The Three Realms
三界
Heaven above, earth in the middle, the underworld below — the basic architecture of the Chinese mythic cosmos, and the traffic rules between them.
Worldview · 世界观
One Coherent Universe
Two thousand years of tales share a single map: three realms, a celestial bureaucracy, a ledger of karma, and a second population of spirits living alongside humanity. This is that map — every entry cross-linked to the stories that show it in action.
宇宙与地理
Cosmos & Geography
How the world is built: the three realms, Mount Kunlun, the isles of Penglai, the Nine Provinces, and the Courts of the Dead beneath the earth.
Mount Kunlun
昆仑
The axis of the world: a mountain at the western edge of everything, where the Queen Mother of the West keeps the peaches of immortality, and the earthly and the divine touch.
Penglai and the Isles of the Immortals
蓬莱
Three islands in the Eastern Sea where the immortals live among jade palaces and deathless herbs — visible sometimes to sailors, unreachable by emperors.
The Courts of the Dead
幽都地府
The Chinese underworld: not a hell but a civil service — ten courts, ten magistrate-kings, a river to cross, a soup to forget, and a ledger in which everything is written.
Fengdu: The City of Ghosts
酆都鬼城
A real town on the Yangtze that became the capital of the dead — with a postcode, a bureaucracy, a police force, and a magistrate who once went down a well to argue about taxes.
种族与生灵
Races & Beings
Gods, immortals, humans, ghosts, fox spirits, nature sprites, monstrous beasts and dragons — and the rules that separate them.
Fox Spirits
狐妖 / 九尾狐
The great shape-shifters of Chinese fiction: animals that cultivate themselves into human form — omens of dynasty, ruinous seducers, faithful wives, and everything in between.
Gods and Immortals
神与仙
Two different ways to be more than human: gods are appointed to office, immortals are self-made. The distinction runs through the whole universe.
Hun and Po: The Two Souls
魂魄
Every human carries two souls — one intelligent and upward, one dull and bound to the flesh. Almost everything Chinese fiction does with corpses, resurrection and possession follows from this one distinction.
Sprites, Monsters and Strange Beasts
精怪与异兽
Everything that lives long enough can wake up: animals, plants, stones, household objects. A taxonomy of the world's second population.
人物图鉴
Figures
The recurring cast of the universe: the Queen Mother of the West, Nie Yinniang, Nie Xiaoqian, Lü Dongbin and others.
The Queen Mother of the West
西王母
Keeper of the peaches of immortality on Mount Kunlun — the oldest great goddess of the tradition, and the story of how a tiger-toothed plague-spirit became the queen of heaven's orchard.
Lü Dongbin
吕洞宾
The most beloved of the Eight Immortals: a failed examination candidate who woke from a dream of glory, took up a sword, and became the wandering patron saint of the not-quite-faithful.
修炼体系
Cultivation & Rules
How a human becomes an immortal, how an animal becomes a spirit, what a tribulation is, and how cause and effect bind everything together.
Cultivation: How Beings Change Their Nature
修炼体系
The rules of becoming: how a human becomes an immortal, how an animal becomes a spirit, what a tribulation is, and why karma outranks them all.
How Souls Move On
轮回与去路
Every mechanism the tradition invents for what happens between one life and the next: the substitute, the sunbeam, the borrowed corpse, the hidden soul, and the death that happens twice.
The Timeline. From the creation myths to Pu Songling — see how the universe grew, era by era, with the stories placed along it. Open the timeline →