Guan Yu (关羽): How a Defeated General Became a Chinese God

The career was not a success

It is worth being blunt about this, because almost nothing else written about Guan Yu is. He was a capable field commander who spent his last years holding Jing province for Liu Bei, launched a northern campaign in 219 that went brilliantly and then collapsed, lost the province to an alliance he had not expected, was cut off in the retreat, captured at Linju, and executed. He was somewhere around sixty. The state he served outlived him by forty-three years and then fell.

The record of all this is short. Chen Shou compiled the Records of the Three Kingdoms within about sixty years of the events, having grown up in the very state Guan Yu died for, and the biography he wrote runs to a few pages. It is not hagiography. Chen Shou's closing verdict on Guan Yu and his sworn brother Zhang Fei allows that both were worth ten thousand men, and then puts the knife in: Yu was hard and pleased with himself, and each of them was destroyed by his own defect, which is the ordinary way of things.

That is the man. Everything that follows is what China did with him.

The one incident that started it

Around the year 200, Guan Yu was separated from Liu Bei and taken by Cao Cao, the most powerful man in the empire and the one with the most to offer. Cao Cao offered it. Rank, gifts, a marquisate, the lot. Guan Yu accepted the hospitality, discharged his debt by killing an enemy commander for Cao Cao at Baima, then sealed up every single thing he had been given, left a letter, and rode back to Liu Bei, who at that point had almost nothing and was losing.

The detail that made this immortal is not Guan Yu's, though. It is Cao Cao's. When his staff wanted to send riders after the departing general, Cao Cao told them not to bother, on the grounds that each man serves his own lord. In four words of recorded speech the enemy certified the loyalty, which is a far stronger endorsement than any friend could have given, and Chinese moral literature has been quoting it ever since.

One episode. Everything downstream is built on it.

He entered the martial temple as a name on a wall

Here is the part that almost never survives translation into English, and it is the most interesting thing about him.

China had an official martial temple long before it had Guan Yu. In 731 the Tang court established a temple to Jiang Ziya, the strategist of the Zhou founding, and in 760 raised him to Wucheng Wang, King of Martial Accomplishment, with sacrifices explicitly set at the same rank as those offered to Confucius. That is where the parity of a martial sage with a civil sage actually comes from, and the man holding the post was not Guan Yu.

In 782 the court expanded the temple, adding sixty-four generals of history to be venerated alongside the king, in imitation of the worthies enshrined beside Confucius in the civil temple. Guan Yu is on that list. He appears in the roster under his lifetime rank, marquis of Hanshou, as one name among sixty-four, in a building dedicated to somebody else.

By the Qing dynasty, the main deity of the martial temple was Guan Yu, and the martial temple had become the Guandi temple. He did not join the institution at the top. He walked in as an item on the guest list and left owning the building. Our page on the character for warrior records where that ended, with Guan Yu level with Confucius; this is how the seat changed hands.

Sixteen hundred years of promotions

The paperwork is unusually well preserved, and reading it in sequence is like watching a share price.

He was first given a posthumous name by Shu Han in 260, forty-one years after his death: the Zhuangmiu Marquis. And immediately there is an argument, which is worth reporting honestly rather than smoothing over. The Explanations of Posthumous Names gives that second character, miu, three glosses, and all three are insults: it is what you call a man when his name and the reality diverge, when he injures people and blocks the worthy, when he obscures the good. On that reading the first honor the Shu state ever paid him was a coded complaint about losing Jing province. Other scholars, including the Qing commentator Lu Bi, argue that the character is here simply standing in for a homophone, mu, which is straightforwardly respectful, and that no criticism was meant at all. The evidence genuinely does not settle it. Either the god of loyalty began with a mild insult or he did not, and anyone who tells you confidently which is overselling their hand.

After that the direction is uniform and steep:

- 1102. The Song emperor Huizong makes him a duke, Zhonghui Gong, the Loyal and Gracious Duke. - 1108. Six years later, a king: Wu'an Wang, King of Martial Peace. - 1123. The title grows: Righteous and Valiant King of Martial Peace. - 1590. The Wanli emperor of the Ming makes him an emperor: Xietian Huguo Zhongyi Dadi, the Loyal and Righteous Great Emperor Who Aids Heaven and Guards the Realm. A subject of the Han has been raised to the rank of the reigning dynasty's own sovereign, which as far as the record goes had never been done for anyone else. - 1614. Wanli extends it again, into the Daoist register, with demon-subduing and celestial-worthy formulas attached. - 1879. Under the Guangxu emperor the official title reaches twenty-six characters, which unpack into something like this: Loyal and Righteous, Divinely Martial, Numinously Aiding, Benevolent and Brave, Awe-Inspiringly Manifest, Guardian of the Realm and Protector of the People, Wholehearted and Pacifying, Assisting and Proclaiming Virtue, the Sagely Emperor Lord Guan.

Twenty-six characters, for a man whose own government had given him three. Each Qing emperor in the sequence added a couple of characters of his own, the way successive owners add extensions to a house, and no one ever took any away.

The reason for all of it is not mysterious and the dynasties were fairly open about it. A state that needs soldiers and officials to stay loyal through defeat has an obvious use for a god who did exactly that, and the promotions cluster around periods when the dynasty in question was frightened.

The surgery is real. The surgeon is not.

Because Guan Yu is so thoroughly a figure of fiction now, readers assume the vivid material is invented and the dull material is history. It is very often the other way round.

The bone-scraping is real, or at least it is in the history. Chen Shou records that an old arrow wound had left poison in the bone of Guan Yu's left arm, that a doctor opened the arm and scraped the bone, and that Guan Yu, who happened to be entertaining his officers at the time, went on carving his meat and pouring his wine and talking and laughing while the blood ran off his elbow and filled the dish beneath it. That is in the third-century record, without embellishment.

What is not in the record is the doctor's name. The physician is anonymous. Hua Tuo, the legendary surgeon who performs the operation in every opera, television series and children's book, was assigned to the scene by Romance of the Three Kingdoms over a thousand years later.

The same sorting applies elsewhere. The red face is the novel's. The Green Dragon Crescent Blade is the novel's, and worse, it is an anachronism: the crescent-bladed polearm he is always shown holding is a Song-dynasty weapon that appears in the military manuals of the eleventh century, some eight hundred years after he could have carried one. The peach-garden oath with Liu Bei and Zhang Fei, which our page on righteousness covers in full, is likewise fourteenth-century fiction and does not appear in the third-century sources.

None of which has damaged him in the slightest. It is a useful reminder that the popular version of a figure and the historical one are not competing for the same job.

Why a general became the god of money

This is the strangest turn in the story and it has a completely rational explanation.

Guan Yu was born in Hedong Jie county, in the salt country of what is now southern Shanxi. In the Ming and Qing dynasties, Shanxi produced the most formidable merchant network in the empire, the Jinshang, who ran the long-distance trade and eventually the remittance banks that moved silver across China. They took their most famous native son as their patron.

The logic was practical rather than sentimental. Long-distance commerce in a country without enforceable commercial law is a problem of trust between strangers, often strangers separated by two thousand miles and several months. What the Shanxi houses had instead of contract law was reputation, sworn relationships, and a shared god who was famous above all for keeping his word when keeping it cost him everything. An oath sworn before Guan Yu was the enforcement mechanism. Wherever the Shanxi merchants built a guildhall, and they built them in every commercial city in China, they built a Guandi temple inside it, usually as the most conspicuous structure on the site.

That is how a third-century cavalry commander became the Wu Caishen, the martial god of wealth, and why to this day there is a small red shrine to him beside the till in a great many Chinese restaurants, shops and offices worldwide. The figure by the cash register is not there because he was good with money. He is there because he could not be bought.

Three religions claim him, and none of them will let go

Very few figures anywhere have been successfully annexed by every available tradition at once.

The Confucian state made him the martial sage, with a temple in every prefecture and sacrifices on the official calendar. Daoism enrolled him as an emperor of its own pantheon, a subduer of demons with a full liturgy. Chinese Buddhism absorbed him as the Qielan Pusa, the Sangharama, a guardian of monastery grounds, on the strength of a legend that has his ghost converted by a monk at Yuquan Temple near where he died; walk into a Chinese Buddhist monastery today and there is a reasonable chance of finding a long-bearded general standing guard in a side hall. Popular religion, meanwhile, took him as the god of sworn brotherhood, which is where the martial underworld's devotion comes from.

The modern result is a genuinely odd tableau, most visible in Hong Kong, where the same deity is venerated on altars inside police stations and on altars inside the premises of the societies the police are raiding. It looks like a contradiction and is not quite one. One side is honoring loyalty to a rightful authority and the other is honoring loyalty to the man standing next to you, and Guan Yu, who spent his career doing both and died doing the second, is a legitimate patron of either.

Where you meet him now

Outside China he is most often encountered with a controller in hand, as a playable general in Koei's Dynasty Warriors series or in Total War: Three Kingdoms, whose two modes ship the legend and the histories side by side and make you choose which one you are playing. Inside China he is inescapable: the shrine in the shop, the statue at the restaurant door, the temple complex at Xiezhou in his home county, one of the largest surviving Guandi temples in the world.

The thing worth holding onto is the shape of the whole arc. A man lost a war and was executed, and was given a posthumous name that may have been a rebuke. Sixteen centuries later his official title was twenty-six characters long, three religions were claiming him, and merchants two thousand miles from his birthplace were swearing contracts on his name. Nothing about that was inevitable, and all of it followed from a single afternoon when he gave the presents back.