Yu Slays Xiangliu

The Nine-Headed Marshal

Yu kills the nine-headed marshal of Gonggong whose blood turned land to poisoned marsh.

Xiangliu, the nine-headed marshal of the water god Gonggong, has a single serpent body with nine human faces; wherever he coils, the land sinks into marsh and no people can live. During his taming of the flood, Yu the Great slays the monster, but its blood is so rank that every field it soaks turns barren. Yu must heap earth over the site again and again until a terrace stands where the poison lay; later legend sets the Terrace of Xiangliu north of Kunlun, a monument not to the monster but to the labor that buried it.