Tlillan-Tlapallan 'Place of the black and red colour' is a legendary place or region on the Gulf Coast of Mexico where king Quetzalcoatl

Quetzalcoatl

Quetzalcoatl is a Mesoamerican deity whose name comes from the Nahuatl language and has the meaning of "feathered serpent". The worship of a feathered serpent deity is first documented in Teotihuacan in the first century BCE or first century CE...

 went on his flight from Tollan

Tollan

Tollan, Tolan, or Tolán is a name used for the capital cities of two empires of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica; first for Teotihuacan, and later for the Toltec capital, Tula-Hidalgo, both in Mexico...

 in order to burn himself and change into the Morning Star.

The tale can be found in an important 16th-century manuscript

Manuscript

A manuscript or handwrite is written information that has been manually created by someone or some people, such as a hand-written letter, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way...

 (the Codex Chimalpopoca) containing the Annals of Quauhtitlan. Written in Nahua

Nahuatl

Nahuatl is thought to mean "a good, clear sound" This language name has several spellings, among them náhuatl , Naoatl, Nauatl, Nahuatl, Nawatl. In a back formation from the name of the language, the ethnic group of Nahuatl speakers are called Nahua...

, the text basically translates a pre-Spanish book. The tale also occurs in Bernardino de Sahagún

Bernardino de Sahagún

Bernardino de Sahagún was a Franciscan friar, missionary priest and pioneering ethnographer who participated in the Catholic evangelization of colonial New Spain . Born in Sahagún, Spain, in 1499, he journeyed to New Spain in 1529, and spent more than 50 years conducting interviews regarding Aztec...

's General History of the Things of New Spain. The name Tlillan Tlapallan has been interpreted as referring to writing and books.