The Life of Zhong Kui

His earliest trace is not in any pantheon but in state ritual. The Rites of Zhou record the Fangxiang: bearskin, four golden eyes, dark robes, spear and shield, leading a hundred men through the houses to drive out plague; at great funerals he strikes the four corners of the grave with his spear. Around the same time the Analects note that when the villagers perform the nuo exorcism, a gentleman stands in formal court dress on the eastern steps. Exorcism was both a rite of state and a village custom — almost everything the later Zhong Kui carries, he carries from here.

The name arrived before the man. The Artificers' Record says the great jade gui sceptre of the Son of Heaven has a "zhongkui head" — zhongkui here is a shape, glossed by later commentators as a mallet. In Ma Rong's Guangcheng Song, zhongkui already stands beside the Fangxiang exorcist and is something one can swing: the mallet of plague-expelling. How a mallet became a man is one of the great name-studies disputes of the Song and later — the mallet theory, the vegetable theory, the clan theory, none yielding to another.

By the Tang, Zhong Kui had become a state gift at year's end: the emperor sent a "painted Zhong Kui" together with a "new almanac scroll" to his ministers, and Zhang Yue and Liu Yuxi each left a thank-you memorial. The portrait, Liu writes, "raised the honour of the door" — it hung at the gate. Between Huainan and the court, once a year, every year.

The famous story is Emperor Xuanzong's dream: Zhong Kui, rejected in the military examinations, died by throwing himself on the palace steps, and promised to rid the empire of its void-devouring demons. Shen Kuo dated the story after the Kaiyuan era; Li Shi said outright that the dream origin is wrong; Song and Ming compendia cite the story "from the Yishi of the Tang", yet in the surviving recension attributed to Lu Zhao, a full-page search finds the character kui zero times. What carried the story, in the end, was the Ming and Qing leishu.

The painting histories gave him a pattern: the "Wu Daozi Zhong Kui pattern", which Huang Quan dared not alter; the Tuhua Jianwen Zhi kept a whole heading for "Zhong Kui patterns"; the Xuanhe Catalogue of Paintings judged his origin "finally without textual basis". Drama kept his name too — Shen Kuo records a wooden Zhong Kui puppet dance, Zhou Mi the "Zhong Kui chou" troupe of Lin'an. What the records prove is the presence of name and image, nothing more.

He also lived elsewhere: in 1072 Shenzong had his image carved on wood and printed for the two administrations, delivered at New Year's Eve by a palace commissioner — a dated record; the Bencao Gangmu admitted him as a materia medica name with appended prescriptions; Ming pantheons gave him a canonized title and a woodblock portrait. Then the Qing critics came back through a thousand years of accretion — Gu Yanwu on "zhongkui", Zhao Yi tracing the dream story to the Tianzhong Ji, the Siku editors redating the Xu Bowu Zhi from internal evidence. He became the ghost most carefully examined in Chinese textual history.