NW

NW may stand for:

Nüwa

Nüwa (/nỳwá/ Chinese: 女媧), also known as Nügua, is a goddess in ancient Chinese mythology best known for creating mankind and repairing the pillar of heaven.

Description

The Huainanzi relates Nüwa to the time when Heaven and Earth were in disruption:

The catastrophes were supposedly caused by the battle between the deities Gonggong and Zhuanxu (an event that was mentioned earlier in the Huainanzi), the five-colored stones symbolize the essence of the five phases (wood, fire, earth, metal, and water), the black dragon was the essence of water and thus cause of the floods, Ji province represents the central regions (the Sinitic world). Following this, the Huainanzi tells about how the sage-rulers Nüwa and Fuxi set order over the realm by following the way (道) and its potency (德).

The Shan Hai Jing, dated between the Warring States period and the Han Dynasty, describes Nüwa's intestines as being scattered into ten spirits.

In Liezi (c. 475 - 221 BC), Chapter 5 "Questions of Tang" (Chinese: 卷第五 湯問篇), author Lie Yukou describes Nüwa repairing the original imperfect heaven using five-colored stones, and cutting the legs off a tortoise to use as struts to hold up the sky.

San Jose, California

San Jose (pronounced IPA: /ˌsæn hoʊˈzeɪ/; Spanish for Saint Joseph), sometimes stylized as San José, is the third-largest city by population in California, the tenth-largest by population in the United States, and the county seat of Santa Clara County. San Jose is the largest city within the Bay Area and the largest city in Northern California.

Before the arrival of the Spanish, the area around San José was inhabited by the Ohlone people. San Jose was founded on November 29, 1777, as San José de Guadalupe, the first civilian town in the Spanish colony of Alta California. The city served as a farming community to support Spanish military installations at San Francisco and Monterey. When California gained statehood in 1850, San Jose served as its first capital.

After more than 150 years as a small farming community, the San Jose area in the mid-20th century contained some of the last undeveloped land near San Francisco Bay. It then began to experience rapid population growth, much of it coming from veterans returning from World War II. San Jose then continued its aggressive expansion during the 1950s and 1960s by annexing more land area. The rapid growth of the high-technology and electronics industries further accelerated the transition from an agricultural center to an urbanized metropolitan area.