The Cult
Nǚwā's cult is a late-built house on early foundations. The texts know her from at least the second century BCE — the Huáinánzǐ presumes every reader knows who mended the sky — but no Zhou or Han sanctuary of hers is attested; the textual archaeology is far richer than the ritual one. The standing cult crested in the medieval and Ming-Qing rebuilding age. Its capital is the Wāhuáng Palace at Shèxiàn, Hebei — pavilions chained to a red cliff above the Zhāng River, founded under the Northern Qi in the sixth century and rebuilt repeatedly — where she reigns as 'August Wa' and the spring crowds come to ask, above all, for children; her cliff is hung with the locks and ribbons of petitioners, and opera shares the fairground. Huaiyang's Ancestor Deities temple in Henan couples her altar with Fúxī's. The rite's logic follows her myths exactly: she who shaped the first people from riverside clay is the natural first address of every childless household — creation, in her case, did not stop at the world's beginning; it is re-contracted every spring at her cliff.