Pangu and divine intervention

‘Change doesn’t happen overnight’ will be a phrase familiar to many who have set out for some self-improvement. Spare a thought for Pangu, a deity whose body transformed into the stuff of the universe – from the sun and stars to grass and pearls. This great change was no less than 36,000 years in the making. Image: Wellcome Collection / Public Domain China’s earliest known story of creation was written down in the 3rd century AD by the Daoist Xu Zheng, whose works are known from quotations in later sources such as the Tang Dynasty encyclopaedia, the Yiwen Leiju (AD 624). The story itself must have undergone its own long process of transformation, handed down through the oral