Pixiu (貔貅): China's Wealth Beast, and What It Used to Be

Walk through any Chinese jewelry shop, from Hong Kong to Vancouver, and you will meet the pixiu about forty times before you reach the till. It is carved on jade bangles and cinnabar beads, cast in gold for keychains, and molded in resin for the shelf beside the cash register: a squat, muscular, lion-bodied animal with wings folded flat against its back, a horn or two, and an expression somewhere between a guard dog and a gargoyle. The sales patter is always the same, and it is wonderfully direct. The pixiu eats money, the story goes, and cannot pass it. Whatever goes in stays in. Buy the bracelet.

It is one of the best-marketed animals in the world, and almost none of that is what it originally was. The classical pixiu is not a piggy bank. It is a war beast, and then a tomb guardian, and the road from there to your wrist runs through the deserts of Central Asia and the fields outside Nanjing.

It began as a word for troops

The oldest use of the name is a battle cry. In the Book of Documents, the collection of early speeches and proclamations that sits near the base of the Chinese canon, King Wu addresses his army on the morning of the battle that will end the Shang dynasty. Be valiant, he tells them, like tigers, like pi, like bears, like great bears. The pi is simply the fiercest thing he can think of to compare a soldier to, standing in a line with animals everyone in earshot has seen.

A thousand years later Sima Qian, writing the Records of the Grand Historian around 94 BCE, puts the pair pi and xiu into the Yellow Emperor's order of battle. Preparing to fight the Flame Emperor at Banquan, the founder-hero of the Chinese people cultivates virtue, musters his troops, plants the grains, comforts the people, and trains the bears, the great bears, the pi, the xiu, the chu and the tigers. Read that list plainly and you notice something the charm sellers never mention: the pixiu is introduced to Chinese literature as a unit in an army.

That stuck. For the next two thousand years, right through the imperial period, calling an army pixiu was standard literary praise, the way an English writer might call troops lions. A general's crack regiments were his pixiu. A poet describing the imperial guard reached for the same word. If you had said "pixiu" to a Tang official he would have thought of soldiers, not savings.

The winged lions came from the west

The other half of the story arrives from outside China altogether, and it arrives with real lions.

The Book of Han, completed around 111 CE, describes a far-western country called Wuyishanli, out past Jibin in the direction of what is now Afghanistan, and notes what it has that home does not: the taoba, the lion, and the rhinoceros. The third-century commentator Meng Kang added the gloss that made the creature famous. The taoba, he wrote, also called the fuba, resembles a deer with a long tail; the one-horned kind is the tianlu, "heavenly emolument," and the two-horned kind the bixie, "evil-averting."

Two things are worth noticing there. First, this is a report about foreign fauna, filed alongside the lion and the rhinoceros, which is to say that the Chinese first meet this beast as something from very far away. Second, the winged lion is one of the great shared images of the ancient world, at home in Assyria, Achaemenid Persia, and Greek art long before it reaches the Yellow River. The stone beasts that follow in China are usually read by art historians as evidence of exactly that traffic, arriving along the same routes as the horses, the grapes and the glass.

It helps to remember that China has no lions. The animal is not native to any part of it, and it reached the Han court the way ostriches did, as a diplomatic gift. In the eleventh lunar month of 87 CE an envoy from Parthia presented the emperor with a lion and an ostrich, and more arrived over the following centuries from Sogdiana, Samarkand and the Yuezhi, as pelts, as live tribute, and as stories carried by Buddhist travelers along the same roads. So the most Chinese-looking object in the world, the stone lion crouched outside the bank, the restaurant and the temple gate, is descended from an animal almost nobody in China had ever seen. The sculptors were working from description, which is precisely why the results look less like lions than like something better.

That is the family the pixiu belongs to. It is a lion assembled out of hearsay, given wings borrowed from Persia and horns borrowed from nobody in particular, and then put to work.

The beasts outside Nanjing

What China then did with the imported lion was to plant it in front of the dead. Stone tianlu and bixie appear at Han tombs and reach their peak in the Southern Dynasties, in the fifth and sixth centuries, when the emperors and princes of a string of short-lived southern courts were buried in the countryside around modern Nanjing, Danyang and Jurong.

They are still there, scattered across the fields and villages of Jiangsu, mostly stranded far from any tomb that survives, some tilted, some armless, all of them monumental: chests thrown forward, mouths open, tongues out, stubby wings carved in tight scrolls along the flank, walking on the spot toward a spirit road that vanished a millennium ago. They are listed among the country's major protected historical sites, and one of them, a bixie, serves as the emblem of the city of Nanjing. If you want to know what a pixiu actually looks like when it is not a keychain, that is the answer: far bigger than the person photographing it, weathered to the color of oatmeal, and standing in somebody's cabbage field.

Their job at the tomb was protection and status, not profit. They kept malevolent things away from the dead and announced the rank of the person buried behind them, which is why the evil-averting name, bixie, is the one that stuck to the type. Nobody was asking them for money.

The beast with no way out

So where does the money come from? The honest answer is: recently, and from nobody in particular.

The story everyone tells goes like this. The pixiu was a heavenly creature, greedy and badly behaved, and it fouled the floor of heaven once too often. The Jade Emperor, out of patience, struck it hard enough to seal its rear end permanently shut, leaving an animal that can swallow gold, silver and jewels forever and never pass a single coin. Hence its appetite for treasure, hence its usefulness to you, hence the bracelet.

It is a genuinely good story, and it is not in the classics. It does not appear in the Book of Documents, or in Sima Qian, or in the Book of Han, or in the standard early bestiaries where the pixiu is a war animal or a grave guardian. Chinese Wikipedia's own entry on the creature notes plainly that the wealth-and-protection beliefs attached to it lack any classical textual foundation, which is an unusually blunt thing for an encyclopedia to say about a national favorite, and it is correct. What we have is a modern folk tradition, propagated with enormous energy by the people who sell the objects, resting on an ancient and perfectly real animal.

Saying so does not spoil anything. Plenty of the world's best customs are younger than they look. It only means that if someone tells you the pixiu has been guarding Chinese wealth for five thousand years, they are selling you a bracelet.

How people use it now

The contemporary etiquette is remarkably consistent for something with no scripture behind it. The head faces outward, away from the wearer and toward the world, so the beast can go hunting and bring things home. You wear a single one on a wrist rather than a competing pair. The stone is often matched to your own element, so a Fire person is steered toward red agate and a Water person toward dark jade. Some sellers add that you should not let strangers handle it, which is either a sound piece of ritual hygiene or an excellent way to sell a second one.

In shops and restaurants the pixiu sits near the register or the door, looking out, which is the one placement rule everybody agrees on. The logic of the whole charm, once you say it plainly, is unusually frank about what it wants: an animal chosen specifically because it is understood to be incapable of giving anything back.

Set beside the qilin, which arrives to announce that a sage has been born, the pixiu is the other end of the Chinese imagination about lucky beasts: not an omen you wait for but an employee you hire. Both belong to the wider bestiary of auspicious animals, and the pixiu is the only member of it that has ended up with a job in retail.

If you would rather work with the room than with the ornament, the tradition has a more structured answer for money, and it starts with where the wealth spot in your home actually is. That question has three competing answers, two of them Chinese and one of them Californian, and our feng shui wealth guide sorts out which is which. The character side of the same subject, the difference between wealth, fortune, and the blessing you wish on someone at New Year, lives on the symbol for prosperity.

None of that changes what the beast is. Strip off the marketing and the pixiu remains one of the more impressive things China ever imagined: a lion that flew in from Persia, learned to guard emperors, spent fifteen centuries standing in a field, and then, in living memory, got a job watching the cash.