Bowing avoid bumping heads. The kowtow is the highest sign of reverence in Han Chinese culture, but its use has become extremely rare since the collapse of Imperial China. In many situations, the standing bow has replaced the kowtow. However, in modern Chinese societies, bowing is not as formalized as in Japan, South Korea and North Korea. Bowing is normally reserved for occasions such as marriage ceremonies and as a gesture of respect for the deceased, although it still sometimes used for more formal greetings. In China, three bows are customarily executed at funerals including state funerals, ancestral worship, and at
Chinese creation myths builder's cord motif is uniquely Chinese and iconographic of the Goddess. In Han iconography, Nüwa sometimes holds a builder's compass. The 9th-century "Duyi Zhi" (獨異志, "A Treatise on Extraordinary Things") by Li Rong records a later tradition that Nüwa and her brother Fuxi were the first humans. In this version, the goddess has been demoted from "primal creatrix to a mortal subservient to God in Heaven" and a "lowly female subservient to the male, in the traditional manner of marital relations." Long ago, when the world first began, there were two people, Nü Kua and her older brother. They lived