Background & setting
Xihe appears in the Shanhaijing as a wife of Dijun and the mother of ten suns. Other passages describe a solar tree and a sequence of suns. These pieces give context for ten-sun imagery without requiring every passage to be a chapter of the same narrative.
The story
At the Gan waters, Xihe bathes the suns. The blazing bodies of the sky are imagined as children who can be washed and cared for. A distant cosmic process becomes a scene of nurture, located in an extraordinary landscape beyond familiar territory.
The Fusang tradition places multiple suns in a great tree, with some below and one above. Later storytellers combine such images into an orderly daily rotation, then explain drought as a breakdown when all ten rise together. The archer Yi’s intervention becomes clearer against this contrast between regularity and excess.
How to read it
The sun is both a source of life and a power that must keep its measure. Maternal imagery gives celestial order a humanly recognizable form.
Where this telling comes from
Shanhaijing, Great Wilderness: South, for Xihe; compare its Fusang and multiple-sun passages.
- Classic of Mountains and Seas ↗
A layered collection of geography, beings and traditions: Jingwei in the Northern Mountains; Kuafu in Beyond the Seas: North; many accounts of Kunlun and unusual creatures.
An original introductory retelling · Sources consulted October 10, 2026.