At the 2025 International Festival, we have commissioned a series of expert essays to help you Dive Deeper into your Festival experience.  

This essay interviews the composer Huang Ruo on the inspiration behind Book of Mountains and Seas and provides cultural context for the performance. 

Creation or Destruction, Hope or Despair

In China, there is no question: the egg came first. Other cultures may count their chickens, but China places this common symbol of fertility at the heart of its most widespread creation myth. Bursting from this primordial egg, the giant Pan Gu continues to push the purer parts of the egg upward to become the heavens and the less pure elements downward to become the earth, thus instilling the new cosmos with the Daoist duality of yin and yang.  

The power of such legends, as well as their countless variations through the millennia, stem in large part from the nature of their literary source, the Shanhai jing, commonly translated as  ‘Book of Mountains and Seas.’ Though codified in its present form for the imperial library during the early Han Dynasty (202 BCE–9 AD), many of the texts had already circulated for hundreds of years and the stories themselves long before that. Divided into 18 sections, Mountains and Seas describes many landscapes and creatures (both largely mythical) in a series of standardised, highly elliptic vignettes.  

What these texts lack in narrative clarity finds compensation in the cumulative power of their imagery, which not only forms a core of Chinese sensibility but often taps into corners of a collective unconscious of human concerns and experience. Their brevity and very lack of concrete detail practically invites Chinese readers to view the stories in modern trappings, and non-Chinese readers to reframe them through a different cultural lens. In addition to Pan Gu (who resonates as part Adam, part Atlas), we meet such characters as a princess turned into a bird and a reckless figure venturing too close to the sun, neither of whom would feel out of place in European legends.  

Adapting Myth for the Stage

For the composer Huang Ruo, adapting such poetic stories for the stage was daunting – not on a verbal level, since he had previously worked with operatic texts in Chinese (Dr. Sun Yat-Sen), English (M. Butterfly) and a dialect entirely of his own creation (Paradise Interrupted) –but rather in his musical language. He describes Book of Mountains and Seas, an 80-minute work in four scenes, as “vocal theatre,” with 12 singers surrounded by two percussionists –singing and beating things being the most basic and primal forms of music-making.

Within those vocal forces, though, comes a variety of musical textures: his vocal ensemble periodically divides in separate male and female choruses, as well as all possible permutations of solo and smaller groupings. Treading a fine line between ancient ritual and contemporary theatre, singers sometimes perform as specific characters, other times offering omniscient commentary.

Given the calculated timelessness in Huang’s musical conception and the mythic imagery of director Basil Twist’s production design, the four stories of their Book of Mountains and Seas often mirror current matters. Following the introductory ‘Legend of Pan Gu,’ we veer into ‘The Spirit Bird,’ where the spirit of a young princess embodies a bird after her body drowns at sea and she begins a long and relentless campaign to take revenge on the water by dropping twigs and pebbles. “In Chinese, we have this expression, ‘Dripping water can penetrate rock,’” Huang says. “For me, this simple story sends a clear message. Even if you think something is impossible, never underestimate the strength of one’s determination, or the power of revenge.”  

From there, we encounter ‘The Ten Suns,’ picking up the creation story after Pan Gu’s death. The earth is now guarded by ten suns, each revolving in turn, riding on a large and graceful bird. One day the suns all decide to come out together, and their combined heat dries up the rivers and shrivels the crops, imperiling the earth. Their father, the God of Heaven, employs the God of Archery to shoot them down, but after the ninth has fallen he asks that the tenth be spared; so fearful is the remaining sun that he keeps his scheduled revolution faithfully, clearly marking day and night.  

From that cautionary tale extolling moderation, we turn to ‘Kua Fu Chasing the Sun,’ where the giant Kua Fu, trying to discover where the sun goes at night, spends his days chasing it from east to west. Exhausted and overheated, he keeps drinking water from one river to the next until they all run dry and he finally dies of thirst. After his death, however, his walking stick falls to the ground and grows into a forest of peach blossoms, a long-held symbol of paradise. ‘For us today, this story is so rich in meaning,’ Huang says. “First of all, we see the danger in mistreating the environment by trying to control nature. But then, nature will always have the last laugh.”

His original conception of the story, however, notably changed during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. “I was working on the part with the peach trees when the pandemic hit,” Huang recalls. “I’d wanted it loud, bright, with everybody singing and glorifying nature. But once the pandemic hit, I couldn’t write that. It was so different from what any of us were experiencing.”  

After a long period of contemplation, during which he completed his meditative string quartet A Dust in Time, Huang returned to the scene anew. “It was a 180-degree turnaround,” he says. “The sun was no longer burning, but quiet and warming. Survivors crawl out of the post-Apocalyptic debris trying to find each other, humbled and now valuing how precious life is.”  

The essential message, though, remains the same. “No matter how much destruction occurs, nature will always grow again,” Huang maintains. “Whether or not humans will be there depends on what we decide to do.”  

© Ken Smith, 2023. This essay was commissioned by the Moss Arts Center, Virginia Tech. 

Want to Dive Deeper?

Read the synopsis for Book of Mountains and Seas written by Huang Ruo, composer and librettist.