Houtu — Hòutů (后土), “the Queen of the Earth” or “Sovereign Earth” — is the great deity of the earth and the soil in Chinese mythology and religion: the divine personification of the Earth itself, ruler of the land and the deep places, counterpart to the sky-ruling Jade Emperor and to Heaven. The Earth-god (or goddess) of China, Houtu is the sovereign of the soil.
The Sovereign of the Earth
Houtu (“Sovereign Earth” or “Queen of the Earth”) is the supreme deity of the earth — the divine personification and ruler of the Earth itself, the soil, the land, and the deep places of the ground. In the great cosmic pairing of Chinese religion, Houtu (the Earth) is the counterpart to Heaven — Earth and Heaven, the two great powers between which all things exist (Houtu is sometimes paired with the supreme Heaven-deity, the celestial counterpart). The gender of Houtu shifted over time: in early sources Houtu was often male (an earth-god, sometimes a minister of the Yellow Emperor), but in later religion and especially in popular and Daoist worship, Houtu became understood as a great goddess — the Earth Mother, the “Empress of the Earth” (Houtu Niangniang), the maternal, generative power of the soil.
The Generative Power of the Soil
As the deity of the earth, Houtu governs the fertility and generative power of the soil — the land that brings forth all crops, plants, and life; the ground that sustains all living things; the earth that receives the dead. Houtu is the source of the earth’s abundance and the guarantor of the harvest, honoured by the emperor and the people in the great state sacrifices to Earth (paired with the sacrifices to Heaven) — for the emperor, the “Son of Heaven,” sacrificed to both Heaven and Earth (Houtu) as the two supreme cosmic powers on which the realm depended. The great Altar of Earth in the imperial capital was dedicated to Houtu, as the Altar of Heaven was to Heaven.
The Earth Mother and the Lord of the Underworld's Threshold
In her developed form as the Empress of the Earth (Houtu Niangniang), Houtu is a great mother-goddess of the soil, fertility, and the land — one of the highest goddesses of Daoism and folk religion, sometimes counted among the supreme deities. As the deity of the earth and the ground, Houtu also has associations with the dead and the underworld (which lie within the earth) — the earth receives the dead, and Houtu presides over the soil in which they are buried, standing at the threshold of the land of the living and the realm below. Sovereign of the soil, counterpart to Heaven, the generative Earth Mother who brings forth all life and receives the dead — Houtu is the great deity of the earth in Chinese mythology, the Queen of the Earth.
