Nüwa in the context of "Culture hero"

According to Chinese mythology and traditional Chinese historiography, the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors (Chinese: 三皇五帝; pinyin: Sān huáng wǔ dì) were a series of sage Chinese emperors, and the first Emperors of China. Today, they are considered culture heroes, but they were widely worshipped as divine "ancestral spirits" in ancient times. According to received history, the period they existed in preceded the Xia dynasty, although they were thought to exist in later periods to an extent in incorporeal forms that aided the Chinese people, especially with the stories of Nüwa existing as a spirit in the Shang dynasty and Shennong being identified as the godly form of Hou Ji and a founder of the Zhou dynasty.

In myth, the Three Sovereigns were demigods who used their abilities to help create mankind and impart to them essential skills and knowledge. The Five Emperors were exemplary sages who possessed great moral character, and were from a golden age when "communications between the human order and the divine were central to all life" and where the sages embodied the divine, or aided humans in communicating divine forces.

The Classic of Mountains and Seas, also known as Shanhai jing (Chinese: 山海经), formerly romanized as the Shan-hai Ching, is a Chinese classic text and a compilation of mythic geography and beasts. Early versions of the text may have existed since the 4th century BCE, but the present form was not reached until the early Han dynasty. It is largely a fabulous geographical and cultural account of pre-Qin China as well as a collection of Chinese mythology. The book is divided into eighteen sections; it describes over 550 mountains and 300 channels.

Fuxi or Fu Hsi (Chinese: 伏羲) is a culture hero in Chinese mythology, credited along with his sister and wife Nüwa with creating humanity and the invention of music, hunting, fishing, domestication, and cooking, as well as the Cangjie system of writing Chinese characters around 2900 BC or 2000 BC. He is also said to be the originator of bagua (the eight trigrams) after observing that there were eight fundamental building blocks in nature: heaven, earth, water, fire, thunder, wind, mountain, and lake. These eight are all made of different combinations of yin and yang, which are what came to be called bagua.

Fuxi was counted as the first mythical emperor of China, "a divine being with a serpent's body" who was miraculously born, 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."

Chinese culture attaches certain values to colors, such as considering some to be auspicious (吉利) or inauspicious (不利). The Chinese word for 'color' is yánsè (顏色). In Literary Chinese, the character 色 more literally corresponds to 'color in the face' or 'emotion'. It was generally used alone and often implied sexual desire or desirability. During the Tang dynasty (618–907), the word yánsè came to mean 'all color'. A Chinese idiom meaning 'multi-colored', Wǔyánliùsè (五顏六色), can also refer to 'colors' in general.

In Chinese mythology, the goddess Nüwa is said to have mended the Heavens after a disaster destroyed the original pillars that held up the skies, using five colored stones in the five auspicious colors to patch up the crumbling heavens, accounting for the many colors that the skies can take on.

Mount Huaguo (traditional Chinese: 花果山; pinyin: Huāguǒ Shān; Wade–Giles: Huakuo Shan; Japanese: Kakazan; Vietnamese: Hoa Quả Sơn), or Flowers and Fruit Mountain, is a major area featured in the novel Journey to the West (16th century). A number of real-world locations have been connected with the Mount Huaguo, although the eponymous mountain in Lianyungang, Jiangsu is most commonly identified as its source of inspiration.

According to folklore, when Guanyin Bodhisattva passed through Flower Fruit Mountain, she meditated on a large rock. Imbued with divine essence, the stone miraculously gave birth to Sun Wukong. In a folktale, the mother goddess Nüwa sacrificed herself, transforming into thousands of colorful crystals to repair the sky. One of these crystals fell onto Flower and Fruit Mountain, where it absorbed the essence of the sun and moon, eventually giving birth to a stone monkey.

Zhurong (Chinese: 祝融), also known as Chongli (Chinese: 重黎), is an important personage in Chinese mythology and Chinese folk religion. According to the Huainanzi and the philosophical texts of Mozi and his followers, Zhurong is a god of fire and of the south. Some sources associate Zhurong with some of the principal early and ancient myths of China, such as those of Nüwa (Nüwa Mends the Heavens), Gonggong, and the Great Flood.