, which was enormous and ran all the way to the sea. When they came out there was no one left alive anywhere. He proposed marriage; she set the test. They carried a millstone to a hilltop, took a half each, rolled them down opposite slopes — and the halves came together at the bottom. So they married, and there are people again.

That is the drowned-city story and the sibling-survivor story welded into one object. The red-eyed stone figure belongs to the Wu lowlands; the millstone rolled down facing slopes belongs to the Miao and Yi uplands a thousand kilometres southwest. Fuyang has both, in sequence, in one narrative, and the join is invisible. The same warning sign turns up again on the Korean coast, in the sinking-village tradition recorded at Wonsan, with the same red-eyed stone and the same lone compassionate survivor — the chain runs from the Yellow Sea down through Anhui to the Zhejiang hills without a break. And the machine is running as far away as Upper Burma: at Indawgyi Lake the Tamansai offend the nats, a widow named Kyep is warned in three dreams and flees, springs rise and drown the whole valley, and the neighbours who ignored the warning become the fish in the lake that replaces them. A warning sign, one singled-out survivor, a valley that becomes a named lake — with a broken taboo as the trigger and a woman as the remnant.

Liu’s own reading of why this family lives where it lives is a physical one, and he keeps it modest. Ground in the Wu lake country really does subside and drown: he cites the Han-period notice of Liyang going under in a single night, and the field debate of 1935 over subsidence between Suzhou, Wuxi and the lake. That is deltaic subsidence on a Holocene-to-historical scale, and it is enough. These are stories told in a country where the ground is known to go.

Dongjing sank, Fujian rose

On the Fujian coast the trade is explicit. East of the shore, where the strait is now, there was land, and on the land was a city called Dongjing. Dongjing went down, and Fujian came up in its place. Along the same coast the saying is told with different pairs: Dongjing sank and Nan’ao rose; Wujiao sank and Damao rose. Every version is an exchange. One place is spent so that another can exist.

Dongjing sank, Fujian rose.沉东京，浮福建 — coastal saying of southern Fujian and Chaoshan

The evidence people point to is on the beach. Fishermen still snag worked stone off that bottom. At Shenhu Bay in Jinjiang the tide goes out over the stumps of a drowned forest and a bed of dead oysters, and those stumps are shown to visitors as the country that went under.

Xu Qihao and his colleagues went through the historical, sociological and geological sides of the claim together, and what they found is better than the legend’s own account of itself. There was never a sunken Dongjing. But the coast does preserve real submergence, at two very different depths and two very different ages: an oil-fir forest standing on the sea floor at about 7,500 BP, and submerged beach-rock ruins of three to four thousand years ago. Their reading is that the saying splices the traces of several thousand years of crustal deformation onto a much later and much sharper memory — the Song court perishing at sea. The drowned land is real and postglacial. The date the legend wears is a later graft.

What survives that stripping is the grammar, and the grammar has a twin on the other side of the strait. In the Puyuma account from Katipol, inhabited land once lay between Green Island and Orchid Island, and in the deluge Taiwan rose while the eastern country sank; five siblings rode it out in a mortar, two became the sun and the moon, and the rest came ashore to establish the human world. Two coasts of one strait, and one idea between them: the sea does not simply take. It trades. A country is spent and a country is paid out, and the one you are standing on is the one that was paid.

Korean ponds and peaks

A recording made at Eupnae-ri in Dangjin in August 1979 says that the Hanjin shore was once joined land. Yi Ji-ham surveyed it, predicted that the ground would burst, and cleared the residents before the sea came through — and the breach stopped at the staff of a salt seller who had been walking slowly along behind him. The bay replaces the joined ground; the celebrated magistrate gets the credit, and the salt seller, who said nothing, is the one who decides where the coastline stops.

Namu Doryeong, the Son of the Tree, works at the other extreme of scale. His father is a tree, and when the water covers the world he rides it, pulling ants and mosquitoes and another boy out of the flood as he goes, until he reaches a high peak where an old woman lives with her daughter. The rescued animals repay him by helping him through the marriage trials, and he and the boy he saved found the later human lines. It is told the length of the peninsula.

Two Korean tellings keep the flood small and local and lose nothing by it. At Saseok-ri in Namwon, a narrator in 1979 remembered that when Daegang-myeon lay underwater, boats ran between Goribong and Gwangdong and tied up to a ring whose trace was still in the rock — the whole flood compressed into one mooring on an inland peak. At Jangjamot in Paju, a rich man refuses a monk and his daughter-in-law secretly gives rice; she is told to flee and not look back, and she carries her loom toward Gorangpo, turns at the sound of the world breaking, and becomes stone as the estate goes under. The house-site is the pond now, and the loom-bearing stone stands as the one witness the water left behind. It is the flood at its smallest — one household drowned, one woman carried out of it — and it is told at ponds all over the peninsula, and at Rawa Pening in central Java, where a village that turned a stranger away goes under and the woman who fed him rides it out in a rice mortar.

Japanese lakes and a fire on the hill

Aso begins as a vast lake filling the caldera. Takeiwatatsu tries to kick through the rim at Futae Pass and fails, then strikes at Tateno and opens an outlet, and the water goes out through it. The lake floor becomes an inhabited agricultural basin, and the god’s fall at the gap gives Tateno its name. Sediments confirm repeated lakes inside the caldera, and Tateno is indeed its outlet; no single drainage phase can be attached to the story. But the plot is a familiar one by now — the water is not fought, it is given somewhere to go, and the ground it vacates is farmland. Yu cut channels for the same reason. So did the Truku and Seediq survivors on Taiwan, who found the water’s blocked outlet and cleared it.

Northward, the water is made rather than drained. Hachirōtarō ate three forbidden char, turned into a vast serpent, dammed ten streams and made Lake Towada out of them; driven out by the monk Nansobō, he travelled through a whole northern world of lakes and tried to turn the Kazuno basin into another one. Towada, Hachirōgata and Lake Tazawa end up bound into one sacred geography, with linked tutelary beings, rivalries and a divine marriage — three bodies of water with quite different physical histories, held together by one serpent’s career.

One Japanese fire belongs to another order of story. At Hirogawa in 1854, Hamaguchi Goryō burned rice sheaves on high ground between two Ansei-Nankai waves to guide nine stranded villagers uphill, and Lafcadio Hearn later moved the fire to before the wave and made it summon a whole village. It is a superb story, and it carries a year. A wave with a date on it is a different object from a flood that no telling can date.

The starkest Japanese founding is far out in the Izus, on Hachijōjima, and its survivor is a woman alone. A great wave takes the people of the island. Tanaba is already pregnant, and she is the one who lives; she comes ashore at the river mouth at Ōkago and bears her child after the water has taken everyone else. Mother and son become husband and wife, and the two of them are the beginning of the island’s people. She is not only told about. The landing place is marked at Ōkago, her grave is at Sueyoshi, and both were entered in the 1871 official survey of the island’s shrines and historic sites — a founding mother with an address, on an island whose whole population runs through one woman who was carrying its future when the wave came.

Ainu land that moves

In the north the world remade by water is not the social order but the ground itself. In Kushiro, inherited accounts describe strong shaking, fissuring, and a tsunami running along named routes and around Lake Harutori, carrying offshore gear inland — and they carry a rule for descendants attached: leave the low water-country quickly and go up. At Lake Kussharo a giant amemasu overturns boats until Otashitonkuru wounds it, and in its struggle it tears a mountain loose and drops it into the lake, where it becomes the island Nakajima; the hollow it came out of fills as a smaller lake. Farther out along the Kuril chain, Yamamoto Tasuke’s tradition ends a multi-year war with earthquakes and eruptions: settlements are buried, the land splits and sinks into the sea while other ground rises as mountains, Kurunse’s country is destroyed, and what is left standing is the island chain. At Samani a great wave is said to have carried a whale, or its bones, into the six- and seven-hundred-metre Samatki range, where people afterwards said they had seen the remains.

A fish tears off a mountain and leaves it standing in a lake. A war ends in subsidence and uplift. The sea puts its animals on a ridge. These are not stories about a wave; they are stories about a landscape with no fixed shape, in which the ground is one of the moving parts.

Taiwan’s changed ground

Taiwan gives the whole range line by line. Atayal, Saisiyat, Kavalan, Truku, Seediq, Pazeh, Puyuma, Rukai, Paiwan, Tao and Amis accounts each keep their own plot and their own ground. Three Atayal traditions alone go three separate ways. At Da-ke-lang the water covers the country and only a human sacrifice makes it fall. At Nan’ao the former world is flat before the water turns it into a sea, and as the water withdraws it cuts the present valleys and leaves fish in the rivers. At Tapachien a brother and sister are given up, and the departing water becomes the Dajia and the Da’an, two rivers named for the woman and the man.

On Taiwan’s northeastern coast, Kavalan ancestors escape a sinking ancestral island in a wooden boat and drift north until they find the grass-covered Yilan plain. Their descendants divide into lowland and mountain peoples, explaining the later relations between neighbours. Farther west, Pazeh survivors wait out the water on Guanyin Mountain, come down to Fengyuan, found four clans and end with sixteen settlements.

A Truku pair rides in a basket toward the end of the sea, measuring the voyage with mustard seeds. Seediq voyagers reach the sea’s blocked passage and clear it. Both return to a country cut into new valleys, with fish lying where food had been stored. The water has made channels through the land, and planting begins again.

In Saisiyat country in northwestern Taiwan, the vessel is a weaving loom. A brother and sister reach Li-tou Mountain, but the sister dies. Her brother cuts her body into pieces, wraps them in leaves and lowers the bundles into the water, asking for human life to return. They become the ancestors of distinct families. Another telling carries a lone man to a mountain, where a god divides his body: flesh becomes Saisiyat, bones Atayal, and entrails cast into the sea become Han. A household tool carries the remnant of humanity, and the body inside it becomes the difference between neighbours.

On Orchid Island the Tao tell it with a completed inventory. In the account from Iḥaḷalai, a pregnant woman overturns a piece of coral and the sea gushes out from underneath it, drowning the villages and then the mountain itself. Ten people reach Ipigaun and wait there ten years for the water to fall. What they do next is given item by item: they found six named villages, put taro and yam back into cultivation, obtain tools, rebuild the houses, and restore the distribution of meat at feasts. Ten years above the water, and then a functioning society reassembled part by part — that list is the story. A tsunami or a typhoon is a better physical fit here than any slow rise of the sea.

Elsewhere on Taiwan the rebuild is the whole plot. In Rukai country seven days of rain and darkness dissolve the earth until only Kindo’or, a few distant mountains and Sansan Island remain above it. Deer, crow and earthworm fetch back the essentials: fire, crops, and new soil to put them in. Marriage rules follow, and the country is repopulated.

At Da’niao, on the southeast coast, a Paiwan brother and sister cling to weeds as rain washes away their village and its mountains. Their old crops lie on the sea floor. A half-cricket makes a new mountain with its droppings, and the two climb it. Fire passes through a beetle that eats a still-burning insect; the siblings rescue the flame and keep it alive. They must travel far to find yam and millet seedlings. With no other people left, they marry. Their children are born with disabilities, their grandchildren still struggle, and their great-grandchildren are healthy. New villages grow from that third generation.

At the Paiwan village of Patjavat, the surviving siblings keep something smaller: a broken piece of cooking pot. A half-worm makes hill soil, but the two cannot cook until a lizard-like creature comes carrying a burning torch in its mouth. They take the fire, which never goes out. On the new ground they find shoots of sweet potato, taro and millet. Here the children improve across three births, rather than three generations, and the telling ends with a prohibition on sibling marriage. Pot, flame, planting stock and marriage rule are what it takes to begin again.

Kapayuanan gives the rebuilt earth an owner. Water normally disappears into the monster Taruvar on the plains. When its mouth is blocked, the flood covers the smaller mountains, and people flee to Tumapalapalai. A muntjac swims to Palasidang for fire so they can cook. At last Taruvar’s mouth opens and the water drains. The chiefs find worms hanging in the trees and feed them staple food. Their droppings become soil. That is why all the land belongs to the chiefs: they fed the creatures that made it. The flood has ended, but the act of feeding still determines who owns the country.

Among the Amis, survivors at Dou-lan come down the river recovering millet, rice and yam planting stock. At Dabalang the surviving pair’s first children have to be put right by ritual before they can become the ancestors of named clans; at Cilangasan, Sura and Nakao begin Amis descent and its millet calendar. Fire, soil, crops and the right marriages: these are the minimum contents of a working world.

Ryukyu islands

Hatoma and Hateruma sit close together on the map and tell quite different stories. On Hatoma, a tsunami kills everyone but a brother and sister who reach the island’s highest point, where a deity is waiting; when the sea withdraws the deity leads them back down, and their union establishes the island’s later people. On Hateruma the flood falls as burning oil, and the founding pair survive it inside a cave — and what they emerge into is a kinship order, with the Utsizamari groups and the island’s western and eastern ritual halves already in place.

At Harimizu on Miyako the water is not the destroyer at all. A heavenly rock is cast into the sea, gathers soil about itself, becomes the island, and the founding deities come down onto the new ground and establish living beings and human descent. It is the same transaction as Shenhu Bay read from the other end: there, a country is spent so a coast can rise; here, the sea simply delivers the land. Across the archipelago the creation texts, the sibling-survivor accounts and the memory of historical waves belong to different periods and different islands, and taken one at a time they give the whole regional range in miniature — a cave and a kinship order, a peak and a descent, a rock in the sea that becomes an island.

And on Tarama, between Miyako and Ishigaki, the flood’s first issue is a snake. A great wave goes over the island and leaves nobody but the Unazē brother and sister; there is no one else alive, so they marry. What they have first are not people: a serpent, a lizard, a giant clam and hemp come before any human child does. Then the human children come, the island has descendants again, and the two founders stay on, remembered at their shrine. The flood’s first issue is never an ordinary child: it has to be opened, or gotten past, before there are people. The mainland answers with a gourd and a lump of flesh; Tarama answers with a snake.

The ice sea over Changbai

The northernmost telling on this map is also the strangest. In the Manchu creation cycle, ages beyond counting go by and then the Ice Sea of the northern sky comes down. Floodwater and mountains of ice go over the land; the earth is water and the sky is water too. One willow on Changbai Mountain and one stone pillar in the northern sea stay standing and hold the sky up.

Then comes the ending this whole essay has been about. The few who lived through it on the heights did not know how to make families, and the spirits came down and taught them how a marriage is properly made — and that instruction is the beginning of the order the Manchu live under. Water arrives with ice in it, the world is reduced to a surface, and what is handed back is a wedding rule. The ice sea is the closest image in the Chinese corpus to a deglaciation.

The morning the lake broke its rim

North of everything, on the shores of Lake Baikal, the Buryat and Evenk keep the plainest deglacial account in this whole essay. Siberia lies under ice, and the first people live on the patches that stand out of it. As the ice goes, the meltwater gathers into Baikal until the lake is too full to hold, and it breaks the rock at its lower end and runs out toward the ocean. In the Evenk telling the people are standing there when it goes, and hear the mountain give way.

They call the breach angara, the gaping mouth, and the river that comes out of it keeps the name. The Buryats count their descent from the people who lived through it — so the lake, the river, its name and the line of the people are all left by the same morning.

The story was written down three separate times in the 1930s — from Ivan Ilich Efremov in 1937, from Georgii Maksimovich Shelkovnikov on Olkhon in 1938, from D. S. Aslamov in 1936 — and each teller gives the same machinery: ice, an overfull lake, a rock barrier that fails. Geology has since proposed exactly that. Arzhannikov and Arzhannikova reconstruct a partial collapse of the Primorsky Ridge opening the Angara about twelve thousand years ago, with a rapid fall in lake level. The chronology is fought over — Zolnikov and colleagues hold that neither the Angara landforms nor the Palaeolithic stratigraphy will carry a breach that late, and older estimates put the outlet far earlier. What the three tellers describe is not a flood at all but a lake losing one: the water leaves, the land is what arrives, and the people who watched it happen put their own beginning at the breach.

An iron raft and stones on hide straps

Farther west, in Tuva, the vessel itself gives the telling its name. In the Demir-Sal cluster a man and a woman survive with animals on an iron raft and come down on a named mountain after the water falls. Versions were recorded independently from the late nineteenth century onward, but later tellings also carry unmistakable biblical names and episodes. The older iron-raft core belongs on the map; so does the warning attached to it. This is a tradition with a history of contact, not evidence that Tuva witnessed one prehistoric deluge.

At the other end of the map, on Kamchatka, Georg Wilhelm Steller recorded a more tactile machine. When the great water came after Kutkh’s time, the Itelmen lashed tree trunks into rafts, put provisions and property aboard, and tied heavy stones to hide straps so the drifting rafts could be anchored. He printed the account in 1774, after surviving the 1737 Kamchatka tsunami himself. Steller placed the flood in mythic time, after Kutkh, and not in his own century.

Mapped traditions

Water makes worlds

East Asia tells the flood at six sizes — cosmos, kingdom, island, village, field and family — and one logic governs every one of them. A caldera becomes farmland. A household becomes a pond. A greedy city becomes Lake Tai, and the reed-beds along its edge are the chopsticks the one warned girl planted as she ran. A stone thrown into the sea becomes Miyako. A gourd is pierced and eight peoples walk out of it in order.

Nothing thins as the scale drops, because the ending is always the same ending. The flood Nüwa stops by patching the sky and the pond that swallows one rich household are the same event told at the reach the teller could see, and each closes with an inventory of what the water left behind: a coastline, a channel to the sea, a valley cut by the retreat, six villages, seed corn, fire, a stone lion, a name for a people, a rule about who may marry whom. Seventy-nine of every hundred southern minority tellings end by naming the surnames or the peoples of the present world, and the ones that do not still end by naming a river, a lake or a province.

That is why the liturgy at Shexian says what it says. It thanks Nüwa in one breath for putting down the flood, for instituting marriage and for making the reed-pipe, and it is right to run the three together, because in these stories they are one act. The water is what has to be got out of the way before a world can be handed over. Mainland, peninsula, archipelago and outer island, from the Ailao Mountains to the Kurils, East Asia remembers water as the thing that unmakes a world — and remembers, in the same breath and with the same precision, the surnames, the crops, the rivers and the marriages that were issued with the one that came back.