Deity · Chinese · c. 300 BCE
Gonggong
Also called Kanghui, Gong Gong
The Chinese water god who loses a fight and knocks down the pillar holding up the sky — which is why the heavens tilt one way, the rivers run the other, and Nüwa has repairs to make.
Well sourced
The cosmology is unusually consequential: the sky leans to the northwest and the waters run southeast because a defeated god butted a mountain in a temper, and both facts about Chinese geography are the damage. He is not evil, and no tradition here treats him as a demon; he is a loser whose defeat rearranged the world permanently. The corpus keeps him beside Nüwa because the pair make one story — the wreck and the repair — and because the arrangement is the clearest instance on this site of a myth explaining a landscape by an accident rather than by a plan.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
Where it was actually worshipped
Mount Buzhou, which he broke; a mythic geography rather than a site
A figure with temples and a figure that only ever existed on a page are different kinds of thing, and the difference is easy to lose once both are entries in a list.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
Also known as
- Rank
- The Water Lord
- Pantheon
- Chinese
- Order
- Chinese pantheon
- Base of operations
- Mount Buzhou, which he broke; a mythic geography rather than a site
- Era
- c. 300 BCE
- Traditions
- Chinese
Traits
- Domain
- Floods, the broken pillar, the tilt of the sky
- Traditional form
- A man's face on a serpent's body, with red hair
Stats
Known connections
Opposed by
3 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 3 offices attributed to Gonggong, grouped by kind. Segment width is the share of powers falling in each category.
A bar dominated by one colour means a specialist; an even spread means a figure the sources credit with almost anything.
- material2
- malefic1
2 texts
Which texts say so, and where do they disagree?
When these texts were written
Each dot is one of the 2 texts that names Gonggong, placed at that text's approximate date.
A wide spread means the figure was carried across many centuries and traditions; a tight cluster means a single period produced the whole record.
2 texts, all inside a single century
Where the texts differ
- Rank: given as The water official; Contender for the throne
Named among the ancient powers with his minister and his serpent form, in the classic's catalogue of the world's creatures and places.
Butts Mount Buzhou in defeat and breaks the pillar of heaven, tilting the sky and the earth; the damage is what Nüwa then repairs.
Connections
What is it connected to?
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention Gonggong?
What rank is Gonggong?
How else is Gonggong spelled?
What is Gonggong said to do?
How old is Gonggong?
Nearest in the corpus
If Gonggong is what you came for, these are next
Chosen by proximity rather than by popularity: the same pantheon first, then the same rank, then the same kind of figure.
Nüwa
Creator Goddess · Chinese
She makes people from yellow earth and patches the broken sky with five-coloured stones. A creator whose defining act is repair.
Xiwangmu
Queen Mother of the West · Chinese
The Chinese goddess who begins as a tiger-toothed sender of plagues in the Classic of Mountains and Seas and ends as the serene keeper of the peaches of immortality — a demotion running backwards.
Yanluo Wang
Judge of the Dead · Chinese
Chief judge of the Chinese underworld — a civil servant with a ledger, in a hell organised as a court system rather than a torture chamber.
The Ten Kings
Court of the Dead · Chinese
The Chinese court of the dead — ten magistrates who each hear a case at a fixed interval after death, with clerks, registers and a right of appeal, and Yanluo Wang sitting fifth.
Artemis
Mistress of Animals · Greek
Huntress and protector of the young, whose Ephesian cult statue looks nothing like her and whose temple gave the ancient world one of its most durable protective formulas.
Hades
Lord of the Underworld · Greek
Ruler of the dead by lot rather than by punishment — a god of the underworld who is not evil, a distinction Christian cosmology cannot express.
The books behind Gonggong
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. They are public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.
Shanhaijing (Classic of Mountains and Seas)
Anonymous · 4th c. BCE - 2nd c. CE · Classical Chinese
Read Shanhaijing (Classic of Mountains and Seas) in full ↗Cover: Public domain · National Library of China · Wikimedia file page
The Huainanzi
Compiled under Liu An, King of Huainan · c. 139 BCE · Classical Chinese
Read The Huainanzi in full ↗
Corpus last revised 29 August 2026. A reference site’s credibility rests on being maintained, so this is the date the sourced records last changed — not the date the page was rebuilt.