Yuqiang
Mythological Narrative
On the islets of the North Sea, says the Great Wilderness: North, there is a god with a human face and a bird's body, two green snakes hung at his ears and two red snakes under his feet: Yuqiang. The Beyond the Seas: North chapter repeats the portrait. Wearing and treading snakes is the full regalia of a great god in this book — serpents are both servants and insignia.
His lineage appears in the Great Wilderness: East. The Yellow Emperor begat Yuxiao, and Yuxiao begat Yujing; the father rules the Eastern Sea, the son the Northern, both gods of the sea. Guo Pu's commentary identifies Yujing with Yuqiang and records his courtesy name Xuanming — the very title later given to the god of the north in five-phases cosmology. The final chapter, however, makes Yuxiao a son of Di Jun instead: two genealogies coexisting in one book, a seam left by its layered compilation.
Daoist texts give him grander employment. The Zhuangzi counts him among those who attained the Way, 'standing at the northern pole'. In the Liezi, the five immortal mountains of the eastern sea, Penglai among them, drifted rootless on the waves; fearing they would wash away, the god on high 'ordered Yuqiang to have fifteen giant sea-turtles raise their heads and bear them' in relays. The keeping of paradise rests on the North Sea god's shoulders. Because he stands at the pole with a bird's body, older commentators sometimes made him double as the north wind's god.
Academic Discussion & Critique
Exchange peer-reviewed hypotheses, comparative Indo-European etymologies, and archaeological field interpretations regarding Yuqiang.
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