Before there was sky, there was chaos. Before there was earth, there was formlessness. And before there was light, or dark, or anything at all that we would recognize as a place to exist — there was an egg. Inside that egg, there was a being. He slept for eighteen thousand years, and when he woke up, he began the work of making everything.

This is the story of Pangu (盘古), and if you grew up in a Chinese-speaking household, you almost certainly heard some version of it. It’s the foundational myth, the one that answers the question every culture eventually asks: how did the world begin? The Chinese answer involves a giant, an egg, and eighteen thousand years of continuous transformation — a timescale that puts even the most ambitious geological estimates to shame.

The earliest written versions of the Pangu story appear in texts from the Three Kingdoms period (220-280 CE), though the mythology itself is almost certainly much older, predating written records by centuries or millennia. The Sanwu Liji and the Jinwen tradition preserve fragments that describe Pangu emerging from the cosmic egg and immediately setting to work on the problem of the undifferentiated universe.