Chinese Mythology

Bai Ze, 白泽 (báizé), is the divine beast that talks. In the legend it meets the Yellow Emperor on a shoreline in the east and dictates a complete inventory of the supernatural world: 11,520 kinds of spirit, monster and haunting, each named, each with instructions. The emperor had the whole thing drawn and published. That book existed, was used as a household charm for centuries, and is lost, except for one Tang-dynasty fragment that now sits in a library in Paris.

The Black Tortoise, 玄武 (xuánwǔ), guards the north: winter, the element water, and the cold end of the year. It is the strangest of the four celestial guardians. It is the only one made of two animals, a tortoise with a snake coiled around it, the only one whose name does not contain the animal, and the only one that eventually grew a human body, took a new name, and got a mountain of its own.

Caishen, 财神 (cáishén), is the Chinese god of wealth, and the name is a job title rather than a person: at least five different men have held the post. The one on the black tiger, Zhao Gongming, enters the written record in the fourth century as a commander of plague, sent down with ghost troops to fill a quota of the dead. His promotion to the money department took about twelve hundred years, and the paperwork survives.

Chang'e, 嫦娥 (Cháng'é), is the woman on the moon. She swallowed the drug of deathlessness her husband had been given, rose out of reach of the earth, and has been up there ever since, which is the reason a fifth of the world eats mooncakes on one particular autumn night. The oldest surviving version of her story ends rather differently from the one on the mooncake box. In that one she lands on the moon and turns into a toad.

The Chinese dragon, 龙 (lóng), is almost the exact opposite of the fire-breathing monster the English word "dragon" brings to mind. It is a benevolent, wingless, serpentine water-god: bringer of rain and rivers, chief of all scaled creatures, emblem of the emperor, and the auspicious ancestor a billion people invoke when they call themselves "descendants of the dragon." Less a beast to be slain than a weather system with a personality.

Erlang Shen, 二郎神 (èrláng shén), is the Chinese god of flood control and dragon-slaying, best known outside China as the warrior who fought the Monkey King to a standstill. Erlang is not his name. It is a birth-order word meaning second son, which is what the Song philosopher Zhu Xi called him when he wrote the god up in the twelfth century. The third eye he is drawn with today is the newest thing about him: it is absent from Journey to the West, absent from Investiture of the Gods, and still absent when Pu Songling described him in the Kangxi era.

The fox spirit, 狐狸精 (húlijīng), is the shapeshifting fox of Chinese folklore, and in its nine-tailed form, 九尾狐 (jiǔwěihú), it is the creature the rest of Asia borrowed. Almost everything said about it in English describes its last two centuries. In the oldest text that mentions it, the Classic of Mountains and Seas, the nine-tailed fox of Qingqiu cries like a human baby and eats people, and the only reason given to seek it out is that eating its flesh protects you from poison. The lucky version, the seductress version and the insult all came later, and each one can be dated.

Fuxi is the figure credited with inventing the eight trigrams, the three-line symbols behind the Book of Changes, the feng shui compass and four corners of the South Korean flag. The oldest account of how he did it is unusual: it describes not a revelation but a procedure. He looked up at the sky, down at the ground, and at the markings of birds and beasts, and then he made them. He is also said to have knotted the first fishing nets.

Guan Yu, 关羽 (Guān Yǔ), died in the winter of 219 as a defeated general who had just lost a province. Over the following sixteen hundred years the Chinese state promoted him, in stages and on paper, from marquis to duke to king to emperor to god, until his official title ran to twenty-six characters and his temples outnumbered Confucius's. He is the god of loyalty, the god of war, and, improbably, the god of money. No other subject in Chinese history was ever promoted that far after dying.

Guanyin, 观音 (Guānyīn), is the bodhisattva of compassion, the figure who hears people in trouble and comes. Male or female is the question everyone asks, and the answer is that the figure arrived in China male, was still being carved with a mustache in the Tang, and had become a woman by the Song. The sutra that made the cult famous had already granted permission for exactly that, in writing, several centuries earlier.

Hou Yi, 后羿 (Hòu Yì), is the archer who shot the extra suns out of the sky when ten of them rose at once and began cooking the world. He was given a drug that ends death, and his wife took it and left for the moon. He is also, strictly speaking, two people. The archer of the old myths and Lord Yi of Youqiong, a Xia-dynasty warlord who came to a considerably worse end, were separate men who got welded together.

The Jade Emperor, 玉皇大帝 (Yù Huáng Dàdì), is the supreme sovereign of the Chinese heavens, the august ruler most people picture when they picture Heaven: robed, crowned, and presiding over a vast celestial bureaucracy of gods and record-keepers. Yet he is famously not the highest power in Daoist theology, he was not born a god, and he was formally promoted to his cosmic office by the decree of an earthly Chinese emperor. He is the ruler of Heaven, and the one Sun Wukong could not defeat.

The Jade Rabbit, 玉兔 (Yùtù), is the hare that lives on the moon and pounds medicine with a mortar and pestle. The oldest surviving description of it at work is a Han dynasty court song, and it answers the question nobody asks: the rabbit is kneeling, the pills are being carried down to the emperor, and whoever swallows them does not die. It is not a pet. It is staff.

A jiangshi, 僵尸 (jiāng shī), is a reanimated corpse from Chinese folklore. The name means stiff corpse, which is the most accurate description anyone has ever given it. English calls it the Chinese vampire, and that is a borrowed label: the thing the tradition describes drains qi, the life breath, rather than blood. It is famous for hopping upright with its arms held out in front of it, and the reason for that pose turns out to have nothing to do with the supernatural at all.

Mazu is the Chinese sea goddess, the deity in the small shrine at the bow of a fishing boat, and the most widely worshipped female deity of the Chinese coast. The story everyone tells is that she was a girl named Lin Moniang who died young saving sailors. The oldest surviving document about her, written in 1150, does not say that. It says she was a working spirit medium, and it does not give her a name at all.

Nezha, 哪吒 (Nézhā), is the boy god of Chinese myth: born as a ball of flesh after a three-and-a-half-year pregnancy, a dragon-slayer by age seven, dead by his own hand to spare his parents, and reborn in a body built from lotus. A protection deity with flaming wheels for feet, he is the hero of the sixteenth-century novel Investiture of the Gods and, since 2025, the star of the highest-grossing animated film ever made.

Nian, 年兽 (niánshòu), is the monster said to have come down on the last night of the year to eat the village, until people discovered it feared red, fire, and noise. It is the origin story attached to almost every Chinese New Year custom. It is also the best-dated legend in Chinese folklore: the earliest known text naming the beast is a Shanghai newspaper column from 17 January 1933, and in it the animal is chained up in a picture.

Nüwa is the goddess who repaired the sky. When the four pillars holding up heaven collapsed and fire and flood broke loose, she smelted five colored stones into a patch, cut the legs off a giant sea turtle to prop the corners back up, and banked reed ash against the water. She is also credited with making the first people out of yellow clay. Those are two separate myths, from two books written about three centuries apart.

Pangu is the giant who separated heaven from earth. He grew inside a black egg of chaos for eighteen thousand years, pushed the clear half up and the murky half down, held them apart while he grew ten feet a day, and when he finally died his body became the world: his eyes the sun and moon, his blood the rivers, his hair the stars. He is also the latest arrival in Chinese mythology, first written down in the third century CE.

The Chinese phoenix, 凤凰 (fènghuáng), is the king of birds and the sign that the world is being governed well. It is also the most mistranslated animal in Chinese myth. It does not burn, it does not die, and it was never reborn from its own ashes until a Chinese poet borrowed that ending from Europe in 1920. What it actually does is arrive when the music is right.

The pixiu, 貔貅 (píxiū), is China's wealth beast: a winged, lion-bodied, horned creature said to swallow gold and never let it out again, which is why it turns up on jade bracelets, cash registers, and casino floors across the Chinese world. Its real history is stranger than the charm. For two thousand years the word meant crack troops, and the winged stone version standing outside Nanjing arrived from the far west with the lions.

The qilin, 麒麟 (qílín), is the gentlest creature in Chinese myth: a benevolent, scaled, hoofed animal with a deer's body, an ox's tail, and a soft horn, so kind it will not tread on a blade of grass. The West calls it the "Chinese unicorn." One of the four great auspicious animals, it appears when a sage is born or a golden age is coming, and it is the reason a real giraffe once caused a sensation at the Ming court.

The Queen Mother of the West, 西王母 (Xī Wáng Mǔ), also called Xiwangmu, is the Chinese goddess who keeps the peaches of immortality and decides who gets one. She is usually painted as a serene white-haired matriarch. The oldest text that names her describes something else entirely: a figure with a human face, a leopard's tail, tiger's teeth and a howl, living in a cave and holding the portfolio for plague and celestial punishment.

Shennong is the Divine Farmer, the figure credited with giving China agriculture, the marketplace and herbal medicine. The oldest surviving account has him tasting the flavors of the hundred plants to sort the edible from the poisonous, and meeting seventy poisons in a single day. It says nothing about tea, and nothing about him dying. Both of those arrived later, and one of them arrived astonishingly late.

Sun Wukong, 孙悟空 (Sūn Wùkōng), the Monkey King, is the breakout hero of the sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West and the most retold character in Chinese fiction. Born from a stone, armed with a shape-shifting staff taken from the Dragon King, he rebels against Heaven itself, is tamed on a pilgrimage to India, and ends as a Buddha. Rebel, trickster, and unlikely saint, he is now a global game and anime star.

The taotie is the face on the pot. It is the animal mask that covers Chinese ritual bronzes from roughly 1500 BCE onward: frontal, rigidly symmetrical, two enormous raised eyes, curling horns, and no lower jaw. What it is not is a monster with a story. The name taotie belongs to a glutton in a much later book, and the earliest surviving text that attaches it to the bronzes was written around 239 BCE, some nine hundred years after casters were already putting the face on vessels. Nobody knows what the Shang called it.

The Yellow Emperor, Huangdi, is the figure Chinese tradition puts at the head of its own history: the sovereign under whom writing, medicine, the calendar and the state are said to have arrived. He is almost certainly not a historical person, and the more interesting thing is what the oldest texts actually credit him with. Read them closely and he invents very little himself. He asks, and other people write it down.

The Vermilion Bird, 朱雀 (zhūquè), holds the south: summer, the element fire, and the direction a Chinese ruler faced when he sat down to govern. It is seven constellations running from Gemini to Corvus, it has a beak and a crop and a pair of wings that Sima Qian mapped onto real stars, and its name means, quite literally, "red sparrow."

The White Tiger, 白虎 (báihǔ), guards the west: autumn, the element metal, war, and punishment. It is also the least mythical of China's mythical beasts. The tiger is a group of stars, seven lunar mansions that include the Pleiades and all of Orion, and Sima Qian wrote down which stars are its shoulders more than two thousand years ago.

Zao Jun, 灶君 (zàojūn), the Chinese Kitchen God, lives above the stove, watches the household all year, and goes up to report what he has seen. He is one of the oldest gods still in domestic use: a proverb about him is quoted at Confucius in the Analects, and the earliest full account of his job, written around 320, describes a monthly audit that docks days off your life. The sugar on his mouth is a bribe, and it is a cheap version of an older one.

Zhong Kui, 钟馗 (Zhōng Kuí), is the demon queller of Chinese folk religion: a scowling, black-bearded figure with a drawn sword, hung on doors to keep the year's bad things outside. The story says he was a candidate who failed the imperial examination and came back from the dead to hunt demons for the emperor who had wronged him. The oldest surviving telling of that story is eleventh-century, and the scholar who wrote it down spent the next paragraph explaining why it could not be true.