Mujiezhu, called Mutsitsu in local speech, is the heavenly maiden of the Qiang origin epic Mujiezhu and Dou'anzhu and the third daughter of the supreme sky-god Aba Mubita. Visiting the mortal world she is rescued from a tiger by the herdsman Dou'anzhu; the two fall in love and, once her father's impossible labors are met through her secret intervention by the other gods, they marry and descend to earth bearing seed grain and the five white stones. From their union the Qiang people are said to descend, and Mujiezhu is honored both as a sky deity and as an ancestral goddess. Qiang scholarship treats her as a central figure of the people's goddess worship and ethnic self-understanding, and her story is retold in folktales such as the paper-cutting episode in which she saves the wild animals.