Hello and welcome to Chinese Folk Tales.
This is Bei Bei.
In the last episode, goddess Nuwa patched up the hole in the sky and saved the humans that she had created.
But then, the exhausted goddess went back to the heavens, carried away by two dragons.
And that's usually a nice way to say that a god or emperor had passed.
So was there no one left to take care of the poor little humans?
That would be too bad.
Luckily, there was another hero.
His name was Fu Xi.
And in fact, he was Nuwa's brother.
Fu Xi is one of the most powerful Chinese gods.
In fact, he's considered as one of humanity's original ancestors in Chinese mythology.
Sort of like mankind's first male ancestor.
He's credited with several very important innovations that helped humans to flourish.
As we will find out soon, he's also a cultural hero and a very benevolent god in ancient China.
Did I mention that he didn't have legs, but had a serpent's tail instead?
In some artworks he's simply portrayed as a wise, sage-like old man dressed in animal skins or long yellow robes, probably to cover up the serpent's tail.
Back in the days of giants and goddesses, people didn't know much about the natural world.
We now measure time by year, by month and days, and there are four seasons in a year and all that.
But for the people living at the times of Fuxi, they saw the sunrise and then later they saw the moon.
People around them got sick and died, and no one really knew why things were the way they were.
Were there any patterns to any of this?
People lived with so many questions and also so much fear.
Other people took things as they were, but Fuxi watched and thought and remembered.
There were secrets waiting to be discovered.
One day Fuxi was catching fish by a river and out of nowhere, huge waves surged from the water and a monster came out of the water standing on the crest of the waves.
It had a horse's body and a dragon's head.
Let's just call it the dragon horse.
Though it was weird looking, but it did have a nice temper.
The dragon horse walked over to where Fushi was standing and raised his head, as if saluting to him.
Then it turned its body, so its side was shown to Fushi.
Fushi then saw that there were patterns on its side.
They did not look like anything he was familiar with.
He wondered what it all meant.
Fushi tried to memorize the patterns.
And when he was done, the dragon horse lifted his hooves, threw back his head, and neighed.
Then he ran back to the water and disappeared under the waves.
The roiling water calmed down right away, as if nothing had happened.
When things quieted down, Fuxi stood there, bewildered.
What had just happened?
I thought I was the one with the magic here, he must have thought.
He drew on the ground the pattern that he had seen on the body of the dragon horse and named it the Eight Diagrams, or Ba Gua in Chinese.
He stared at it day after day, waiting for its meaning to surface.
Finally, one day, the arrangement of the long and short lines started to make sense.
What he saw were patterns of changes in the universe.
And from these, he could predict the future of everything.
Wow!
This is the legend of the pattern on the dragon horse.
The dragon horse was presenting the secret of the universe to Fushi on a silver platter.
Fushi was very observant.
One day he saw a spider web with a huge spider in the middle spitting out silk and weaving its net.
Just then, a poor little bug fell on the web and got stuck.
Perfect lunch for the weaver.
Now, someone ordinary could see the same thing a hundred times and not make anything of it.
But Fuxi started thinking.
He found some strong hemp leaves and twisted them into ropes.
He then made a web with the ropes just like the spider web.
He showed his work to his people, but no one knew what this was for.
Fuxi explained, With this net, we can trap animals in the forest and fish in the river.
Then you won't go hungry anymore.
That sounded too good to be true to the people.
They felt the net as if it was a piece of treasure, and together they added more ropes to it to make it bigger.
The next day, they took the net into the forest to hunt.
Some people shouted on one side of the forest, scaring the beasts and birds to the other side, and the others spread the net to block their way.
They trapped so much prey in one day, it was unbelievable for the people back then.
In fact, they caught too much, and a lot of the animals were not hurt at all.
So Fuxi told the people to raise the smaller ones.
And since then, people started domesticating animals, such as sheep and chicken.
So you get the idea.
Fuxi was the great inventor of the ancient times.
There are many folk tales of such inventions because people didn't have much back then and everything started from scratch.
Later, people learned to use fire, to build living spaces, to farm, and to make clothing.
All of them took a long time to come about and took even longer to perfect.
In fact, none of the great inventions came to someone well-developed.
Maybe they started as one small inspiration, but it often took contributions from different people to improve over time.
Some even took hundreds of years to come near to what we see and know.
But to pass down the stories of these inventions, people contributed them to a few powerful figures, including Fuxi.
So now we have nets and domesticated chickens.
What came after this?
Well, let's wait till the next episode.
Bye for now.
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