Nu Wa the Sun Crow

Photo by Millenium Twain.
The Chinese goddess Nu Wa may have been the original model for the phoenix in China. Here she is shown as a bird associated with the sun, "Nu Wa the Sun Crow," which resonates well with the associaton of the phoenix with fire.

As the original Earth Mother, Nu Wa repopulated the earth following a Great Flood by fashioning people from the yellow clay of the earth and giving them the breath of life. (Her husband/consort/brother was FuXi, the legendary first emperor of China, and the man who received and revealed to humankind the secrets of universal balance and harmony through the I Ching.)

In later eras, the Earth Mother was associated with the Queen Mother of the West, one of whose names is Nine-Phoenix Supreme Perfect Queen Mother of the West of the Jade Tortoise Platform. She dwelled in the Kunlun Mountains where she tended the Peaches of Immortality.

The Jade Tortoise Platform is, of course, the earth. Possibly the Nine-Phoenix refers to birth through the association of the sun's movement through nine constellations (i.e. nine months of human gestation).