Model humanity: Main philosophical traditions: Ritual traditions: Devotional traditions: Salvation churches and sects: Confucian churches and sects: Fuxi or Fu Hsi (伏羲)[a][1] is a culture hero in Chinese mythology, credited along with his sister and wife Nüwa with creating humanity and the invention of music,[2] hunting, fishing, domestication,[3] and cooking, as well as the Cangjie system of writing Chinese characters around 2900 BC[4] or 2000 BC.

Fuxi was counted as the first mythical emperor of China, "a divine being with a serpent's body" who was miraculously born,[5] a Taoist deity, and/or a member of the Three Sovereigns at the beginning of the Chinese dynastic period.

Some representations show him as a human with snake-like characteristics, "a leaf-wreathed head growing out of a mountain", "or as a man clothed with animal skins.

Pangu then died after standing up, and his body turned into rivers, mountains, plants, animals, and everything else in the world, among which is a powerful being known as Huaxu (華胥).

[8] A possible historical interpretation of the myth is that Huaxu (Fuxi's mother) was a leader during the matriarchal society (c. 2600 BC) as early Chinese developed language skill while Fuxi and Nüwa were leaders in the early patriarchal society (c. 2600 BC) while Chinese began the marriage rituals.

[9] A divinity Taihao (太皞, "The Great Bright One") appears, vaguely, in sources before the Han dynasty, independent from Fuxi.

The creation of human beings was a symbolic story of having a larger family structure that included the figure of a father.

[Missing translation of the following three sentences: 能覆前而不能覆後 They could only know/trace their offsprings but not their progenitors (promiscuous without family concept), 臥之言去言去 They slept whenever they wanted (non-circadian without concept of time), 起之吁吁 When awoke, they started yue-ing (repeating/using a single sound to express emotions or communicate without language).]

According to this tradition, Fuxi had the arrangement of the trigrams of the I Ching revealed to him in the markings on the back of a mythical dragon horse (sometimes said to be a tortoise) that emerged from the Luo River.

[13] Fuxi is said to have lived for 197 years altogether and died at a place called Chen (modern Huaiyang, Henan), where a monument to him can still be found and visited as a tourist attraction.