The Sacrifice of the Five Pigment Girl (as told by Victoria Finlay in her book "COLOR A Natural History of the Palette"):

The local people of Dunhuang have their own version of where the pigments come from. It contains the elements of the best folk stories: a crisis, a deity who appears in a dream with a dangerous solution, and a virgin who is willing to risk everything for what she believes in. It was recorded by Chinese anthropologist Chen Yu in the 1980's, and was set in the eighth century. At the time, Mogao (the painted caves) was attracting tens of t housands of people, who came to seek their fortune there. Among them were the widower Zhang and his teenage daughter. Zhang was one of the most talented artists in China, known for his exquisite apsaras fairy figures, which floated over turquoise skies as if the breath of the Buddha were guiding them. The most powerful warlord in the area, His Excellency Cao, had heard of the reputation of this father-daughter team, and had hired them to paint a new cave. There was one condition. They had to finish by the Buddha's birthday on the eighth of April. Easy, thought Zhang, and said yes. They spent days balancing on scaffolding, painting the most exquisite images. But the most beautiful painting of all was their deity Guanyin, who radiated compassion throughout the cave.

And then, disaster. They ran out of paint. They ran out of the white for the Buddha's body, and the green for his ribbons. There was no blue for the robes of his attendants, no red ochre for his face, and no black to draw the outlines of his enlightenment. It should not have been a problem: Dunhuang was a major stopping point on the Silk Road. In a normal year there would always be merchants in the marketplace selling sachets of vermilion and malchite and orpiment and all the other precious pigments that artists needed. But this was not a normal year: hundreds of artists were staked out in the caves and in tent cities around them, painting to the same deadline. The only paints avalable were cut with dross to make them go farther, and were unusable.

Zhang and his daughter knew the penalties for not finishing on time. His Excellency Cao was not a man known for his kindness and patience. They were sick with worry. Then one night the daughter dreamed she was in a high valley of the San Wei Mountain, not far from Dunhuang. In her dream she was surrounded by powdered pigments of every possible hue, but every time she tried to pic them up they would slip out of her hand. Then the Guanyin of her cave painting appeared. There were plenty of pigments in this valley, the deity said. But only if the girl had the courage to find them. She said she did, and was given instructions to go to the bottom of a well, a special well, which was hidden beneath white sand and protected by black cliffs. Only a girl could descend the well, the deity said. Only someone was pure could find the pure colors.

The next day the girl and her father and their two assistants went on an expedition to this monochrome landscape. They tied her carefully to a piece of rope and eased her down. She was only halfway into the well when the knot slipped and she tumbled to the bottom. The last thing she must have felt was the thin stone at the base as her body crashed through it, because when the grieving father looked down all he could see was a gushing new spring from which flowed the five pigments he had prayed for. Black and red, green and blue and, of course, the precious and pure white, all flowing out in a magical waterfall of paints.

I may post this on your earthporn submission as well :)