The Eight Immortals (八仙): Who They Are, and How the Eight Got Fixed

Eight people, one of them a woman, one of them a beggar, one of them a cripple with an iron crutch, and one of them riding a donkey backwards. They are not related, they did not live in the same century, and for several hundred years nobody could agree on who the eighth one was. They are the Eight Immortals, and if you have ever looked at a Chinese vase, a temple roof, a wedding cake, or a Jackie Chan film, you have met them.

The eight, and what each one carries

Every one of the eight is identified by an object. This is not decoration. It is a naming system, and once you have it you can read a great deal of Chinese art you previously had to guess at.

Now the useful part. Because the objects are so firmly attached, Chinese decorative art learned to use the objects alone, without the people. A fan, a sword, a fish drum, a flute, a gourd, a lotus, a basket and a pair of clappers, arranged around the shoulder of a jar, and any Chinese viewer knows exactly who is meant and what is being wished on the owner. The set has its own name, 暗八仙, the covert or hidden Eight Immortals, and the Western antiques trade knows it as the Eight Daoist Emblems, which is what the ceramics reference Gotheborg files it under.

It is the closest thing Chinese ornament has to a rebus. It also explains a very common experience: you look at an old bowl, count eight small unrelated objects around the rim, and cannot work out what they have to do with one another. They do not have to do with one another. They stand for eight people who are not in the picture.

The Eight Drunken Immortals, and the film that made them famous

Ask a Western audience about the Eight Immortals and a surprising number will answer with a martial arts film. That is Drunken Master, directed by Yuen Woo-ping and starring a 24-year-old Jackie Chan, which opened in Hong Kong on 5 October 1978, took the equivalent of nearly two million US dollars there, and ended the year as the second most popular film in the colony. Its whole structure is the eight: the young hero is drilled through eight drunken boxing forms, one named for each immortal, and the joke of the finale is that he has skipped He Xiangu's form because he was not willing to imitate a woman, and has to improvise it under fire.

Drunken boxing is real. So is the long association between these eight and wine, which runs through the poetry and the paintings and is a good part of why the group is fun rather than pious. The specific eight forms in the film are shakier. The film's own documentation, following its martial arts sources, records that the Eight Drunken Immortals set is very probably the invention of Yuen Woo-ping as choreographer, assembled out of routines borrowed from other systems rather than handed down intact from a school.

That is worth saying plainly, because the internet has spent forty years quietly promoting a 1978 fight scene into an ancient lineage. The film is magnificent. The lineage is a film credit.

Not gods, exactly

The word doing the work here is 仙 (xiān), which English translates as immortal and which is not at all the same as god. Chinese popular religion runs a celestial bureaucracy: the Jade Emperor at the top, ministries below him, gods holding posts with jurisdictions and paperwork, exactly like the earthly government it is modeled on, and you can read the whole org chart on our guide to the Chinese gods.

The eight are not in that bureaucracy. They are people who got out of dying, by discipline, by pill, by accident, or by meeting somebody who had already managed it, and who then spent eternity wandering about being difficult. They hold no office and answer to nobody. This is why they are the group the storytellers love: a god has responsibilities, and an immortal has time.

Two of them do have institutional weight. Zhongli Quan and Lü Dongbin are counted among the Five Northern Patriarchs of Quanzhen Daoism, one of the two great surviving Daoist schools, and that canonization was confirmed by imperial edict under the Yuan. The Lü Dongbin cult in particular grew enormous. The Palace of Eternal Joy in southern Shanxi, a Yuan temple complex whose murals are among the finest surviving in China, was built around him, and Paul Katz of Academia Sinica has written a whole book about how his legend and that building made each other. So one of the eight is simultaneously a comic character in a popular novel and a founding patriarch of a living religion, which tells you something about how Chinese religion actually works.

Crossing the sea

The story everyone knows is the crossing. The eight are on their way to a birthday party in the Western Paradise, they come to the sea, and Lü Dongbin proposes that instead of riding clouds like sensible immortals, each of them should get across on whatever they happen to be carrying. So Iron-Crutch Li floats on his gourd, Lan Caihe on the flower basket, Han Xiangzi in the flute, and so on across all eight. Lan Caihe's basket attracts the attention of a dragon prince, there is a theft, a rescue, and a fairly serious war with the Dragon King before the Bodhisattva Guanyin arrives to make everybody behave.

Out of it comes one of the most-used idioms in the language: 八仙过海，各显神通, the Eight Immortals cross the sea, each revealing their own divine powers. It is said of any group tackling the same problem by wildly different methods, and it is genuinely everyday speech, the sort of thing said about a project team or a set of siblings. It is also, quietly, a very good statement of the group's whole point, which is not teamwork but assortment.

The eight were not always these eight

Here is the part almost nobody writes in English, and it is the most interesting thing about the group.

The number came first. The membership came last.

Eight was already a set-making number in Chinese thought, and there were earlier Eight Immortals who have nothing to do with ours. The kingdom of Shu had a group of eight that includes the philosopher Laozi, the Han Confucian Dong Zhongshu, and Zhang Daoling, the founder of organized Daoism. Nothing about that list overlaps with the one on this page. It was simply eight immortals, from Shu.

By the Yuan dynasty a recognizable group is on stage, and the stage is where you can watch it wobble. Yuan drama loved these figures, and the plays do not agree with each other. In Ma Zhiyuan's Lü Dongbin Thrice Drunk at Yueyang Tower, the eight are listed by name and He Xiangu is not among them; her place is taken by a Song Daoist called Xu Shenweng, gourd on his back. In Yue Bochuan's play about Iron-Crutch Li, the odd man out is somebody called Zhang Silang. A Ming novel about the treasure fleets swaps in two more names again. The eight were a shape with interchangeable parts, and the parts kept being swapped.

What fixed them was a book. In the Ming dynasty Wu Yuantai wrote A Record of the Origins of the Eight Immortals and Their Journey to the East, usually shortened to Journey to the East, a fifty-six-chapter novel that gathered every scattered legend into one narrative, ran the eight through their mortal lives in order, and finished with the crossing of the sea. It is not a great novel. It did not have to be. It was popular, it was complete, and it was the version that got copied, staged, painted and eventually televised, so its cast list became the cast list.

That is the honest history of the Eight Immortals: a number that was waiting for members, a few centuries of substitutions, and a Ming bestseller that closed the door behind the last one in. If a page tells you the eight are ancient and fixed, it is repeating the novel's own claim about itself.

Three of them were real people

The other thing the retellings flatten is that some of these are documented human beings, and the documentation is remarkably unmagical.

Zhang Guo is in the dynastic history. The Old Book of Tang, completed in 945, gives him a biography among the Masters of Technique, and it opens by admitting that nobody knew where he came from: he lived hidden on Mount Zhongtiao in the time of Empress Wu, was reputed to hold a secret art of long years, and said of himself that he was several hundred years old. Emperor Xuanzong had him fetched to court, granted him an honorary senior rank and the Daoist name Master of Penetrating Mystery, and offered him the hand of the Princess Yuzhen, which Zhang declined with a line the historians thought worth preserving: to take a wife and get a princess, now that is a frightening thing. Everything about the backwards donkey, which folds up like paper when he is not riding it, is later. The court appointment is not.

Han Xiang was a Tang official. He is the grand-nephew of Han Yu, one of the greatest prose writers in the language, and we know this because Han Yu wrote a poem at him. In 819 Han Yu submitted a memorial objecting to the court receiving a finger-bone of the Buddha with honors, was demoted to a post at the far southern edge of the empire, and on the road, at a snowbound pass, his young relative caught up with him. The poem he wrote there is one of the most-memorized in Chinese, and its title says plainly what the folk tradition later garbled: Demoted, I Reach Blue Pass and Show This to My Grand-Nephew Xiang. Cloud lies across the mountains, the snow has closed the pass, the horse will not go on, and be ready to gather my bones by that fever-ridden river. Han Xiangzi the flute-playing immortal is a legend that later attached itself to that young man.

Cao Yi is the least romantic of all. He was born in 1018, grandson of a famous general, younger brother of the empress of Emperor Renzong, and he had precisely the career you would expect of a well-connected Song aristocrat: a run of prefectures, a string of military commissionerships, an enfeoffment as Prince of Jiyang. The History of Song preserves Emperor Shenzong praising him, and the praise is that he went home from court and never talked about state business. He died in 1089, at seventy-one, of nothing in particular. Then folk tradition made him the eighth immortal, the imperial brother-in-law with the jade clappers, admitted last and slightly awkwardly, which is roughly how he seems to have lived.

Lan Caihe was there first

The one who really breaks the "ancient fixed group" story is the beggar.

Lan Caihe appears in the Extensive Records of the Taiping Era, the enormous imperial anthology completed in 978, which the compilers credit to a Southern Tang collection of immortal biographies. The description is one of the great pieces of Chinese character writing, and it has survived unchanged for a thousand years: nobody knew where he came from, he wore a torn blue gown and a wide black wooden belt with six plaques on it, one foot had a boot on it and the other went bare, in summer he padded the gown with wadding and in winter he lay down in the snow and the breath came off him like steam off a pot. He begged through the towns with a set of great clappers, singing, drunk, and people followed him about to watch.

That is 978. It is roughly three centuries before anyone thought of putting eight of these people in a boat. Lan Caihe was a solo curiosity in an anthology long before the group existed, and the group, when it eventually formed, simply took him. He also arrives with his ambiguity intact. The text never says how old he is or, with any conviction, what gender he is, and the tradition has been comfortable with that ever since, which is why he is painted sometimes as a boy, sometimes as a young woman, and in the theater is often played by whoever is available.

What the eight are actually for

Put the roster back together and the design becomes obvious. An old man and a youth. A woman and seven men. A cripple and an athlete. A beggar, a scholar, a soldier and an imperial in-law. The eight are not a team with complementary powers, in the way a modern audience expects a group of eight to be. They are a sample. They cover the field of human conditions on purpose.

Which is the argument the group exists to make: the way out is not reserved. A Song empress's brother and a barefoot busker who sang for coins got through the same door, and the busker got there first by about four hundred years.

You will find the eight all over the rest of Chinese material culture once you start looking, most often at birthdays, because a group of deathless people is an obvious thing to wish on somebody turning eighty. The fuller pantheon they sit beside is worth having straight in your head, and if you want the other great Ming novel about somebody who declined to die on schedule, the Monkey King is a few centuries and one enormous personality away.