The Cult of the Fox: Power, Gender, and Popular Religion in Late Imperial and Modern China 9780231508223

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Map: The Chinese Empire in the Early Twentieth Century
Introduction
1. Foxes in Early Chinese Tradition
2. Huxian and the Spread of the Fox Cult
3. Foxes and Domestic Worship
4. Foxes and Spirit Mediums
5. Foxes and Local Cults
6. Fox Spirits and Officials
Conclusion
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Cult of the Fox

Xiaofei Kang

The Cult of the Fox Power, Gender, and Popular Religion in Late Imperial and Modern China

Columbia U niversit y Pres s New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York

Chichester, West Sussex

Copyright © 2006 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kang, Xiaofei. The cult of the fox : power, gender, and popular religion in late imperial and modern China / Xiaofei Kang. p.

cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–231–13338–8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–231–50822–3 (e-book) 1. Foxes—China—Religious aspects. 2. Cults—China. II. Title: Power, gender, and popular religion in late imperial and modern China. II. Title. BL2211.I5K36 299.5’11212—dc22

2005 2005041377

A Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

To Wang Wei and Alex

~!

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments xi Map: The Chinese Empire in the Early Twentieth Century

Introduction 1 1. Foxes in Early Chinese Tradition 14 2. Huxian and the Spread of the Fox Cult 44 3. Foxes and Domestic Worship 72 4. Foxes and Spirit Mediums 97 5. Foxes and Local Cults

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6. Fox Spirits and Officials 161 Conclusion

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Notes 203 Glossary 235 Bibliography Index 261

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Illustrations

Map

The Chinese Empire in the Early Twentieth Century

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The Queen Mother of the West, the nine-tailed fox, and other attendants on a tomb brick from Sichuan, first–second century a.d.

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Figure 1.2

A Daoist talisman for summoning fox spirits.

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Figure 1.3

Daoist talismans for the expulsion of fox demons.

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Figure 3.1

Portrait of the fox, Hu Santaiye (Grandpa/Master Hu the Third), and his retainers dressed as Qing mandarins.

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Figure 3.2

Portrait of the Five Animal Spirits in the early twentieth century.

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Figure 4.1

Daoist exorcistic ritual performed for a family haunted by a fox spirit.

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Figure 4.2

A literati visit to a fox shrine hosted by a female medium.

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Figure 5.1

Bixia Yuanjun (The Perfected of the Azure Clouds), also known as Taishan niangniang (Mother Taishan), in the temple of the Mountain of the Marvelous Peak, Beijing.

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Wang Sannainai (Granny Wang the Third) in the temple of the Mountain of the Marvelous Peak, Beijing.

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The Stone Buddha, with its vague features, in the Jieyin temple, Boluo, Shaanxi province.

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The fox as a Diamond King beside Buddha in the Jieyin temple, Boluo, Shaanxi province.

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Figure 1.1

Figure 5.2

Figure 5.3

Figure 5.4

Acknowledgments

I am greatly indebted to Bob Hymes, a most inspiring scholar, stimulating teacher, and supportive friend. I am also very grateful to my other teachers at Columbia and to the readers on my dissertation committee: William de Bary, Paul Rouzer, Michael Tsin, Pei-yi Wu, Shang Wei, Myron Cohen, and Valerie Hansen. I also wish to express my special gratitude to Paul Katz, who has been a constant source of encouragement and support and whose comments on various versions of the manuscript were immensely helpful in my final revisions. The following people have read the whole or parts of my work and offered invaluable criticism from historical and literary perspectives: Robert Campany, Christian de Pee, Liu Jianmei, Donald Sutton, Michael Szonyi, Tian Xiaofei, Zhang Dongming, and an anonymous reviewer for Columbia University Press. Sarah Schneewind read the manuscript more than once with enthusiasm and insightful comments. She and Rachel Schneewind also provided editorial help at different stages of my writing. My work also benefited from scholarly exchanges with Shin-yi Chao, Thomas Dubois, Qitao Guo, David Johnson, and Terry Kleeman at AAS panels. Rania Huntington and Li Jianguo generously shared their works and sources with me. James Flath and Chen Xia kindly provided leads to visual materials. Wendy Lochner, Leslie Kriesel, and Christine Mortlock at Columbia University Press shepherded the manuscript into print with great patience. I would also like to thank my wonderful colleagues at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Christine Adams, Linda Hall, Chuck Holden, and Tom Barrett offered advice when I sought publishers. Jingqi Fu helped me make academic connections in Beijing. In addition to providing much valuable professional advice during our long commute together, Gail Savage read the

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introduction and offered valuable insights as a non-China specialist. Pam Hicks, Sandy Robbins, Lucy Myers, and Jeff Krissoff are the best administrative and technical backup one could ever find. My research and ethnographic work in China during the academic year 1997–1998 was made possible by the Columbia Traveling Fellowship. My subsequent trips to China in 2001 and 2002 were sponsored by faculty development grants from St. Mary’s College. While I was in China, Professors Sun Qinshan, Wang Lan, Zhang Yufan, and Zhang Honghong afforded me a friendly intellectual home at Beijing University. Gu Qing, Liu Xinming, Zhang Wei, and Zhan Yiping helped me locate rare materials. My cousin Li Guangxin arranged my trip to Miaofengshan, and my informants in Yulin treated me with incredible hospitality. When I first came to the United States, I was fortunate to study with Professors Josh Fogel, Alan P. L. Liu, Kenneth Hsien-yung Pai, William Powell, Kuo-Ch’ing Tu, and Mayfair Yang at the University of California at Santa Barbara. They taught me and, in Professor Pai’s case, “brainwashed” me, with refreshing ideas and personal warmth, each in their own way. Above all, I owe a great debt of gratitude to Professor Ron Egan, who ushered me into the academic field with kindness, patience, and rigorous standards. He has been a role model for me as a teacher and a scholar. I am also grateful to Susan Egan, who has been equally supportive all these years and whose noble personality and incredible talents have won my deepest respect and admiration. My life in America would not be possible without Bob Orr and Bonnie and Jack Orr, who helped me out of China in the aftermath of 1989 and have welcomed my family into the wonderful Orr family with so much love and support. I also deeply appreciate Carol Huang’s encouragement and support during and beyond my Columbia years. In China, my in-laws, Wang Kezhu and Yang Suzhuang, devoted so much time to babysitting through several hot summers in Beijing so that I could travel and write at ease. My sister-in-law, Wang Xiaoqing, and her husband, Liu Tongpeng, scanned visual materials for me. My sisters, Kang Yanfei and Kang Zhanfei, have done so much to lessen the family burdens on my shoulders so that I could focus on my work. Most of all, my parents, Kang Jidong and Li Zhaoxia, have always answered whenever and wherever I asked for help and stood by me through ups and downs. To them, and especially to my father, who did not live to see the book in print, nothing I say can repay their love and kindness. I also thank my grandmother, my dear Laolao, who showered my childhood with abundant love, care, and fun folk stories. My initial interest

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in foxes and spirits can be traced to her. In memory of her, I open the book with a story about her. Finally, my husband Wang Wei has sustained me through all these years with his confidence, humor, intelligent conversations, and unconditional support. My son Alex was born the same year I finished my dissertation and has grown up with the book. He has been a constant source of inspiration with his bright smiles, surprising ideas, and so many little “books” he has drawn. To them this book is dedicated.

~! A section of chapter 1 was previously published as “The Fox (hu) and the Barbarian (hu): Unraveling Representations of the Other in Late Tang Tales” in Journal of Chinese Religions 27 (1999): 35–67. A section of chapter 5 appeared in a slightly different form in Minsu quyi (Journal of Chinese Ritual, Theater, and Folklore) 138 (2002): 67–110 under the title, “In the Name of Buddha: The Cult of the Fox at a Sacred Site in Contemporary Shaanxi.”

The Chinese Empire in the Early Twentieth Century

The Cult of the Fox

Introduction

My mother recalls that the backyard of her childhood home in a suburb of Beijing during the 1940s contained a small shrine. It was dedicated to a “xianjia,” the respectful term for fox spirits in the local language. Throughout her childhood, she tried to avoid it, and whenever she had to pass by, she ran as fast as she could without daring to look at it. She was afraid that if she came in close contact with the shrine she would invoke the spirits inside, causing them to haunt her and visit disasters upon her. As frightening as the fox spirits might be, however, it was common, if unspoken knowledge in the family that maintaining the shrine would ensure good fortune and well-being. When my uncle, my mother’s only brother, fell seriously ill and had a high fever at age fourteen, my grandmother made offerings at the fox shrine and prayed. That night, my mother told me, my grandmother dreamed of a gray-haired, white-bearded man who descended to my uncle’s bedside and wiped his face once with his long sleeves. Next morning the fever subsided, and the boy soon recovered. The family believed that the white-bearded man was a fox spirit. I would never have heard this anecdote had I not asked my family about any knowledge of the fox cult during a research trip back to China in 1997. For my mother, as well as for many other ordinary people in north China,

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things like that were too trivial or too improper to mention in family history. After all, the fox cult had been branded as “feudal superstition” and banned during both the Republican and the Communist eras. When corroborated by the numerous fox stories in anecdotal literature produced during the Ming (1368–1644), Qing (1644–1911), and Republican (1911–1949) times, however, the family story about the ambiguous fox spirit reflects a tradition that has been deeply entrenched in the local life of north China for centuries.

Marginal Foxes, Illicit Cults, and Cultural Diversity For the Chinese, the fox has long been “betwixt and between”: it roams in the wild and remains untamable for domestic uses, yet it preys on domestic fowl, builds dens in human settlements, and demonstrates quasi-human intelligence. No clear line divides natural and supernatural foxes in popular imagination. Ji Yun (1724–1805), a famous scholar and an enthusiastic compiler of fox stories, summarizes the creature’s marginality: Humans and things are different species, and foxes lie in between humans and things; darkness and lightness take different paths, and foxes lie in between darkness and lightness; divine transcendents and demons follow different ways, and foxes lie in between divine transcendents and demons.

The marginality of the fox has generated manifold interpretations over the course of history. For example, “huli jing” (fox essence), a colloquial expression, connotes a dualism recognized by all: the enchantment of a female beauty and her power of lustful destruction. Another general term for fox spirits, “huxian” (literally, fox transcendent, fox genie, or fox fairy), is not merely an honorific for benign foxes, as its literal translation suggests. It also carries an ingratiating undertone by which people propitiate baneful foxes. Sources about fox spirits and fox cults paint even more complex and often self-contradictory pictures. An encounter with a fox spirit could turn into deadly intercourse with a vampire, or a pleasant romance and even marriage. Fox spirits might appear as women or men and transform themselves into youths or elders; they are just as variable as human beings themselves. At certain times they act like ghosts, haunting and bewitching people, causing sickness or death; at others they assume the role of ancestors, granting wealth and prosperity. They sometimes appear as female dei-

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ties, ensuring fertility or performing healing services; or they turn out to be white-bearded, gray-haired men, lecturing on the Dao or providing moral guidance. As deities of demonic origins, they are worshipped on some occasions and exorcised on others. The marginality of the fox spirit is expressed both locally and nationally. Although modern zoological research finds that foxes populate almost every region of the Chinese mainland, the Chinese since medieval times have believed that these animals, being innately spiritual, were unique to north China, and that their appearance south of the Yangzi River was rare. Almost all of the surviving medieval fox tales are set in north China, and a tenth-century proverb stated: “There are no wild foxes south of the [Yangzi] River and no partridges north of the [Yangzi] River.” This view persisted into the Ming and Qing periods, when fox worship was still regarded as a phenomenon particular to the north, even though it had expanded to many other parts of China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Families and villages in north China and Manchuria (today’s Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning provinces and eastern Inner Mongolia) worshipped foxes of different identities and under different titles. Worship of the fox was a personal, familial, local, and regional practice. It varied from person to person, village to village, and region to region. But the fox spirit was also well known nationwide, for its spiritual capability and enchanting power are amply demonstrated in literati anecdotal writings, dramas, and vernacular novels that have circulated all over China since medieval times. Foxes have been a familiar topic in Chinese literary studies, and much attention has been devoted to them as spellbinding beauties, whose female charm exemplifies the perpetual struggle for human control of unbridled desires. Little is known, however, about fox spirits as a religious phenomenon that has lasted for more than a thousand years, or about the connection between local religious practices and literary writings about them. This book, therefore, focuses on the cult of the fox in north China from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Traditionally, cults dedicated to such capricious deities were labeled by Chinese officials and elites as yin, which can be translated as “illicit,” “excessive,” “licentious,” “lewd,” “profligate,” or “improper.” For centuries they have been the targets of state and clerical proscription and suppression, yet their repeated appearances in historical records testify to the ultimate failure of such control. Using the example of the fox cult, I examine how the illicit cults reveal the nature of Chinese religion, with special interest in the ways in which gender was used

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to construct religious power. Through the theme of illicit cults and gender, I explore the broader subject of the role of a multivocal religious symbol in expressing Chinese cultural unity and diversity. As an object of both worship and exorcism, the fox spirit shares features with many spirits and deities with illicit qualities in Chinese religion. From the Song on, for example, the fox was considered a northern parallel of the Wutong spirit in the south. The two haunted, bewitched, and granted wealth in much the same ways. The fox was also associated with the dangerous power of female sexuality, which it wielded through spirit mediums. In this respect it was cast as a subordinate of Bixia Yuanjun (The Perfected of the Azure Cloud, hereafter also referred to as Bixia), a prominent female deity in north China, and often functioned as her alter ego. In addition, the fox spirit in rural north China was sometimes comparable with plague spirits bearing names such as Five Commissioners of Epidemics in Zhejiang, Five Fury Spirits (wuchang) in Anhui, or Five Emperors (wudi) in Fujian, for it specialized in inflicting as well as curing diseases. In fact, during the late Qing and the early Republic, the fox was often worshipped together with four other animals—another local cult that was formed by a group of five and called Five Great Families (wudajia). Despite these similarities with other cults, the fox cult was unique. Based primarily in north China, it never encountered large-scale official suppression during late imperial times, as did the Wutong in Jiangnan. Also, images of fox spirits ranged from male to female and from young to old. They were much more diversified than the Wutong, which only appeared as a young man. In addition, the Wutong wielded its capricious power mainly in the domestic arena, whereas the fox thrived in nooks and crannies everywhere and harassed people in homes, travelers’ lodges, and government offices. The fox’s wider range of activities in the specific economic and cultural conditions of north China also had a different impact on the cult’s development and dissemination. First, the fox cult’s popularity in north China seems to lack the strong support of lineage organizations and commercial gentry-elite demonstrated in the cases of the Five Emperors cult in Fujian and the Five Fury Spirits cult in southern Anhui. Second, in many parts of north China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fox as a god of wealth shows little of the association with urban bourgeois ethics that marked the transformation of the Wutong in the highly commercialized Jiangnan region. Instead, the fox’s frequent invasions of government offices seem to echo various forms of local resistance in north China. They posed a constant threat to state of-

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ficials, who by the late Qing made offerings to foxes as the “Great Guardians of the Official Seal” (Shouyin daxian). Many historians and anthropologists have argued that late imperial China witnessed an increasingly high degree of social integration and cultural homogenization and that the imperial state, offi cials, educated elite, and ordained clergy were the major agents who promoted and disseminated official standards and interpretations. The history of the fox cult, however, not only demonstrates the limited role of these agents in assuming control of local cults but, more important, also questions the assumption of an underlying cultural unity. Some scholars have challenged this assumption with studies of celebrated elite cults and/or of areas of south China and Taiwan, where sources are much richer than for the marginal cult of the fox in north China. Instead of looking at individual social groups or institutions as the embodiment of a standardizing power, they call for a shift of our attention to the actual processes through which beliefs and practices are produced and to the role of human beings as cultural actors who make different choices from a repertoire of religious models and systems according to “differences in their places in society, the situations in which they find themselves, and their views of religious and secular authority.” The study of the fox cult joins with these theoretical efforts to seek a new understanding of Chinese religion and culture. It shows that the process of cultural integration is inseparable from the production of variations. Fox cult practices, to borrow Robert Weller’s words, “nourish a rich surfeit of multivocalic meaning which opens up many interpretative possibilities.” By examining the fox cult as a local as well as national phenomenon, I distinguish the different roles played by ordinary folks, spirit mediums, officials, and elite scholars in its practices. On the one hand, people used official language and public standards to aggrandize and legitimize the power of local cults with illicit content, like the fox, in order to promote the efficacy of the cults and to justify their pursuits. On the other hand, people found it difficult to evoke the powers of prominent deities through personal capacities and for personal purposes. They consistently resisted standardizing the deities, by ascribing to them personal, local and imperfect characters and by creating new subcults, so as to always keep the power of the illicit cults within reach. People from all walks of life consciously manipulated gendered images of the fox to negotiate the moral and political order in the family and local community and to construct the relationship between state and society.

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The Power of the “Betwixt and Between” Both anthropologists and historians have emphasized the significance of the betwixt and between for the study of culture. Mary Douglas, for example, gives special importance to boundary-crossing animals and spirits in assuring social and moral order. She argues that in a given society, what is perceived to be ambiguous and marginal tends to be regarded as ritually unclean, hence defiling established principles. The marginality of such beings discharges both danger and power to the dominant patterns of the existing social structure. Victor Turner further elaborates the symbolism of marginality and ritual. He contends that rituals are organized around certain key symbols that simultaneously encompass many different meanings. Only by relating the ritual symbols to social experience can one decipher their multivocality. Turner also develops the concept of liminality: Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. As such, their ambiguous and indeterminate attributes are expressed by a rich variety of symbols in the many societies that ritualize social and cultural transitions. Thus, liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon.

In other words, the betwixt and between represents a liminal phase, an ambiguous and paradoxical stage of being neither this nor that—or being both. It is a ritual stage that allows people to change from one state to another, and thereby to reorder the world and to gain new power to deal with life. Liminal situations and roles tend to be conceived as “dangerous, inauspicious, or polluting to persons, objects, events, and relationships that have not been incorporated into the liminal context.” In popular culture and folk literature, they are likened to marginal groups, such as shamans, mediums, magicians, and jesters, who usually come from the bottom of society yet are endowed with the ritual power of the weak to reverse established social structures and express cultural oppositions. Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu also shed light on the ways in which power is wielded in social practices. For Foucault, power does not rest in an individual, a social group, the laws, or the state. Rather, it is omnipresent, permeating every single aspect of life. It must be understood as “the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate

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and which constitute their own organization.” Resistances are embedded in the dense web of power relations and take many different forms: violent, spontaneous, or compromised. Just as this web cuts across apparatus and institutions, “so too the swarm of points of resistance traverses social stratifications and individual unities.” In his study of the Kabyle (a Berber people living east of Algiers), Bourdieu identifies two types of power at work in society. Official power is attributed to men. It is derived from the formal structure of the kinship hierarchy and associated with “disinterested, collective, publicly avowable, legitimate interests.” But in reality, unofficial power, which is attributed to women and represents “the egoistic, private, particular interests,” is also exercised, often “under the cover of an official authority.” People can use “officializing strategies” to make the largest possible group conform to collective interests, or deploy “unofficial power” to adapt to private situations. Applying his findings to human social organization in general, Bourdieu concludes that these powers are generated and conditioned by the habitus, which serves as a cultural repertoire from which human agents develop endless strategies to cope with life and maintain coherence and structure. Sexual and gender relationships, according to Bourdieu, have social and political meanings and are reflected in temporal and spatial arrangements of the domestic and public space. Echoing Foucault and Bourdieu, Joan Scott highlights the importance of gender as an analytical category. She defines it as “a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power.” The construction of gender relationships, in other words, is implicated in the process of conceptualizing and theorizing class, race, ethnicity, religion, politics, and any aspect of people’s social experiences. Religious symbols, and cultural symbols in general, evoke multiple interpretations that constantly negotiate and compete with one another. They symbolize power relationships of human agents and social institutions in a given historical context. From different angles, these scholars provide theoretical tools with which to go beyond the conventional boundaries between the elite and the popular and study different appropriations of the fox spirit in the exercise of power in Chinese society. Feared yet worshipped, the fox embodied popular perceptions of marginal groups, ranging from daughters and daughtersin-law in family life to courtesans, entertainers, spirit mediums, migrants, and outlaws in society at large. The cult of the fox harbored morally ambiguous pursuits, such as trading sex for money or stealing from one family to enrich another. It also symbolized politically dubious activities, for fox

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spirits were believed to preach sectarian teachings, instigate rebellions, and take up residence in government offices. I will therefore show that wielding the power of the fox in everyday life involved a complex process of negotiating, safeguarding, and challenging well-established social and cultural boundaries in late imperial and modern Chinese society. Furthermore, instead of identifying the power of the fox with a particular social group or institution, I study how such power was actually produced in the process of fox worship and fox exorcism. In particular, I pay attention to how people imagined the power of the fox in the context of their social and religious life. The ways they reacted to fox spirits in relation to ancestors, ghosts, gods, and goddesses in specific contexts, rather than the normative labels and titles they applied to the spirits, invested them with both public and private meanings. As foxes freely crossed gender boundaries, their powers were used to define the official and unofficial, private and public, and moral and immoral in social and religious practices. Their marginality embodied cultural conflicts and compromises in everyday life. Cult practices, characterized by a variety of activities of worshipping, exorcising, and writing about fox spirits, reveal diverse popular conceptions of contending power relationships in Chinese society and offer valuable insights into the complex ways Chinese people constructed social order and cultural values.

Sources and Methods Anybody who studies Chinese local cults will encounter the problem of scanty sources, and this problem is especially acute in the case of the fox cult. Throughout Chinese history, fox spirits surfaced only occasionally in formal genres such as government documents, standard histories, local gazetteers, Daoist and Buddhist scriptures, and literati anthologies, for they belonged to a terrain about which Confucians did not speak. Also, as I shall show in the following chapters, fox shrines were generally established in insignificant and private places, such as backyards, doorways, or bedchambers, and in extremely simple forms, such as a wooden box, unnamed tablet, or haystack. These shrines were ephemeral, easily erected and quickly torn down. When worshipped in public places, foxes were regularly shielded in temples dedicated to prominent gods or goddesses. These characteristics of the fox cult indicate that its practices might be considered not only inappropriate but also less notable for independent entries in local gazetteers and formal documents. Informal anecdotal writings in the form

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of biji (miscellaneous notes) and zhiguai (accounts of anomalies), as the “petty talk” (xiaoshuo) outside of official historiography, were convenient tools for the literati to freely discuss the fox cult and the illicit practices fox spirits embodied. They constitute the richest source of material. During the late Qing and the early Republic, when local customs and religious practices became serious subjects of historical and ethnographic research, fox cult practices began to appear in local gazetteers and works by scholars and missionaries. My study of the fox cult in late imperial and modern north China, therefore, relies heavily on records from the vast repertory of literati anecdotal writings, while using other types of sources as supplements. I sometimes intentionally parallel sources from modern gazetteers, ethnographic records, and missionary reports with anecdotal writings from earlier times to suggest possible historical similarities and continuities and to overcome the shortage of materials from premodern times. The validity of anecdotal writings as historical records is now widely recognized by scholars of Chinese history and religion. In his groundbreaking study of zhiguai writings in early medieval China, Robert Campany shakes the conventional idea that zhiguai are fictional creations and argues that they were compiled as verifiable historical accounts to fulfill different religious and political agendas. Edward Davis maintains that the anecdotes in the Southern Song collection of Yijianzhi (Records of the Listener) are not folktales, but primarily a “record of subjective experiences, a document of private life that contrasts with such public documents as historical biographies, eulogies, and grave inscriptions.” Based also on Yijianzhi, Robert Hymes argues that biji and zhiguai are a special form of historiography providing the literati a means to discuss matters regarding gods, spirits, and other miscellaneous topics unsuitable for formal genres. An assertion of authenticity was deeply embedded in the traditional biji and zhiguai genres. Many Ming-Qing compilers of fox stories adopted a serious attitude and formats similar to those employed when writing official histories. They collected materials from all types of people, ranging from poor peasants to high officials and from household women and servants to traveling merchants and monks. They sought to transcribe tales as accurately as possible, carefully identified their informants and references, and claimed loyalty to the truth. Qing anecdotal writings have been divided into two opposite types: one represented by Pu Songling (1640–1715)’s Liaozhai zhiyi (Liaozhai’s Records of the Strange, hereafter referred to as Liaozhai) and the other by Ji Yun’s Yuewei caotang biji (Random Jottings at the Cottage of Close Scrutiny, here-

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after referred to as Yuewei), both major collections of fox stories that attracted large numbers of followers. Liaozhai is hailed as a masterpiece of Chinese fiction, inheriting the Tang tradition of chuanqi marked by wellrounded characters and full development of narrative plots. Ji Yun opposes this trend toward literary re-creation of folklore and emphasizes the faithful recording of original informants in the form of brief zhiguai anecdotes as a prerequisite for expounding on moral ideas. Leo Tak-hung Chan’s study of Yuewei points out that “truthfulness and didactic utility were the twin principles that buttressed his [Ji Yun’s] compilation,” and “whether the events involving the supernatural did occur and whether the accounts were authentic were of crucial significance.” The zhiguai writings of Ji Yun’s style can be more easily accepted as a historical source. We should, however, note that works like Pu Songling’s also have important historical value. Despite his literary fame, Pu investigated in a serious manner and named himself Historian of the Strange (Yishi shi). As Judith Zeitlin notes, “the title conveys the sense of comprehensiveness traditionally associated with historical writing,” and “this particular understanding of ‘history’ and ‘historian’ was rooted in private forms of historiography” that can be traced to the Han historian Sima Qian (145–86? b.c.). The voluminous collection of Liaozhai is actually comprised of both lengthy chuanqi-style stories and brief anecdotes. The latter were largely drawn from first-hand storytelling and personal experiences of Pu’s friends and family and Pu himself, and they include accurate information on specific historical events and the official titles of real figures. Many of the chuanqi-style stories, which have attracted the most scholarly attention and gained Pu Songling his extraordinary fame, were in fact derived from personal experience or oral storytelling as well. In crafting them into sophisticated literary compositions, Pu either deliberately straddled the border of truth and fictionality or simply claimed authenticity as a zhiguai writer. He also used structures and symbols similar to those in brief zhiguai anecdotes. Any form of writing is a process of re-creation. Even for those who claimed to transcribe what they heard verbatim, personal tastes, individual writing styles and agendas, and different contexts in which the stories were recounted would all significantly influence different versions of the same story. Rather than determining how much the Ming-Qing records are fictional inventions and how much they have preserved oral narratives from the “original” informants, we should see that different types of literati records both were produced by and contributed to the transmission of the fox cult. The process of fictionalization exemplifies at least one way in which

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fox spirits were popularly appropriated and allows us to probe the complexity of collective mentalities in late imperial and early modern times. Furthermore, the division between fox worship and literary creation may have been derived from a traditional elite bias against “popular religion” that still holds sway among many scholars today. My work shows that literati scholars, with or without official titles, were not immune to fox attacks; nor were they merely outside observers or critics of popular religious practices. In different ways, they actively participated in fox cult activities, and their writing about fox spirits proved an integral part of making, reshaping, and transmitting popular beliefs and practices.

Terms The special features of fox worship and fox exorcism require explanations of some key terms in this book. The term “cult” here is loosely defined to indicate any kind of human interaction with fox spirits, with or without a shrine, based on a common assumption of the fox’s spiritual capacities. It means worship as well as exorcism, devotion as well as fear, disgust, and suspicion. Its membership is inclusive and fluid, comprised of people of a wide range of social backgrounds, from emperors to illiterate peasants, whose worship of the fox has nothing to do with their commitment to other religious cults and traditions. Also, while spirit mediums, their followers, and people of certain professions offer regular worship, other people can both denounce and worship foxes on different occasions and according to different needs. The Chinese use the terms xian, xianjia, and most commonly huxian to address fox spirits. While xian is customarily translated as “immortal,” “perfected,” or “transcendent,” and huxian as “fox immortal, “fox fairy,” or “fox genie,” there is no English equivalent that can capture the complex ways of using these Chinese terms in local practice and popular literature. I will discuss the multiple meanings of the term huxian at full length in chapter 2, and throughout the book I use the original Chinese expressions in the sources wherever possible in order to preserve the ambiguity of the terms as they were employed by the Chinese themselves. I also use the terms “north China” and “northern China” to distinguish them from William Skinner’s macroregion of “North China,” which denotes the region south of the Great Wall, east of the Taihang Mountains of Shanxi, and north of the Huai River. His macroregional framework focuses on distinctions between political and economic core and peripheral areas

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in each region. Despite its well-recognized analytical power, the term does not encompass the vast regions in which the fox cult spread, which include both “North China” and “Northwest China,” two of Skinner’s eight macroregions, roughly covering today’s Shaanxi, Shanxi, Henan, Hebei, Shandong, northern Anhui, and Jiangsu. While written records indeed show that fox stories concentrated on Shaanxi, Shanxi, and Henan during medieval times and on Hebei, Shandong, Shaanxi, and northern Jiangsu during late imperial and modern times, we cannot conclude that this coincided with a regional shift in actual practices. As my own fieldwork in northern Shaanxi shows, fox cult practices can thrive on oral tradition and on the margins of religious mainstreams in local culture without ever penetrating into written records (chapter 5). For convenience of expression, therefore, I use the generic Chinese term of “north China” or “northern China” to define the large geographical area north of the Yangzi River, although sometimes it coincides with Skinner’s North China of Hebei and Shandong. I would also like to note that the region of Hebei was referred to as Jingshi during the Ming and as Zhili during the Qing, and I use the modern term of Hebei throughout the book for the sake of clarity.

Organization of the Book I begin my inquiry in chapter 1 with a study of the history of the fox cult from ancient times to the Song dynasty (960–1279). The intense interactions among shamanistic, Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist ideas enriched the ambiguous image of the fox. Extensive late Tang (618–907) zhiguai writings about foxes especially embodied the Tang literati’s complex feelings about their own identity and the foreign elements in Chinese life. Official and clerical attempts to suppress the fox cult during the early Song proved futile. Chapter 2 studies the multiple meanings of huxian, a term by which the Chinese addressed fox spirits, to trace the roots of the cult in north China and its spread empirewide in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The term huxian allowed people to identify fox spirits with a variety of beings, from Daoist transcendents to possessing spirits and from shamans and mediums to erotic young women. Its history exemplifies the ambiguous features of the fox in the process of the cult’s transmission and reveals the inextricable relationship between popular practices and literati creation of fox spirits. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 explore different aspects of the fox cult in late imperial and modern north China. Chapter 3 deals with the fox cult in the domestic

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arena and explores how the fox, straddling boundaries between this world and the other and between male and female, serves an alternative source of power in family life. Chapter 4 discusses the role of spirit mediums in fox cult practices and the ambivalent elite attitudes toward these practices. Chapter 5 focuses on the perceived relationship between fox spirits and local cults dedicated to prominent male and female deities in north China. All three chapters deal with human agents manipulating the marginality of fox spirits to negotiate powers between the public and private and the official and unofficial. Particularly, they demonstrate how gender qualities of and gender relations between men and women were interpreted for people to pursue divine power in their everyday lives. Chapter 6 studies the interactions among fox spirits, local people, and officials. The presence of fox shrines in government yamen offices and the expansion of the cult both hierarchically and geographically reflect the changing perceptions of the relationship between state and society in late imperial times. I conclude the book by discussing the significance of the Chinese fox cult for the study of Chinese religion and in comparative perspective.

1 Foxes in Early Chinese Tradition

From the beginning of the Tang Dynasty, many commoners have worshipped fox deities (hushen). They offer sacrifices [to them] in their bedchambers, and the food and drink offered are the same as those [consumed by] humans. Those who offer sacrifices are not [limited to] one “host” [of the foxes]. At the time there was a proverb saying: “Without fox demons (humei), no village is complete.”

The fox worship witnessed here by the Tang scholar Zhang Zhuo (658–730) seems to have been deeply rooted in an age-old tradition spanning a thousand years of Chinese history, for this passage is found along with some eighty records of fox spirits dating from the Han (206 b.c.–220 a.d.) to the early Song (960–1279) in the tenth-century encyclopedic anthology, Taiping guangji (Extensive Records of the Taiping Reign). This chapter explores Chinese conceptions of foxes from ancient times to the Song. I first trace the mythical origin of the fox and its divinatory meanings in Chinese political culture and analyze popular beliefs in fox magic and the changing images of the fox in the legend of the Queen Mother of the West. Then I use the rich collection of Tang fox tales in the Taiping guangji to discuss the symbolic meanings of foxes in the specific cultural environment of late Tang society. Finally, I rely on official histories, Daoist texts, local gazetteers, and literati anecdotal writings to discuss fox exorcism and state and clerical efforts to suppress the fox cult. The complex and often contradictory representations of foxes in early periods have had a long-lasting impact on Chinese history.

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The Demonic Divinity The Fox as Omen The fox, among many other animals, was used as a symbol of premonition in ancient Chinese texts. Shanhaijing (The Classics of Mountains and Seas), which records numerous wild mountains, distant seas, exotic flora and fauna, and legendary creatures, introduces a number of records about foxes or foxlike animals whose appearance portends war and disaster. In particular, it mentions a nine-tailed fox in several places: “Three hundred li farther east is a mountain called Green Hill. . . . There is an animal that looks like a fox and has nine tails. Its voice sounds like a baby. It is man-eating. Whoever eats it will be immune to bewitching poisons.” In Han esoteric texts, the nine-tailed fox is not a man-eating beast, but rather an auspicious omen. It is said to have appeared when King Tang of the Shang dynasty (sixteenth to eleventh century b.c.) ascended the throne and when the “Eastern Barbarians” submitted themselves to the rule of King Wen. A white fox with nine tails also appeared to the legendary king, Yu the Great, when he turned thirty years old, as a divine indication of his forthcoming marriage that foretold the prosperity of his family and his momentous political achievements. The auspicious meanings of the ninetailed fox are explained in Baihutong (The Comprehensive Discussions in the White Tiger Hall), which records court discussions of Later Han (a.d. 25–220) Confucian scholars: What is the Nine-tailed Fox? When a fox dies, it turns its head toward the hill [where it was born]; it does not forget its [place] of origin. It means that in comfort a man must never lose sight of calamities [impending]. Why must [this fox appear] with nine tails? When the nine concubines [of the King each] receive their proper place, his sons and grandsons will enjoy abundant peace. Why [is the emphasis laid] upon the tail? It is to indicate that his posterity shall be numerous.

Here the fox is given moral meanings. According to Liji (The Book of Rites), the Confucian classic completed in the Former Han (206 b.c .–6 a.d.), the fox serves as a model of humaneness, for in facing home when it dies, it teaches human beings to always observe the rites as their spiritual

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home. The nine-tailed fox is further associated with the rule of sage kings and with imperial concubines. This stresses the importance of concubines for the continuation of the ancestral line and the need to have them properly managed by the emperor, both essential factors for the eternal peace and harmony of the dynasty. It also hints that concubines were a potential source of familial discord and national disaster. The use of omens for political ends persisted during the Six Dynasties. Guo Pu (a.d. 276–324), a Jin-era annotator of Shanhaijing and a well-known diviner, wrote his famous eulogy on the nine-tailed fox: An extraordinary beast on the Green Hill, The fox of nine tails. It manifests itself when the Way prevails, And it appears with a book in its mouth: It sends an auspicious omen to the Zhou [dynasty] To promulgate a mystical talisman.

Official historians of this period showed great enthusiasm in delineating correspondences between animal activities, natural phenomena, and the current political situation. The fox is connected to the sage kings of the idealized Zhou dynasty in these histories and acclaimed as a symbol of humane and wise rule. Foxes caught in the fields were intentionally taken as divine signs of the dynasty’s fate. Upon the final abolition of the Later Han and the official enthronement of the first emperor of Wei, an unusually large fox, red in color and surrounded by dozens of ordinary foxes, was reported found in the north of Zhencheng county (today’s Jiangsu province). The fox was identified as a nine-tailed fox, for its long, bushy tail had many branches. It was sent to the court, accompanied by a memorial of felicitation to the throne. Beginning in a.d. 478, when the ambitious Tuoba emperor Xiaowendi (471–499) initiated his grand plan of converting his people to Chinese ways of living and governing, auspicious foxes were reported in many different sectors of north China and presented to the court. The tradition continued into the Tang, especially during the reign of Taizong (627–648), after he had taken the throne by killing his two brothers and forcing his father to abdicate. Emperor Taizong ascended the throne in the eighth month of the ninth year of Wude (626). In the eleventh month of that year, a black fox was said to have appeared in Zhengzhou. In subsequent years, black and white foxes were sent to the court as tributes from many places. These records reinforce the connection between the fox as good omen and the prevalence of sagely rule and

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use the symbolic meanings of the fox either to consolidate newly established power or to pledge local loyalty.

Fox Magic: Metamorphosis, Possession, and Sexual Enchantment In addition to its auspicious connotations in political texts, the fox was perceived as a spectral animal able to metamorphose and to bewitch people. The Han lexicographer Xu Shen (30–124) defined the fox as a “demonic beast (yaoshou), ridden by ghosts.” He suggests this role as an innate characteristic of the biological fox and an inextricable link between the fox and shamanistic soul journeys to the underworld. Han medicinal texts confirm this image, for two medical prescriptions uncovered in the archaeological site of Mawangdui blame fox spirits for causing illnesses. Specific incantations had to be uttered in exorcism. During the Six Dynasties, the same Guo Pu who eulogized the ninetailed fox in Shanhaijing summarized the various features of the fox in the following passage: When a fox is fifty years old, it can transform itself into a woman; when a hundred years old, it becomes a beautiful female, or a spirit medium, or an adult male who has sexual intercourse with women. Such beings are able to know things at more than a thousand miles’ distance; they can poison men by sorcery, or possess and bewilder them, so that they lose their memory and knowledge; and when a fox is a thousand years old, it ascends to heaven and becomes a celestial fox.

Here the fox assumes the roles of a shaman, a diviner, a sorcerer, and a celestial being all at once. Age played a significant role in gaining the power of metamorphosis. A long-lived creature could evolve from a lower animal level to a human being and then to a transcendent. The renowned fourth-century alchemist Ge Hong (283–343) made this point explicitly: “As for all ten thousand things that become aged, their spirits can assume human shape. . . . At eight hundred years the mi-monkey becomes a yuan-monkey, which after five hundred years more becomes a kuo-monkey. . . . The tiger and the deerhare live to a thousand; at five hundred years their coats turn white. When a bear is five hundred years old, it can change itself. Foxes and wolves live to eight hundred, and at five hundred they assume human shape.” A Tang anecdotal account further explains fox metamorphosis as a form of popular magic: “When [the fox] is about to haunt, it must wear a skull

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and worship the Big Dipper. If the skull does not fall off, the fox will be transformed into a human.” Another alleged eyewitness account specifies that the transformation takes place in a deserted graveyard under the moonlight: [The fox] picks up a skull and puts it on its head. It then shakes its head, abandons the skull if it falls off, and chooses another one. It tries four or five skulls until it finally finds one that fits snugly. Then it picks leaves and flowers to cover its body. As it looks here and there [at the leaves and flowers], they all turn into clothes. In no time, the fox turns into a woman.

The use of the skull echoes Xu Shen’s definition of the fox as a vehicle for ghosts. In the Chinese yin/yang dichotomy, yin is interpreted as negative, ghostly, evil, female, and impure, whereas yang is positive, celestial, virtuous, male, and pure. It was an ancient and enduring Chinese belief that flesh represented yin while human bones embodied yang. Even in modern times, people still use the mingling of yin elements such as blood or animal meat with yang bones in mortuary ritual to bring the skeleton of the deceased back to life as an ancestor and thus to ensure fertility and family continuity. Also, in Chinese cosmology, the Big Dipper hangs above Mount Kunlun. The two constitute the center of the universe, where yin and yang unite and determine the cosmic order. In Tang and later times, pacing the seven stars of the Big Dipper was conceived as a religious dance joining heaven, earth, and humanity and unifying yin and yang. It was performed in the phase of “honoring the Dipper” of Daoist zhai and jiao rituals, usually held at midnight. The fox and the skull, as well as a midnight ritual in a graveyard setting, were all associated with the world of the dead and darkness, and thus the yin force. In the process of fox transformation, however, the fox and the skull also formed a new dichotomy of yin/yang: the fox stood for yin and used its flesh to join the skull, the yang. The worship of the Big Dipper served as a ritual of joining yin and yang during which the fox would gain vital energy to assume human form. The fox’s magic, however, ran against the natural cosmic order, which gave supremacy to the yang force and appropriated the yin as an indispensable but inferior opposite. Using the art of metamorphosis and magic, the fox often engaged in spiritual possession of people. As several Tang stories show, foxes created illusionary visions for those they possessed, and the victims would go mad, talk nonsense, and laugh and wail uncontrollably. Fumigating the victims was considered necessary to cure fox bewitchment.

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The fox was also accused of practicing a particular form of sorcery: cutting people’s hair. In his study of the sorcery scare in 1768, Philip Kuhn has shown that the Chinese believed that losing hair to sorcerers would cause the loss of their souls and that by exerting biodynamic power on the hair, the sorcerers would be able to kill people and use the stolen soul-force for their own purposes. The sorcery scares in late imperial times had antecedents. A Later Han story recounts that a man who killed a fox at night examined the animal’s den next morning. He found hundreds of buns of hair cut from human heads. Another Han story explains that people who lose hair to the haunting demon subsequently lose their spirits and die. Alleged sorcery by fox demons occasionally caused collective panics. Luoyang qielan ji (A Record of Buddhist Temples in Luoyang) tells that the wife of a certain coffin carrier, Sun Yan, was in fact a fox. She cut Sun’s hair off after her true form was revealed and ran away. Thereafter, more than 130 people in the capital lost their hair: At first the fox transformed into a woman, dressed up with makeup, and walked on the streets. People who met her were drawn to her charm, but those who came near her got their hair cut off. At the time, women who wore flashy dress were accused as fox demons. These incidents began in the fourth month of Xiping and did not end until the autumn of that year.

The incident was interpreted differently from an official point of view. Sun Yan’s story dates the haircutting events to a period ranging actually from the fifth month to the autumn of a.d. 517. The official history, Weishu (History of Wei), documents a similar incident forty years earlier, in a.d. 477: “In the first year of the Taihe period, fox demons cut off people’s hair. At the time, Empress Dowager Wenming governed the court. It was a sign of impropriety.” Weishu goes on to record what happened in the capital in a.d. 517: “From the spring of the second year of the Xiping reign, fox demons cut people’s hair in the imperial capital. People were frightened. In the sixth month [of the same year], Empress Dowager Ling gathered all haircutters and ordered them to be whipped by the Chongxun guard Liu Deng outside the Gate of a Thousand Years.” Evidently, the soul-stealing activities of the fox demon were associated with the impropriety of rule by empress dowagers. While the anecdotal account emphasizes Sun Yan’s fear that the fox’s yin might have stolen his yang essence and cost him his life, the official history implies that the empress dowagers’ rule violated the

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supreme power of the imperial patriarch and subverted the normal order of yin/yang. Foxes also metamorphosed into handsome men or beautiful women in order to pursue sexual relationships with humans of the opposite sex. A classic example is the story of “Azi (the Purple),” dated to the fourth century. It recounts how a man was bewitched and taken away by a woman. When people found him, they saw that his looks resembled those of a fox. Ecstatic and dreamy, he kept on whining for “Azi.” After he regained his memory, he recalled that he had had an affair with this Azi. A Daoist priest then commented and made a direct link between foxes and lecherous women, who embody the power of excessive yin that threatens the well-being of the male yang: This is a mountain spirit. The fox was originally a lecherous woman in ancient times. Her name is Azi. She changed herself into a fox, and therefore the [mountain spirits] often call themselves Azi.

During the Six Dynasties and the Tang, the terms humei (fox demon) and humei (vulpine enchantresses) were used interchangeably to indicate the bewitching nature of fox spirits and the sexual danger of beautiful women. The famous Tang poet Bai Juyi (772–846) wrote a poem about the fox in which he combined fox magic with the creature’s deluding nature to warn of the danger of beautiful women: When a fox specter of an old grave is growing old, It changes into a woman of lovely features; Its head changes into a female coiffure, its face into a painted countenance. The big tail it trails behind becomes a long red petticoat. Slowly she strides along the paths between the rustic hamlets, And where at sunset no human sounds are heard. She sings, she dances, and alternately laments and wails; Without raising her eyebrows velvety as the kingfisher, but bowing her pretty face, She bursts into a fit of laughter, a thousand, a myriad of joys. Eight or nine out of ten who behold her are beguiled; If false beauties may fascinate man in such a manner, The attraction exercised by genuine beauties surely will surpass it. Such false and such genuine beauties both can bewilder a man, But the human mind dislikes what is false and prefers what is real.

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Hence a fox disguised as a female demon can do but little harm, Nor can beguile a man’s eyes for longer than a day or night; But a woman acting like a vulpine enchantress (humei) is the cause of absolute ruin, For the harm she does to a man’s mind grows with each passing day.

Not all literary works, however, emphasize solely the malevolent aspect of the fox demon. Beautiful fox women (hereafter I will refer to foxes who assume male forms as “fox men” and those who assume female forms as “fox women”) were sometimes envisioned as the most exemplary women. The female beauty portrayed by the famous Tang scholar Shen Jiji (740–805), Miss Ren, is called a “female specter” (nüyao) at the beginning of the story. Knowing her fox origin, the two male protagonists, both aristocratic men, are deeply attracted to her beauty and enjoy her company. Miss Ren remains loyal to her first lover, Zheng, and defends her chastity against the second man’s sexual overtures. She also uses her ability to predict the future to help Zheng make money in business and greatly improves his impoverished situation. Miss Li, a fox woman who marries Ji Zhen, a scholar from Luoyang, also displays physical beauty and a gentle nature. For twenty years she unfailingly fulfills her family duties and gives birth to seven sons and two daughters. Before she dies of natural causes, she discloses her fox identity to her husband. The two are heartbroken over their eternal separation, and the husband then holds a funeral for her as if she were a human being. The stories of Miss Ren and Miss Li, because of their romantic content and the authors’ literary reputation, became well-known writings on foxes during and after the Tang.

The Fox and the Queen Mother of the West (Xiwangmu) Hardly seen in literary texts, but commonly found in Han archaeological artifacts, was the image of the nine-tailed fox as one of the Queen Mother of the West’s animal attendants (figure 1.1). The early depiction of the Queen Mother in the Shanhaijing, with her special headdress, panther’s tail, tiger’s fangs, and skill in whistling, is closely tied to shamanistic practices. During the Han she was believed to be a granter of immortality as well as a life destroyer, particularly among peasants in north China, who sought her divine protection in collective trance. Featuring her and the nine-tailed fox on funerary art, Han people could believe that she, with the fox as a helping spirit, was able to transcend the three worlds, escort the deceased to heaven, and confer immortality.

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Figure 1.1 The Queen Mother of the West, the nine-tailed fox, and other attendants on a tomb brick from Sichuan, first–second century a.d. Courtesy of Chen Xia, Sichuan University

During the Six Dynasties, the Queen Mother of the West, who originated from many local cults, evolved into an elegant goddess living in a celestial palace and attended by fairy maidens in the religious system of Shangqing Daoism. Daoist texts of this time are filled with descriptions of her as a holy patron who granted divine revelations and immortality to the Yellow Emperor, King Mu of Zhou, and the Wu emperor of the Former Han. In the Daoist hierarchical pantheon constructed by the great Daoist master Tao Hongjing (456–536), the Queen Mother ranked first among the female divinities. From then until the Song, she held this prominent position not only in the Daoist pantheon but also in the imperial register and in literature and art. Beginning in the Tang, she was also depicted as a Chinese equivalent of the bodhisattva known as Guanyin (Avalokiteśvara in Sanskrit) and was worshipped in both Buddhist and Daoist temples. She was also a patron deity of women outside of normal family circles, including Daoist nuns, female artists, courtesans, and prostitutes. The destructive aspect of the Queen Mother and the nine-tailed fox in her retinue both faded in Daoist visual and textual materials. However, we can detect traces of it. A post-Han divinatory work mentions the fox as an obnoxious figure at the side of the Queen Mother: “The old fox has so

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many appearances. It bewitches and haunts people. It acts as a demon and evil spirit. It disturbs our Queen Mother, and it never regrets its misdeeds.” Elsewhere in this book the old fox is accused of activating its demonic force to bewitch “our eldest daughter (zhangnü).” Guo Pu’s eulogy cited above, in which a nine-tailed fox appears holding a mystic book in its mouth to illuminate the Way of the sage kings, also reflects the possibility that in popular belief, the fox might well be the Queen Mother’s divine messenger. Many Daoist texts of this time tell that in her revelation to the Yellow Emperor on his victory over Chiyou, a “barbarian” chief, the Queen Mother sent a Daoist messenger wearing black fox fur and holding a fu, the Daoist talisman revealing divine instructions. The similarities and dissimilarities of the two cases are equally significant, for they strongly suggest a Daoist endeavor to promote orthodox Daoist deities and to suppress the original shamanistic elements. The same yin force that demonized the fox also nourished the Queen Mother of the West on her path to immortality in some medieval texts: each time she had relations with a man, he fell sick, while she herself kept a polished, transparent face of the sort which had no need of makeup. She fed herself continually on milk and played the five-stringed lute, always keeping harmony in her heart and calm in her thoughts, without any desire. So the Queen Mother of the West never married, but she loved to couple with young men. This secret could never be divulged, for fear that other women would get it in their heads to imitate her methods.

Tang writings also reveal a connection between the fox and higher divinities: Among the arts of the Way, there is a specific doctrine of the celestial fox. [The doctrine] says that the celestial fox has nine tails and a golden color. It serves in the Palace of the Sun and Moon and has its own fu (talisman) and a jiao ritual. It can transcend yin and yang.

The concept of the “celestial fox,” more than a thousand years old and able to ascend to heaven, was now blended with the image of the legendary nine-tailed fox. The specific doctrine it had mastered, the heavenly sign of the fu, and the ritual formality of jiao—all heavily used by religious Daoists—still distinguished the celestial fox from demonic spirits. The phrase “the Palace of the Sun and Moon” might be too vague to be traced to a

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particular religious tradition, yet the idea it embodied—the duality of the universe and the life force the two entities generated—was commonly embraced by shamanism, Daoism, and Buddhism. In particular, the Six Dynasties and Tang Chinese believed that the Queen Mother of the West and the King Father of the East, her male counterpart, represented the celestial world of the moon and the sun. Their iconography from the Later Han onward often carried the symbols of the moon and the sun. In sum, however great the Daoist efforts, the fox’s connection with the Queen Mother was never entirely cut off in non-Daoist contexts, and it persisted into late imperial times (chapter 5).

In and Out: Fox Spirits and Late Tang Society Foxes, Literati Men, and Courtesans Tang tales describe activities of foxes in the inner court as well as among elite and rural families, suggesting that fox worship involved a broad segment of Tang society. Zhang Zhuo, cited at the beginning of this chapter, suggests that foxes occupied an ambiguous position in family life. They were insiders, for they were enshrined in private quarters and offered food consumed by humans. People might seek fertility and sexual happiness from these deities in bedchambers. However, the fox deities (hushen) were also called fox demons (humei), indicating that people also saw them as outsiders whose transcendent power inspired both reverence and fear. Tales about fox men and fox women, although different, both display the liminal status of the fox in family life. The general structure of tales about fox men is as follows: a fox man asks a well-to-do family for their unmarried daughter’s hand in marriage by first proposing to the parents in a polite manner. Though impressed by the fox man’s handsome appearance and extraordinary talents, the parents will not consent to the marriage because the fox did not request it through a proper matchmaker, and his family origins remain unknown. Only when the marriage proposal is rejected does the fox man resort to magic power and force a sexual relationship on the daughter. Sometimes the fox sexually possesses a woman first and tries to win the favor of family members afterward. For instance, the fifteen-year-old granddaughter of Li Yuangong, the Vice Minister of the Ministry of Personnel, is enchanted by a fox who introduces himself as Mr. Hu. Li hires several exorcists, but none is able to expel the fox. Li’s son, however, takes delight in

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discussing scholarly questions with him and often consults him on difficult issues. The granddaughter also benefits from Mr. Hu; over a period of four years, he introduces three great masters to her to teach her classics, history, calligraphy, and music. Finally one day Vice Minister Li says to Mr. Hu, “Why don’t you take the girl to be your wife and bring her to your home?” Thrilled by the good news, the fox confesses: “I have been hoping for this for a long time. Since I am a man of humble origins, I didn’t dare to propose.” But the fox’s happiness does not last long. He is soon killed by Li, whose real intention was to locate and destroy the fox’s home, an underground cave in Li’s bamboo garden. The junior members of the Li family took advantage of the fox’s intrusion to exploit his intellectual resources. But in the eyes of the family head, such benefits could not compensate for the loss of status caused by the family’s association with an inferior species. No matter how many worthy qualities these fox men might have possessed, they were still considered dangerous outsiders who had to be destroyed. The same tragic results apply to fox women, although the tales portray them more sympathetically. The above-mentioned Miss Ren and Miss Li are both paragons of female beauty and virtue, but are still seen as outsiders who have to be unmasked and destroyed. Miss Ren, despite all of her efforts, is chased and killed by a dog, her fox identity involuntarily exposed. Miss Li seems to belong to a human family before her death, but all seven of her children die soon after her funeral, leaving her husband with no heir. The story implies that her impure blood causes the end of her husband’s family line, because a special effort is made to check the corpses of all seven youngsters. When people find that their bodies have not changed into foxes as their mother’s did, they are finally convinced that the female fox indeed married the mortal man with no evil intent. The different experiences of fox men and fox women in these stories were deeply embedded in the cultural environment of the Tang period. As men, foxes often appeared as young scholars who displayed elegant deportment, extraordinary talent, and impressive scholarship. This image in fact mirrored the most desired prototype, the “transcendent self,” of the Tang literati who recorded and read these tales. During the seventh and eighth centuries, literary talents gained particular importance for the new educated class, largely lacking aristocratic backgrounds, to achieve success through the examination system. But a degree granted a man only the right to be considered for office; excellence in learning had to be combined with marriage into a powerful family in order to obtain high office. Since the Tang aristocratic families insisted on marrying their own kind, it was common

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practice for young scholars to claim fake family origins so that they could marry into aristocratic status. When the handsome, erudite fox men sought to marry mortal women, their supernatural powers endowed them with the best qualities of the literati men; thus they appeared to be better scholars than the Tang scholars themselves. Yet the inferiority of foxes as an alien species could be taken as a “projection” of these scholars’ humble family origins—as Victor Turner summarizes it, “the unconscious attribution to other people of thoughts, feelings, and acts of our own which would otherwise be felt as unpleasurable—perhaps feelings of guilt or inferiority. . . . We can see them thereafter as hostility directed from outside against ourselves, and thus can justify or legitimate ourselves in our own eyes. The tensions in reality, through projection, are ritually mitigated.” In featuring the prestigious family heads’ rejection of their daughters’ marriage to the fox men and the exorcism of the foxes from the human world, Tang literati perhaps projected their own feelings of inferiority onto the foxes and thus discharged anxieties over their social status in real life. With the failure of the transcendent self, the real self was redeemed. Like male foxes, female foxes in the tales were endowed with ravishing physical charm and admirable human virtues that Tang literati would expect from an ideal woman. But unlike with male foxes, the unfortunate animal origins of fox women—when seen from a male perspective—were depicted with sympathy and compassion. For the Tang literati class, fox women represented a familiar category: courtesans who lived outside of their formal family circle but provided them sensual and emotional pleasures. One fox tale relates that a prostitute turned into a fox after she had spent several nights with mortal men in a brothel in Luoyang. Miss Ren admits that she is from a family of entertainers and had had intimate relationships with many men in Chang’an before she became Zheng’s mistress. Many of her relatives are also courtesans and concubines. Courtesans were an important part of Tang literati life. Countless poems were devoted to these enchanting women. Tang scholars and officials enjoyed their entertainment at home and on trips while remaining free from serious commitment and family obligations. However, they were also troubled by these relationships when courtesans tried to marry into their family. The author of Records of the Northern Quarters (Beli zhi), Sun Qi (ninth century), was proposed to by a courtesan with whom he soon fell in love. The famous Tang tale, “Story of Huo Xiaoyu,” also features a beautiful courtesan who seeks to marry a talented literati man. But at a time when

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proper marriages meant career success and social prestige for young scholars, courtesans’ simple wishes were rarely granted. Sun Qi refused his lover figuratively: “The lotus seed in mud is indeed pure, but it has no place in my family garden.” Huo Xiaoyu’s lover promises her marriage, but soon betrays her to send betrothal gifts to a girl of Lu, one of the most wanted “five surnames” in the Tang. Huo commits suicide in despair. Even when some of these courtesans were lucky enough to be brought into literati families, they had to be content to live as concubines and suffer maltreatment from men’s wives. The role of Tang courtesans in literati life, therefore, was a social one; they were indispensable only outside the house and on social occasions. Female foxes, when impersonating courtesans who lived on the margins of literati families, complemented—instead of challenging or undermining—the dominant self-image of the Tang literati, as long as they remained transitory.

The Fox (Hu) and the Barbarian (Hu) Similar to the way in which they differentiated insiders and outsiders in the family, the Chinese categorized China as internal and the “barbarian” as external, on the edge of bestiality. Animal radicals were frequently attached to the names of some barbarian groups, and animal features were used to describe their physical attributes and cultural customs. In medieval times, hu (fox) and hu (barbarian) were homophones that shared the same rhyme, the same tone, and the same combination of syllabic transcriptions (fanqie). During the Tang, the term hu (barbarian) always referred to the Western, Indo-European–speaking peoples of Central Asia, especially the Sogdians, who were the most prominent. It was also loosely used to label all non-Chinese people from the north and west. A conversation between An Lushan (?–757) and Geshu Han (?–757), political rivals who were both nonChinese, illustrates how “fox” (hu) was used as a derogatory term: He [An Lushan] suddenly said to Han, “My father was a [Western] barbarian (hu), my mother was a Turk; your father was a Turk, your mother was a [Western] barbarian. I am the same race as you. Why can’t we be friends?” Han replied, “The ancients used to say, ‘It is a bad omen if a wild fox (hu) barks at his lair, for he has forgotten his origins.’ Must I not make every effort to do so [i.e., to be friends with you]?” Lushan thought [Han] was disparaging his hu [origin]. He became very angry and cursed Han, saying, “Does a Turk dare to act thus?” Han wished to reply, but Gao Lishi gave him a look

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and stopped him.

The High Tang period, the seventh century and the first half of the eighth century, witnessed the zenith of interracial mingling and multicultural exchanges in Chinese history. For Tang people, the western lands of India and Central Asia were the distant and mysterious provenances of exotic treasures, esoteric thaumaturgy, and a rapidly popularized Buddhism that promised universal salvation. The concept of “barbarians,” especially “Western barbarians,” denoted a different source of material and spiritual power. However, the very presence of the foreign in many aspects of Chinese life also threatened the cultural pride of the Chinese and sparked a growing hostility toward all foreigners and foreign influences. This was especially true during the latter half of the eighth century and the ninth century, when the Tang suffered significant decline marked by the An Lushan rebellion; An Lushan himself was barbarian, as were his troops. A Chinese identity characterized by the desire to return to the Confucian classics and Chinese antiquity gradually took shape in late Tang intellectual life and foreshadowed the coming of the new Confucian age in the Song. The concept of “barbarian” therefore had manifold meanings for the late Tang literati. It represented a liminal entity linking a set of cultural dichotomies: Chinese and non-Chinese, the inside and the outside worlds, and the Confucian and the non-Confucian. The phonetic connection made the fox a convenient tool for Tang people to express their feelings about the foreign elements in their lives. For example, foxes were notorious for the obnoxious odor they emitted. According to Chinese historian Chen Yinque, the medieval Chinese term for armpit odor, “fox stench” (huchou), might have been derived from “barbarian odor” (huchou), because this type of body odor was considered uniquely foreign and brought into China only by people of “Western barbarian” origins. A female acrobatic dancer of the Entertainment Department of the Tang court, whose profession suggests her Central Asian origin, was characterized by her mei (allure), a variant of mei (demon or demonic) that was often used to describe female foxes, and her slight yundi, a euphemism for the “fox stench.” The Li brothers, men of Persian descent who settled in Sichuan and were teased by their literati friends about their barbarian odor, were known for their literary talent, elegant deportment, and art of cultivating alchemical elixirs—the same qualities we have seen in fox men who requested marriages with mortal women. Like the Persians and other Central

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Asian merchants, the Lis were traders of spices, perfumes, and drugs, things used by male foxes in the tales to cover up their pungent smells. The story of Miss Ren also provides many hints that link her fox origin with barbarian traits. Miss Ren comes from a family of performers, and her family members still serve in the Entertainment Department of the Tang court, where the profession of performer was hereditarily held by Western barbarian families. Her home is next to a barbarian pancake seller, who knows Ren is a fox from the beginning. Ren herself is ignorant about needlework, an indispensable skill for Chinese women, but is talented in doing business and making profits, a well-known feature of the barbarian merchants. In another story, scholar Li Nün, on his way to his government post, is struck by the beauty of a barbarian pancake seller’s wife and purchases this “barbarian woman” from the seller. The woman captivates Li with her charm (again, the term mei is used) and enchanting voice. But like Miss Ren, she is hopeless at needlework. When she dies, her fox identity is exposed. Li is often teased by his next wife as the “husband of the wild fox.” Foxes also took Chinese names that reflected their barbarian origins. In fox tales, fox men were often named Hu, a Chinese surname sharing the same character as the barbarian hu. When they took other surnames, they also left barbarian traces. A fox man declared: “Foxes one thousand years old are surnamed Zhao and Zhang; foxes five hundred years old are surnamed Bai and Kang.” The self-identification of the fox with these Chinese family names is significant, for adopting Chinese names marked an important step in the process of sinicization. The Tang court often granted the imperial family name to foreigners. As thousands of barbarians gathered in the cosmopolitan Tang empire, they settled in China by marrying Chinese and taking Chinese names. They adopted these mainly in two ways: either they took the most typical Chinese names, such as Zhang, Wang, Li, or Zhao, or they named themselves after their native countries. Kang was a Chinese name commonly used by foreigners during the Six Dynasties and the Tang because of the constant influx of monks, merchants, and official envoys from Samarkand, the Central Asian kingdom that was called Kangju in Chinese. So was Bai, a Chinese name adopted by the royal family of the Kucha kingdom and especially carried by the people from the Qiuci region when they visited the Chinese empire. The thousand-year-old foxes gained purely Chinese names, whereas names for the five-hundred-yearolds were still tinged with barbarian origins. The degree of cultivation of the fox toward humanity and immortality seems to correspond to the degree to which the barbarians were transformed into Chinese.

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The upsurge of Buddhism in the Tang also reinforced the links between foxes and barbarians. Tantric Buddhism, marked by magic, divination, and medicine, gained considerable popularity during the eighth century. The term “fox demon” (humei) appeared frequently in Tantric texts translated into Chinese by Indian monks. These texts accused fox demons, together with mountain spirits and ghosts, of being a major cause of disease. A Tang Tantric text specifies that one under fox possession can be cured by wearing a five-colored thread on his collar, and the thread must be knotted 108 times by a ritual specialist and with one incantation recited at each knot. In Tantric Buddhism, the fox demon was identified with the Dakini, a carnivorous demon who was subdued by Mahavairocana, “the Great Sun Buddha.” Portraits of the Dakini ten as a goddess riding on a white fox were common in Japan. According to some Japanese sources, such a vision first appeared to a famous Japanese monk on his return trip from China during the thirteenth century. Compared to Chan, Tiantai, Huayan, Pure Land, and other Chinese Buddhist schools that thrived in the Tang, Tantric Buddhism bore a more striking barbarian mark because of its closer connection with foreign monks. Emperor Xuanzong (r. 712–756) granted extreme prestige to three foreign Tantric masters, Subhakarasimha, Vajrabodhi, and Amoghavajra, who dedicated their lives to translating voluminous Sanskrit texts into Chinese, performing Tantric rites, and presiding over mass Tantric ordinations. He also encouraged frequent court competitions between Indian Tantric masters and Chinese Daoist thaumaturges in order to test their magical spells and esoteric skills. These competitions highlighted the native roots of Daoism and the foreign origin of Tantrism and therefore reinforced the barbarian associations of this Buddhist school. Foreign monks who mastered esoteric skills through their knowledge of Sanskrit texts found parallels in Tang fox stories. Many of the tales report that foxes were masters of a secret learning recorded in mysterious foreign books. A certain Zhang Jianqi, who encounters a fox reading books in a graveyard, steals one out of curiosity, only to discover that the papers, the inks, and the style of the fox’s book are all the same as in regular books, but the fox script is impossible to understand. In another instance, hunter Lin sees an old man in a graveyard holding a scroll in his hands. After he kills the man, who is in fact a fox, Lin finds that the scroll is a book, dozens of feet long, made of white silk. “It had very strange strokes and looked like Indian script, but was not written in Indian characters.” The same impression about fox books is also given in the story of Wang Sheng, who finds a

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book lost by two foxes. It is written in Indian-like script, and Wang is not able to read it. The correspondence between foxes and barbarian religions also explains why in many tales foxes appear as Buddhas, bodhisattvas, or foreign Buddhist monks, even though they were condemned as fake by both Daoists and Chinese Buddhists. Certain Tang tales with Daoist overtones state explicitly that foreign monks and foxes are interchangeable identities. One story recounts that during Xuanzong’s Kaiyuan reign (714–741), an aristocrat found that a Brahman monk was leading all the female members of his family into an ecstatic state. They piously followed this “barbarian monk” in reciting Buddha’s name and performing Buddhist rituals. The man resorted to the famous Daoist master Ye Fashan (636–720) for help. Ye was able to determine that the Brahman monk was actually a celestial fox, and he wrote a charm for the man, who used it to awaken the women from ecstasy and deliver the monk to Master Ye. Due to Ye’s superior power, the monk dropped his robe to the floor and turned into a fox. After punishing him with a hundred blows, Master Ye returned his robe, watched him change from a fox back into a Brahman monk, and exiled him a thousand miles away. Ye was famous for his spiritual powers during the Tang. He was summoned to the court by Emperor Gaozong (650–683) and continued to serve as the Chief Minister of the Court of State Ceremonial until Xuanzong’s reign. Despite Ye’s unusually long service, it was only toward the end of his life, during the first seven years of Xuanzong’s reign, that his powers came to be recorded in Daoist hagiographic texts and literati anecdotal collections. Elsewhere he showed healing power in fighting fox possession when a fox bewitched the daughter of a court official. Dispatched by imperial order, Ye captured the fox, burned down the entire fox den, thereby cured all the sick in the capital city, and allegedly won thousands of followers. Xuanzong’s profound interest in Daoist magical arts and general antipathy toward Buddhist doctrines in the early years of his reign may have helped elevate Ye’s status. However, it should be noted that Ye’s service for Xuanzong also coincided with the arrival of the first great Tantric masters in Chang’an, Subhakarasimpa in 716 and Vajrabodhi in 719. What attracted Xuanzong to Tantric Buddhism appears to have been practices he found similar to Daoist arts, such as astrology, incantations and spells, mystical trances, and magical formulas. Ye, therefore, served Xuanzong together with the foreign monks for a short period in real life and for a much longer time in Daoist hagiographies. He appears in several Tang and Song Daoist

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texts as a major figure who competed in magical skills against a foreign Buddhist master in Xuanzong’s court and defeated an Indian monk in commanding talismans. Such a historical background provides a unique perspective for reading Daoist sentiments in the above fox tales: Tang Daoists and pro-Daoists perhaps wished that as Ye Fashan had exiled the fox of celestial origin, so they too could assume superiority over the barbarian monks and banish them to their homelands. In one story the offending fox is indeed sent away forever to a desert, imagery typical of Central Asia. There are also interesting parallels between the fox tales and Chinese Buddhist texts in which the fox assumes the role of a foreign monk. The challenge of Chinese Buddhist master Da’an to a holy bodhisattva at the court of the Empress Wu (627–705) appears in a fox tale in the Guangyi ji (Great Book of Marvels): When the Empress Zetian of the Tang was seated on the throne, there was a woman who called herself a holy bodhisattva. Everything that people fixed their thoughts upon, she knew. The empress summoned her to court, where all she said proved to be so reliable that she was surrounded with devotion for some months, and praised as a genuine bodhisattva. Then the monk Da’an entered the palace, and was asked by the empress whether he had seen the female bodhisattva. Da’an replied, “Where is the bodhisattva? I long to see her.” The empress gave orders to let them meet. The thoughts of the monk soared away for a while, and then he asked, “You can read minds, why don’t you try to read mine?” She answered immediately: “Between the bells at the canopy on top of the pagoda.” He asked again, and the answer was: “In the palace of Maitreya in the Tushita heaven, listening to the preaching of the Law.” And then he questioned her a third time, and she said his thoughts were in the highest heaven where even no unconsciousness exists. These three answers were all correct. The empress was delighted. But Da’an then fixed his mind upon the fourth fruit of sanctity, namely arhatship. This time the female bodhisattva could not find out his thoughts. Now Da’an exclaimed, “You cannot discover them when I fix my thoughts upon arhatship, how then can you do so when I fix them upon the (still higher) state of the bodhisattvas and the Buddhas?” The woman confessed herself beaten. She changed into a vixen, ran down the steps, and hurried off; nobody knew where she ran.

It is certainly an interesting coincidence that a similar story appears in Lidai fabaoji (Records of Dharmaratna Through the Ages), a Buddhist text contemporary with the Guangyi ji. This time Da’an’s role is taken by the

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famous Chinese Chan master Zhishen (609–702), the founder of the Jingzhong school in Sichuan, and the loser turns out to be an Indian monk. The text relates that Empress Wu once invited several Chinese Chan masters and one Brahman monk named Tripitaka, whom she respected the most, to her court. Master Zhishen from Jiannan (Sichuan) was sick and thought of returning to his hometown. Since gorges and mountains barricaded the way, the master worried about [his journey home]. The Brahman Tripitaka, who possessed unorthodox powers [xietong], said to him, “What is the difference between here and there? Why does the master miss home?” Zhishen replied, “How does Tripitaka know it?” [Tripitaka] answered, “Please fix your thoughts upon something, and there is nothing I will not know and see.” Shen said, “My mind is gone now.” He fixed his thoughts upon dressing as a layman and looking about in the Cao gate of the western market. Tripitaka said, “Why does the master of great virtue look about in the market in lay clothes?” Shen then noted, “Have a good look! My mind is gone.” He fixed his thoughts upon going to Chanding Temple and standing on the canopy of the pagoda. Tripitaka commented, “Why does the master stand in such a high place?” Shen said, “This time look carefully. My mind is gone.” Then he immersed his mind in dharma so that his mind did not give rise to any thought. Tripitaka looked for [his mind] in all three realms and could not find it. He therefore revered [the master]. He prostrated himself before Shen, pressed his head against Shen’s feet, and told him, “I was ignorant in [not knowing that] the Tang empire has great Buddhadharma. Now I repent of my fault wholeheartedly.”

It is a recurrent theme in early Chan literature that Chinese monks were tested by Indian or Central Asian monks endowed with the power to read minds. The stories always end with the final triumph of the Chinese masters when they immerse themselves in nonthinking. The parallel between foxes and barbarian monks and their admitted submission to the superiority of Chinese Buddhist monks must be understood in light of the development of Chinese Buddhism. Formally established by the sixth patriarch Huineng (d. 713) around 700, Chan gained immense popularity among the Tang literati from the eighth century onward and began to emerge as a complete Chinese school independent of Indian tradition. This development has been proven to be inseparable from elements of Daoism and native religions. Other prominent Buddhist schools during the Tang also demonstrated distinctive Chinese characteristics. They adopted Chinese names,

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interpreted Sanskrit sutras in Chinese contexts, and derived their authority solely from the writings of Chinese patriarchs. The traditional Chinese practices of ancestral worship, agricultural calendars, and Daoist festivals were by now nicely woven into Buddhist monastic rituals, and original Indian elements significantly abated. The appropriation of the fox bodhisattva in the tale, therefore, offers a glimpse of the changes affecting Chinese Buddhists at that time. There is another layer of significance in this particular fox tale. While the account in Lidai fabaoji, as well as the general history of Buddhism, features male barbarian monks, the Guangyi ji tale specifies a female bodhisattva in Empress Wu’s court—an image the empress vigorously promoted for herself. On seizing the throne, Empress Wu encountered Confucian ideology and the classical tradition as obstacles to legitimizing her rule. She could not rely on Daoist churches for support because the Tang founding rulers themselves claimed to be descendents of the ancient sage Laozi, and several female deities like the Mother of Laozi were given prominent positions in the Daoist pantheon and enjoyed imperial patronage. Whatever efforts Empress Wu made to associate herself with a Daoist power would link her more closely to the Li family. It seemed therefore natural for the empress to resort to Buddhism, a foreign and yet powerful religion, to advocate a type of unorthodox rule. The empress introduced the idea of an omnipotent female ruler endorsed by the Buddha to China and drew parallels between this ruler and herself. She declared that she was the bodhisattva Maitreya, who, according to a new interpretation under her reign, was a female divinity in the Buddhist pantheon. For the scholar-official class, Empress Wu’s rise to power seriously challenged traditional ideas of patriarchal authority. Although she appears to have been an exceptionally gifted and successful politician who won solid support when rebellions in favor of the Li family broke out, her womanhood still prevented her from being fully accepted throughout her reign. Entering the court as a low-class concubine, she was pictured as an enticing woman who paved her way to power with sex and schemes—an accusation people of the Tang also made against foxes. A well-known manifesto by her political opponents in 684 compares her to a series of imperial femmes fatales in history and reprimands her as “a fox demon specializing in bewitching the emperor.” Such charges were a “reaction of the Confucian mind against a woman who had not only betrayed such cardinal virtues as humanity and wifely submission, but in so doing had challenged an ancient tradition which guaranteed worldly harmony and gave both livelihood and self-respect to the Confucian scholar-officials.”

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The Guangyi ji story was written sometime in the latter half of the eighth century, when the empress had been dead for years and the Li family had long restored their dynasty. Historical records show that ministers who served under the empress held respect for her even when they in principle objected to her occupying a position reserved only for male rulers. The two succeeding Tang emperors accepted her as the de facto emperor. It was not until 780, around the time Guangyi ji was compiled, that Tang scholarofficials of the History Office first openly questioned the legitimacy of the empress’s reign. The above story seems to echo the voices of these scholarofficials at the court. With the gender twist of the bodhisattva, it reflects the empress’s passion for Buddhism and ridicules her illegitimate power. We can perhaps assume that to the Tang literati who read this tale, a woman such as Empress Wu could be identified as a type of fox woman who overpowered men through sexual enchantment and as an outsider who challenged the Confucian ideal of male authority. She belonged to a cultural category as dangerous and alien as the barbarians.

Fox Exorcism and the Suppression of the Fox Cult The “Celestial Fox” and Fox Exorcism The alien nature of the fox spawned danger and called for containment. Although natural enemies of foxes in the hunt, like dogs and hawks, were often employed to unmask and kill foxes in human guise, it was Daoist priests, Buddhist monks, and officials who took the major responsibility for destroying fox dens, exorcising fox demons, and expelling their malignant influence on the community. In presenting these battles, different genres bore the different moral and religious agendas of their authors. In the informal anecdotal writings, where literati scholars tended to rely more on oral sources and to express more freely their personal or alternative opinions on moral and religious issues, such battles are often described in an even-handed way, and foxes may even possess transcendent power to overcome exorcist efforts. For example, it was a religious taboo to kill a “celestial fox,” who claimed connections with higher divine forces. In one story, when a Daoist master wages a battle against a celestial fox who has forced marriage upon an official’s daughter, the two sides are evenly matched after dozens of rounds of fighting. In the end, the Daoist wins only by cheating: he feigns death so that the fox drops its vigilance and is easily captured. The

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Daoist concludes: “This is a celestial fox and cannot be killed.” Instead he exiles the fox to Silla, one of the three kingdoms in Korea. In some tales, Daoist and Buddhist experts are even ridiculed, and their exorcising powers defeated by the supreme gods of their own religions, who are actually transformed by foxes. For instance, a woman in a yellow skirt goes to a Daoist master to learn his magical arts. After the master exhausts all he knows, she admits her fox identity and decides to leave. Since the master’s powers have proven weaker than the fox’s, he sets up an altar, intending to subjugate the fox with the help of Lord Lao. Lord Lao soon appears in a purple cloud and orders a deity to cut the fox in half. The Daoist is overjoyed—until he sees Lord Lao descend from the cloud, change back into a woman in a yellow skirt, and walk away. In another story, Bodhisattva Manjusri descends to the family of a county magistrate. After they have worshipped him for many days, the son questions the true identity of the bodhisattva. A Daoist priest recognizes its original fox form and kills the pseudo-god. Before long, another bodhisattva arrives and is worshipped by the family as before. The Daoist priest is again invited by the son to expel it, but all his magical techniques fail this time. The bodhisattva repudiates the Daoist: “If you have read the scriptures of the Way, you should know the name of Fox Vadjra (Hu Gangzi).” He identifies himself as Fox Vadjra, who attained immortality thirty thousand years before, and the deceased bodhisattva as one of his fox descendants. The Fox Vadjra punishes the priest for killing his descendant, orders him to return the fortune he has made from his exorcising services, and promises to protect the family and their subsequent generations from future disasters. The Chinese name of the god, Hu Gangzi, originally had no relation to the fox. It referred to an ancient Daoist transcendent, surnamed Hu, who had mastered the secret formulae of the alchemical elixirs in Daoist texts before the fourth century. In assuming the form of a bodhisattva and the name of a Daoist transcendent, the fox borrowed from both religions to create a new divine identity for itself, the Fox Vadjra, and enjoyed worship in its own right. The fox’s victories in anecdotal accounts suggest that the efforts of Daoists and Buddhists to convert members of popular cults by promoting the superiority of their own gods might sometimes work in an opposite direction. Instead of eliminating the popular cults, the supremacy of the new gods actually allowed people to refurbish the content of popular religious beliefs.

The Suppression of the Fox Cult In Daoist and Buddhist texts and official histories, foxes appear in a different light. They are usurpers of local gods, and they are doomed to lose

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the exorcistic battles. The Daoist canon has a number of accounts of how Daoist masters, using talismans, mirrors, daggers, and rituals, successfully warded off or summoned fox demons (figures 1.2 and 1.3). In a Tang Daoist text, for example, foxes once occupied a local temple in Chengdu, Sichuan and received offerings on behalf of a legitimate god during Emperor Xizong’s reign (874–888). The temple was restored after the foxes were exorcised by a powerful Daoist master. A Daoist text compiled under the auspices of Emperor Zhenzong (r. 998–1022) contains four records about foxes. In two of them, foxes caused illnesses and insanity and were finally subdued by Daoist priests. The other two, while also affirming the supreme power of Daoist masters, show Daoist effort to control, rather than simply suppress, foxes that claimed temples dedicated to more legitimate gods. One record recounts that dozens of “fox demons” had taken residence in a temple honoring Li Jing (571–649), a Tang general who later became a publicly celebrated god. The Daoist master summoned them, ordering them to leave and sparing their lives. In the second account, hundreds of “fox demons,” who once transformed themselves into bodhisattvas to swindle donations out of people in the Chang’an area, arrived in Binzhou, Shaanxi, county about a hundred miles away from Chang’an. Instead of ordering the Daoist master to expel them, the Lord on High granted them charms (fu) to be the earth god (tudi) of Binzhou and assured the people that they had turned to good and would leave when their term expired. Another Daoist text reports that a temple dedicated to “fox kings” (huwang miao) was erected in Kaifeng under the auspices of Emperor Shizu (937–942) of the Later Jin (936–946). It survived many years into the Northern Song. When Zhang Shangying (1043–1121) served as the Grand Councilor from 1110 to 1111, he issued an order to tear down more than 1,000 temples of fox kings in the Kaifeng area. This text may be corroborated by Songhuiyao jigao (The Collected Important Documents from the Song), which records that in 1111, an imperial edict was issued to demolish 1,308 shrines in the capital. Popular gods like Zhenwu and earth gods were incorporated into the hierarchical pantheon and their images moved respectively to the temples of their superior gods. Three types of shrines—those that had been erected to Wutong, General Shi, and Daji—were categorized as “illicit cults” and banned. If both records in the above paragraph are accurate, then they may refer to the same edict or edicts by the state targeted at reorganizing popular temples and shrines in the early Song. The Daji shrines may in fact indicate fox shrines, for Daji, the notorious concubine of the Zhou King of the

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Figure 1.2 A Daoist talisman for summoning fox spirits. From Gaoshang shenxiao yuqing zhenwang zishu dafa (Great Rites in the Purple Script by the Perfected Lord of Jade Clarity of the Most Exalted Divine Empyrean) (twelfth century). HY 1209, 22.27a

Figure 1.3 Daoist talismans for the expulsion of fox demons. From Taishang laojun hunyuan sanbufu (The Three Sets of Primordial Talismans by the Supreme Lord Lao) (date and author unknown). HY 673. shang, 37b–38b

Shang dynasty, was widely represented as an evil fox in popular literature at least by the Northern Song. Also, the Southern Song scholar Hong Mai (1123–1202) once commented that south of the Yangzi River, “the one-leg Wutong” bewitched people just like “the fox demons in the north.” Such a parallel might have already been drawn during the Northern Song, since

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the capital of Kaifeng and the surrounding region were well known for abundance in foxes, and both the fox and the Wutong were considered to be mountain spirits embodying the yin force and associated with debauchery. In a tenth-century Buddhist text, the fox was associated with the concept of Wutong, the Five Supernatural Powers that were practiced by both Buddhists and non-Buddhists. The power of the fox, termed as Demonic Power (yaotong), ranked fifth, well below the other four: the Powers of the Way (daotong), the Spirit (shentong), Dependence (yitong), and Retribution (baotong). It is very likely, therefore, that the fox, under the name Daji, was listed with the Wutong as an illicit cult. It is also possible, of course, that the thousand illicit cults that Zhang had attacked in the Song were taken as the thousand temples to the fox kings in the Yuan Daoist text after a long period of oral or written transmission. Nonetheless, the confusion of the two accounts by itself would mean that the fox cult was so popular among local people and its threat to the official pantheon so perceptible that it came to represent the category of illicit cults in Daoist literature. But the Song efforts to suppress fox cults were to little avail. After Zhang Shangying was demoted from the position of Grand Councilor, the fox demons reportedly grouped together and snuck into the imperial palace. There they stole imperial treasures, bewitched the concubines, and disturbed the inner quarters. Emperor Huizong (r. 1101–1125) then called Wang Wenqing (1093–1153), the Daoist master of the Divine Empyrean school, to the palace in 1122. Wang used the Five Thunder Rites to fight the fox demons. He erected a three-level thunder altar at the northeastern gate of the imperial city and prepared an iron urn in the center of it. When night came, he held a sword, ascended to the altar, wrote out charms, and roared. In no time, winds blew and thunder struck while celestial soldiers captured the demons and put them in the urn. Wang then sealed the urn with a charm and buried it. Next morning he reported to the emperor that the fox demons would no longer do any harm. Wang Wenqing’s thunderbolts, however, did not curb the foxes’ activities for good. According to the Songshi (History of the Song), on the eve of the Jurchen invasion, a fox descended from the Gen hill where precious birds, rare animals, and exquisite plants had been gathered to celebrate Emperor Huizong’s reign of peace and prosperity. The fox entered the imperial palace and sat right on the throne. The emperor immediately issued an edict again to destroy all the temples and shrines dedicated to the fox kings in Kaifeng. But this action did not save the Song from the subsequent conquest by the

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“barbarians” (hu). Five months after the fox sat on the throne, the Northern Song came to an end. By this time the advent of the fox was no longer taken as a sign of sagely rule. Instead, it foretold barbarian incursions.

Local Officials in Fox Exorcism Office holders in China were believed to have exorcistic powers in supervising local religious activities. While the Northern Song court and the Daoist clergy jointly denounced the fox cult, some officials also waged wars against the fox at the local level. Recall the Daoist record of foxes assuming the position of the earth god in early Song Binzhou. The official history, Songshi, documents that some foxes burrowed homes in a temple dedicated to a local god and attracted huge crowds of worshippers in Binzhou around the same time. The foxes exercised their powers through spirit mediums, and the local people appealed to them in cases of flood, drought, disease, and plague. In local language, the word hu (fox) even became taboo. But in 1011, when Wang Sizong (944–1021), an official famous for his ruthless methods in dealing with illicit cults, assumed the office of magistrate of Binzhou, he ordered the temple demolished. He smoked out the fox den underneath it and killed dozens of foxes. The compiler of the Songshi claims, “The practice of the illicit cult [in Binzhou] disappeared thereafter.” More careful reading of the Songshi with references to the Daoist record and Song literati anecdotal accounts, however, reveals some neglected aspects of the fox temple in Binzhou. Before Wang came to Binzhou, the Songshi notes, the fox cult had been so influential that almost all officials came to pay homage at the temple upon their arrival. In other words, Wang’s action was more an exception than the rule, and local officials accepted the fox cult with reverence. The Daoist text in fact acknowledges the foxes’ temporary legitimacy as the earth god by halting the Daoist master’s exorcistic attempt and having the Lord on High grant them the fu. Furthermore, Wang Pizhi (1031–?)’s Mianshui yantanlu (Leisure Talks by the Mian River) and Lü Xizhe (1039–1116)’s Chuanjiang zaji (Miscellaneous Notes of Transmitting Learning) were literati casual jottings compiled long before the Songshi and only about eighty years after Wang’s destruction of the fox cult. Both say that foxes were not the illicit surrogates of some other god, as the Songshi specifies, but rather that they enjoyed local worship in their own right. Chuanjiang zaji calls the temple the Temple of Fox Kings (huwang miao). In Chuanjiang zaji, the story also ends differently. Wang indeed smokes out the fox den and kills hundreds of foxes, but “a large fox fled away in

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a white light, and the demonic activities in the area subsequently disappeared.” The story then adds: “Even when people rebuilt the temple again, it had no more efficacy.” The escape of the large fox and the Binzhou people’s attempt to rebuild the temple, however, are not mentioned by the Songshi, a much later and more officially oriented source. The details preserved in the story suggest that the author of Chuanjiang zaji, and perhaps the Binzhou people as well, believed that the illicit cult was not completely eradicated, but only driven away from this particular locality. He mentions people’s rebuilding intentions without surprise, suggesting that the suppression of illicit cults was erratic and depended more on the personality and moral stand of individual officials than on regular implementation of government policies. The fox cult continued to appeal to local populations under the Jurchen rule. The famous scholar Yuan Haowen (1190–1257) proudly recalled that his maternal grandfather, Mr. Wang, became well remembered in the history of Luojiao county of Fuzhou prefecture (Shaanxi). When Wang served as the assistant magistrate during the Dading period (1161–1189), he arrested a spirit medium called Bai Shenguan (Spiritual Official Bai), who attracted many local people by practicing “heterodox magic.” When Wang interrogated him, Bai confessed that a celestial deity empowered him to perform magic, and the source of his magic power turned out to be a jar of fox saliva. Bai did not survive the two hundred lashes ordered by Wang and died. According to Yuan, this incident earned Wang the respect of the whole county, and the story still circulated among the local people forty years later. Yuan Haowen also hailed another official’s achievement in suppressing the fox cult. In 1191 a certain Hu Yan’gao was appointed the magistrate of Jimo, a small county in Laizhou prefecture of Shandong known for its infertile land, vulgar customs, and lawless hereditary families. Once he assumed office, Hu found that the yamen office had long been occupied by “demonic foxes” that came out at night and transformed themselves into prison guards, who flagrantly set the prisoners free, or prostitutes, who wantonly bewitched local men, sometimes driving them to death. Out of fear, the local people had erected shrines and had been offering incense to these foxes for fifty years. Hu was determined to reclaim his office: “This office belongs to worthy people, how is it possible that the magistrate has to give it away to demonic beings?” The next day he stayed there after dark and kindled candles. By midnight he heard foxes howling, and soon he was surrounded by hundreds of them. A huge white fox came to the middle and roared, assuming

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attack position. Hu sat untouched, confronting the foxes face to face. After a long while the animals withdrew. The same scenario occurred for three straight days, and then the foxes never came again. Half a month later, a patrolling constable reported that he saw hundreds of foxes leaving the county and heading southeast. Soon after, a woman in the neighboring county of Dengzhou was possessed by a fox, who was soon captured by a Daoist exorcist and made to confess that it was driven there by Hu Yan’gao. Jimo people therefore “worshipped Mr. Hu as a god” and built a tablet to commemorate his success in expelling evil foxes for them. Perhaps no other example can reveal more clearly the meanings behind both the constant suppression and the obstinate survival of the fox cult. The various forms of fox transformation, the reckless, lawbreaking prison guards, and the lustful courtesans might have epitomized a chaotic local reality that challenged the legal and moral order that was supposed to be maintained by officials. The foxes’ occupation of the magistrate’s office compound was symbolic, for the unruly creatures seem to mirror local forces strong enough to compete with the official’s power. They were perceived as potential threats to the legitimate authority of the magistrate, a power imposed from above, outside of the community. The replacement of the fox cult by the tablet to the magistrate marked the triumph of officials in wielding state power to curb dangerous elements in local society and to persuade the local people to conform to state rules. Enthusiastic recorders such as Yuan Haowen made Hu Yan’gao into a model official. But again, reading between the lines, we learn the other side of the story that the recorder might not intend to show. After all, the “demonic foxes” had been masters of the magistrate’s offices for at least fifty years before Hu’s coming, and none of his predecessors had ever taken action. Hu’s achievement also proved to be limited. The foxes were only driven away from his own jurisdiction; they did not entirely disappear. They fled and roamed in the neighboring counties, leaving ample potential for a return after this particularly serious magistrate finished his term.

~! Ambiguities and contradictions characterized representations of foxes in ancient and medieval China. Growing out of shamanistic traditions and elaborated by Han esoteric interpretations, the fox was a spiritual creature whose physical attributes and biological nature invoked both benign and demonic powers. Buddhists, Daoists, and some agents of the imperial state

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argued that foxes, by relying on the yin force, were heterodox and inferior. They bewitched people, performed sorcery, caused diseases, and defiled gods, and therefore had to be exorcised. But with their systematic doctrines, pantheons, and ritual content, Buddhism and Daoism also constituted a rich structure through which popular beliefs were promoted and enriched. The same elements of Daoism and Buddhism, such as age and immortality, the magic of metamorphosis, and meditative techniques formed the core of the foxes’ power. In exploring the multiple representations of foxes in different genres, we see how official and clerical efforts failed to contain the vices of these spirits and how the cult thrived on its marginality. The fox also had social and political meanings. Over the course of history its bushy tail was used to represent both political virtue and family fertility, and its association with the ultimate yin force stood for the enchanting female power. In the specific cultural context of the late Tang, foxes were perceived as the transcendent self of the literati men, of their beloved courtesans, and most of all of the barbarians who lived among the Chinese—marginal outsiders in various aspects of late Tang society. Religious practices, family concerns, and social experience mutually authenticated one another, consistently reinforcing the marginal position of the fox and reconstructing the social categories it symbolized.

2 Huxian and the Spread of the Fox Cult

In 1529, while traveling in the county of Linzi, Shandong, Lang Ying (1487– 1566), a native of the southern province of Zhejiang, claimed that he had heard of fox metamorphoses in the north, and therefore he curiously consulted some local people about the matter. Here is what he learned: Foxes sneak into the shabby houses of poor families, jump on beds, and open their mouths to steal people’s breath. When people wake up and smell a fox, they will shout in fear: “Beat the fox! Beat the fox!” But by this time the foxes are long gone. Practicing like this for a long time, foxes become able to shrink their bodies and penetrate into the earth even at impenetrable places. Practicing for an even longer time, foxes master the arts of metamorphosis and are therefore able to form illicit relationships with mortal men and women. They will find the opposite sex to engage in sexual intercourse, and they are also skillful in conveying wealth and property [from other places] to benefit their [human] hosts. When their human hosts die, the foxes move into another household. People don’t think [these activities of foxes] are anything strange.

Lang Ying’s account echoes those of Zhang Zhuo and other Tang sources: foxes relied on stealing people’s vital energy to attain magic powers and

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human form, and their transformations were closely tied to sexual encounters with mortal men and women. Like Tang fox deities in village homes, they bestowed favors on their human hosts. These common features show that, despite official proscriptions and the relative absence of written records after the Tang, foxes never disappeared entirely from people’s religious life. Lang’s curiosity also suggests that fox cult practices in his time were both a regional phenomenon peculiar to north China and familiar knowledge, mostly likely gained through past and contemporary literatures, for learned people all over the empire. Lang Ying was certainly not alone in exploring local beliefs in fox spirits. From the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries, fox spirits resurfaced in literati anecdotal collections in the greatest profusion since the Tang. These collections provide invaluable information about fox cult practices. Local gazetteers, missionary reports, and ethnographical studies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries complement the collections and confirm the cult’s historical continuity. This chapter relies on these different sources to chart out north China, especially Hebei and Shandong, and later Manchuria, as the center of fox worship. In the absence of religious scriptures, institutions, and famous sacred sites, the chapter focuses on a particular term, huxian, to study the spread of the fox cult within and beyond this region. During late imperial and modern times, huxian was the term most commonly used to address fox spirits. Its appearance in different genres and contexts by authors of different regional backgrounds offers a unique window on the dynamism of the fox cult’s success at both the local and national levels.

Foxes in North China Foxes appear in almost every Ming-Qing local gazetteer of Hebei and Shandong as indigenous to the region. They prefer to burrow homes in preexisting structures, roaming in both rural and urban residential areas and building dens on street corners, in backyards, and in empty rooms. Like Lang Ying’s informants, residents of north China might often be forced into close physical encounters with wild foxes even in their homes and at night while they slept. Such encounters may have had a direct impact on popular beliefs in fox spirits. Ming scholar-officials in Beijing found that foxes infested the metropolitan examination halls, only leaving once every three years when the examinations were held. A late Ming source reveals that a family in Xingtai, Hebei regularly fed a swarm of foxes. Pu Songling, a native of

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Linzi, where Lang Ying met his informants, recorded a relative’s personal experience that confirms Lang Ying’s report. According to Pu, the man, Uncle Sun, was taking a nap one day. Half asleep, he first sensed something suddenly getting onto the bed, and soon he felt dizzy, as if riding on clouds. He thought it might be a fox bewitching him in a dream. When he opened his eyes he saw an animal of a cat’s size, with yellow hair and green muzzle, crawling quietly from his feet toward his legs, then onto his stomach. Before it could go farther, Sun jumped up rapidly and seized its neck. When he and his wife tried to tie it with ropes, however, the fox struggled, shrank its body, and escaped. Fox spirits fascinated southerners who, like Lang Ying, visited or lived in the north. In fact, some Song and Yuan sources already noted that foxes were found south of the Yangzi River, but they did not change the conventional view that fox spirits were peculiar to the north. Shen Defu (1578–1642), another native of Zhejiang who grew up and served in official posts in Beijing, noted the prevalence of fox spirits in the Ming capital and the surrounding regions of “Qi, Zhao, and Song (today’s Shandong, Hebei, Shanxi and Henan), but they were not heard of across the [Yangzi] River.” Both Lang Ying and Xie Zhaozhe (1567–1624), a scholar from Fujian, compared the fox in the north with the monkey, the snake, and the shanxiao spirit, a variant of the Wutong, in the south. Xie observed that Fox demons are most abundant in the vast land of Qi, Jin, Yan, and Zhao (roughly today’s Shandong, Shanxi, and Hebei). Nowadays fox demons dwell in six or seven out of every ten residences in the capital, but they do not do harm. Northerners are used to [their existence], just as the Lingnan people live at ease with snakes.

Pu Songling, following Hong Mai of the Southern Song (1127–1279), reiterated the parallel between the fox and the Wutong: “there are Wutong in the south, just like there are foxes in the north.” In several Ming-Qing anecdotes the Wutong and the fox appear as interchangeable identities, indicating the conflation of the two spirits in the popular mind. Distinctions were even made between foxes in the north and those that were occasionally seen elsewhere. Shen Defu noticed that when he traveled through the mountains in Zhejiang, he saw foxes from time to time, “but they were not able to wield demonic powers as those in the north.”  A century later, when Ji Yun was exiled to Xinjiang, he made similar remarks based on his knowledge of fox spirits back in his home region in today’s

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Hebei. Foxes thrived in the Urumchi area, he realized, “but we never heard that they bewitch people.” Ji even went on to explain that extensive hunting in the area killed foxes before they grew old and prevented them from gaining spiritual capabilities thereby. Shen’s and Ji’s comments confirm that in north China, the fox was believed to be a spiritual animal by nature and there was little distinction between real foxes and invisible fox spirits. Foxes did have natural habitats in many other places, but fox cult activities were particular to north China. Ming-Qing and early Republican anecdotal writings placed activities of fox spirits everywhere north of the Yangzi River, reaching as far as Liaoning and Inner Mongolia to the north, Gansu to the west, Jiangsu to the east, and many places in Hubei and Anhui bordering the Yangzi River to the south. To a lesser degree they also noted fox spirits in south China, in Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Hunan, Fujian, Sichuan, Yunnan, Guangdong, and Guangxi, and various types of fox shrines and temples were found in cities such as Nanjing, Hangzhou, Hengzhou (Hunan), and Fuzhou (Fujian). In Wuhu, southern Anhui, for example, almost every store had a fox shrine, and there were several temples dedicated to fox deities (huxian tang) in the downtown area. Merchants of the city played music and made offerings there more than ten times every month. Another gives a detailed description of the cult practices in Hengzhou, Hunan, where mediums were in charge of making statues of female fox deities, who were addressed as “Ganniangzi” (fictive mother) and worshipped as “bodhisattva.” The mediums offered chicken eggs every three years to be placed within the statues, and the eggs were believed to never decay. A late Qing source records that a fox shrine was even established in Taiwan, where no actual foxes are found. Also, in late Qing Fuzhou, a temple of Transcendent Pei was built around an old banyan tree. Legend had it that a fox, huxian, incarnated into a secretary at the provincial governor’s office and later became a transcendent under the tree. Every tenth day of the third month people celebrated his birthday, and the celebrations continued into Republican times and were revived in the 1980s. After 1949, many Fuzhou people brought their beliefs in Transcendent Pei to Taiwan. Still, north China, most notably Hebei, Shandong, Shanxi, northern Jiangsu, and Anhui, and Manchuria, have remained the heartland of fox cult practices till the present day. Sources from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries also mention that the fox was commonly worshipped as one of a group of five sacred animals, named Five Great Xian (wudaxian), Five Great Households (wudamen), or Five Great Families (wudajia). In some

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places, the cult comprised four instead of five animal spirits, and it usually included the fox, weasel, hedgehog, and snake. While the fox and the weasel always remained the first two members of the cult, others in these groups of sacred animals varied in different regions and included the tiger, wolf, hare, or turtle. Li Qingchen (?–1897), a scholar of Tianjin, explained the images of the five animals in the popular mind: Some in my hometown worship the images of Five Xian. The [five] spirits are: Hu, Huang, Bai, Liu, and Hui. Hu, fox; Huang, weasel; Bai, hedgehog; Liu, snake; and Hui, rat. I said these five can be distinguished by five colors. My guest asked, “Bai (white) and Huang (yellow) are [hedgehog’s and weasel’s] original colors, Hui is black, and Liu is green. But can Hu be red?” I said yes. The Odes of Songs reads: “Nothing is redder than fox.” My guest agreed.

Local gazetteers and ethnographic research during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries testify to the prevalence of the fox cult and the cult of the Five Great Families in north China and Manchuria. Nagao Ryuzō, a Japanese sinologist, observed that fox spirits “enjoy such popularity that they are worshipped by almost every household in north China and Manchuria.” Henry Doré reported that the belief in “fox demons” and “pictures, representing this belief ” were “found throughout the two provinces of Kiangsu (Jiangsu) and Nganhwei (Anhui), especially in the northern parts.” The Wanquan county (Hebei) gazetteer shows fox worship as a highly context-bound and individualized cult practice: Every family worships huxian to seek protection, so much so that for each single person there is one fox to be [painted and] worshipped, which by local custom is called “one’s avatar huxian” (benshen huxian). The fox is [painted] at one’s birth. A female huxian is [painted] for a baby boy, and a male huxian for a baby girl. After these boys or girls get married, the [paintings of] the foxes worshipped will be changed to one picturing a male and a female huxian sitting together. After one dies, “one’s avatar huxian” will be burned or follow one to the coffin.

The Zhuo county (Hebei) gazetteer describes the local people as very hostile to foreign religions and strongly resisted Catholic missionaries. In contrast, they “believe deeply in fox spirits, which are worshipped in every household. . . . Whenever they contract minor illnesses, they say this is caused by the Old Xian (nao laoxian).” The Cang county (Hebei) gazetteer states that

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Spirit mediums worship weasels, foxes, snakes, and hedgehogs. Whenever ill, the foolish people always invite them. When the mediums have arrived, they always say snakes and hedgehogs are demons; therefore, they burn incense, dance, jump, and cry in order to placate the demons. Sometimes they pinch the patients’ legs and arms and call it exorcising demons. Very often the patients die of shock before the incense burns out.

Fox worship also dotted the religious landscape of Manchuria, for it appears in the section of “local custom and beliefs” in dozens of county gazetteers compiled from 1919 to 1964. In his survey of popular shrines and temples in Manchuria, Takizawa Shunryō found the number dedicated to foxes overwhelming: 16 in Fengtian (Shenyang), 46 in Jilin, 6 in Dunhua, 6 in Yanji, 6 in Dongjing (Changchun), 2 in Yimianpo, and 6 in Acheng. In Mukden, a famous temple honoring foxes was called the “Transcendents’ Grotto” (Xianren dong). The temple inscriptions stated that it was first built in 1728 and renovated in 1840. The Andong county (Liaoning) gazetteer reports that local people usually addressed foxes with the family name Hu in order to show their respect, and spirit mediums established shrines and offer incense to them. The Yi county (Liaoning) gazetteer documents that The temples [of fox spirits] are called the Huxian Hall (huxian tang) or the Hall of Great Xian (daxian tang). There are numerous pious believers and worshippers. People who have been cured [by fox spirits] establish small shrines and make offerings to them in ways similar to those for earth gods. Spirit mediums worship foxes as their patron deities.

Fox worship was also integrated into annual festivals. As a god of wealth, the fox was worshipped during the New Year celebration. In a village of southern Manchuria, people celebrated the fox along with Guandi, the god of war, on the thirteenth of the fifth month, the first and fifteenth of every month, and all other major festivals in the year. In Zhangbei and Wanquan counties of Hebei and Hailong county of Jilin, people publicly celebrated the birthdays of fox deities on the ninth day of the ninth month. On this day local mediums would “decorate their houses with lanterns and streamers” and “beat drums and play music” to please the deities. Other worshipers would customarily sacrifice a goat to the deities and bring ample gifts to the mediums. In Wu’an county, Hebei, every village had female mediums for fox spirits. The mediums gathered in the second and third month every year, beat drums and danced to invoke the spirits, and attracted large

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crowds. This tradition was called “the gathering of mediums” (shipo hui). In Funing, Hebei, people made regular offerings at local fox temples on the first and fifteenth of every month, and the fox’s birthday was set on the sixth of the fourth month, during which operas and music were played, men and women mingled, and merchants of all kinds made profits. It was one of the most celebrated local events of the year.

Huxian : The Multiple Meanings of the Fox Spirit Fox worship thrived on myriad local variations, and nothing shows more directly its diversities and inherent ambiguities than the many different terms by which people addressed the foxes. In recognizing their protective powers, people called them fox deities (hushen) and fox kings (huwang). But they also regarded foxes as a source of disturbance and called them fox demons, fox specters, or fox sorcerers (humei, huyao, huguai, hugui, or husui). There were also relatively neutral terms. When speaking of themselves, fox spirits in tales simply used hu. Similarly, hu (fox) and laohu (old fox) carried no specific moral connotation, and people used the terms for both beneficial and harmful foxes. Referring to a fox as laohu or hujing (fox essence) implied its longevity and long training in magical arts. Only toward the late Qing is there firm evidence of hujing as a pejorative term. All three types of term were actively in use during Ming-Qing and early Republican times, helping people to present conflicting and even confusing perceptions about fox spirits in different circumstances. Among all the different terms for fox spirits, huxian stands out. In written literature it first emerged during the late Ming and became increasingly popular in Qing and early Republican times. Fox spirits in the tales of this period started to introduce themselves not merely as hu, but sometimes also as huxian. Authors of anecdotal collections either directly quoted their informants or voluntarily used the term for fox spirits. Village people addressed foxes as shangxian (the xian on high), xianjia (the honorable xian), daxian (the great xian), or simply xian. By at least the late Qing, huxian had surpassed all other conventional terms about foxes and become the most frequently used term for fox spirits of all kinds in both written and oral literature. An investigation of its multiple meanings will show the conflicted nature of the fox cult and help us trace its spread.

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Xian: The Divine Transcendent and the Literati Pursuit The blissful being, xian, has been traditionally translated as “immortal” or “perfected.” They live eternal lives, transcend the divine and human worlds, and differ from gods (shen) and ancestors in that they can travel freely and have no close attachment to any specific location, temple, or grave site. Unlike Confucian sages and saints, xian are not characterized by their moral qualities; rather, they prefer to live in hiding, far from the world, withdrawn into the mountains and often living in caves. . . . They are masters of rain and the wind, like the wu sorcerers, and . . . they pass through fire without burning and through water without getting wet. These are signs that they know how to control Yin and Yang. . . . They move up and down with the clouds, as they please. They have wings, on which feathers grow, and they ride either cranes or fish. . . . They know the future. They are masters of time and space. They can, at will, reduce the world to the size of a gourd, or turn a gourd into a world as vast as the universe. They are evanescent, disappearing and appearing in the wink of an eye. . . . They feed on breaths and vapors, as well as on flowers, seeds, and herbs. As healers, they compound drugs and practice respiratory and gymnastic exercises. . . . In a word, they conjoin the features of therapeutic exorcists, magicians, and immortals.

Recently, Robert Campany has distinguished xian from “immortal” and renders it as “transcendent,” for “immortal” only assures timelessness, while the Chinese xian “neither escape, change nor depart to an utterly distinct place; they remain in a temporal and spatial matrix, although they gain extraordinary ways of maneuvering in that matrix.” A hierarchy was already ascribed to these transcendents as early as the fourth century a.d., as it was articulated by Ge Hong (283–343): According to scriptures on transcendence, superior practitioners who rise up in their bodies and ascend into the void are termed celestial transcendents (tianxian). Middle-level practitioners who wander among noted mountains are termed earthbound transcendents (dixian). Lesser practitioners who first “die” and then slough off (xiansi houtuo) are termed escape-by-means-of-acorpse-simulacrum transcendents (shijie xian).

The Ming-Qing term huxian is largely identified with the blissful transcendents in early Chinese tradition, for Ming-Qing texts also show that foxes

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straddled boundaries of different worlds. They were able to live for several hundred years and to gain many superhuman powers, as described above. Furthermore, underlying these common understandings of the fox’s xian features were many different ways of interpreting huxian, and the three levels of xian-hood were also reflected in both elite and popular interpretations. Literati expressed their understanding of foxes’ pursuit of xian-hood through many discussions recorded in anecdotal collections. A story recounted by an eighteenth-century scholar, Gao Guanying, to his fellow townsman Ji Yun is representative. In the story, a man captured a fox who sneaked onto his bed and intended to steal his breath. Surprised that the fox could not metamorphose, the man interrogated it about its purpose in haunting people. The fox explained: All foxes with spiritual potential practice self-cultivation in order to attain xian-hood. The superior ones nourish their breath, refine their spirits, and strive to capture the gist of the Li and the Kan or the Dragon and the Tiger. They absorb essences [from nature] and obtain effluvia from the sun, the moon, the stars, and the Big Dipper. In this way they can form a Golden Elixir within their bodies, shed their physical bodies, and transform themselves into feathered beings. [To attain this level of xian-hood] one has to not only be taught by transcendents but also possess natural talent for xian-hood. I am not this kind. The next ones cultivate their physical appearance and master the art of the Unsullied Woman [the art of sex]. They bewitch, delude, and possess people, assimilating their life essence to enrich themselves. Then they combine internal and external cultivation so that they can also attain the Elixir. However, if they do not assimilate enough [life essence], they will not be able to attain the Elixir. And if they assimilate too much, they will benefit themselves at the expense of human lives and be punished by either the underworld or heaven. I do not dare to join that kind. Therefore I have to rely on my stealing skills to plunder [the essence]. When people are soundly asleep, I assimilate vital energies from their breath. This is like bees accumulating honey from flowers yet doing no harm to them. Gradually accumulating vital energies [from different people] and mixing them together, I can also hold my original spirit without losing it and attain spiritual powers over the years.

The first two forms of fox cultivation largely conform to the Daoist practices of interior alchemy (neidan) that had become increasingly prominent ever since the Song. The school of interior alchemy emphasized “dual cultivation” (shuangxiu), which combined physiological training and mental

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practices to unite male and female forces within the practitioner’s body and engender the embryo of immortality, namely the Golden Elixir. The passage also recalls that in ancient and medieval China, sexual practices, known as the art of the bedchamber, were well accepted by mainstream society as an essential way to prolong life and to develop the elixir of immortality. In the Shangqing tradition during the Six Dynasties, however, such sexual practices were already formally condemned while still preserved as a form of private contemplation. This remained true in interior alchemy after the Song. From the twelfth century on, along with the gradual establishment of Neo-Confucian orthodoxy, the sexual disciplines of alchemists were often criticized as heterodox and perverse. By the Ming, the teachings of the old sex manuals, once seen as guides for healthy conjugal sex life, were relegated to an infamous form of sexual vampirism that enabled practitioners to extract life essence from innocent victims. The sexual union of yin and yang was considered a respectable form of cultivation only as spiritual exertion. The physical practices of such union were despised and condemned by the mainstream of society. The first two ways of foxes’ cultivation of xianhood in the above story mirror these two trends in Daoist interior alchemy: well-respected mental exercises and illicit sexual practices. In Gao’s story, deliverance from one’s body and ascension to heaven were the most legitimate ways of gaining transcendence, and they were privileges reserved only for those who engaged in meditation and were blessed with divine revelations and natural powers. The second form of practice was illegitimate and dangerous, but it could also enable one to engender the Elixir, even though the story does not specify what type of xian the foxes would become. Years of cultivation of the third form, because of the impure sources of the essence, only allowed the foxes to gain magic powers of metamorphosis, an achievement lower than xian-hood. Gao was a learned scholar who spent all his life on the examinations but never passed beyond the first degree. By telling the fox story, he compared the fox’s self-cultivation with the scholar’s pursuit of success in the civil service examinations and lamented his own career failures. For Gao, Ji Yun, who had gained both high office and literary reputation, belonged to the first category. Gao could not compete with him, nor would he imitate the other two categories and advance by taking advantage of others, so he was left with no way to survive. He Xiu (jinshi 1723), a successful jinshi degree holder and one of Ji Yun’s teachers, expressed his view on the fox’s xian-hood at another level. Also through the mouthpiece of an old fox, he presented two paths. The proper path was to first become a human being and then advance to xian-hood. As

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a prerequisite to attaining human form, a fox had to transform his or her heart by reading the Confucian classics and learning the principles of the Three Bonds and Five Moral Norms (san’gang wuchang). Only then could the fox start to engage in meditation and purification and seek to become a transcendent. The improper path was to rely on absorbing life essence and praying to the Big Dipper. It was a dangerous shortcut associated with heterodox means and magical metamorphosis. There are differences between Gao’s and He’s interpretations, but it is clear that much like Gao, He linked the fox’s search for xian-hood to his own social position as a Confucian scholar and teacher, and he used the self-cultivation of the fox to expound his own moral teachings. The ways in which Gao and He perceived the fox’s search for xian-hood also tell us about how literati understood the world they lived in. Both agreed that there was more than one way to achieve a high goal in the fox and the human worlds. They appreciated and sometimes (as in He’s case) identified with legitimate means of self-cultivation. However, neither denied that the improper methods could also help one reach the very same or similar ends. In other words, the improper methods could produce an equally strong force to challenge and undermine the legitimate practices. The third type of practitioner, those who had neither the means to pursue the first method nor the courage to do the second, worked toward the same goal by accepting the disciplines of the existing order while willingly making moral compromises and taking advantage of legal loopholes. The literati’s understandings of the fox’s xian-hood recognized the existing order and authority, but tolerated and even welcomed alternatives.

Xian and Spirit Mediums The meanings of xian become more complicated when we shift to the interpretations of nonliterati. Lang Ying’s informants, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, did not directly mention the idea of xian, but they clearly indicated that foxes practiced self-cultivation by pilfering human breath and sexual essence. Li Wei-tsu’s ethnographic study in the suburbs of Beijing during the 1940s shows that similar conceptions of foxes persisted into the twentieth century. According to Li’s informants, foxes who had spiritual potential practiced self-cultivation in order to become xian. There were three types. The good foxes retired to mountains and refined themselves in perfect solitude. The wicked ones bewitched humans and absorbed their vital energy by means of sexual intercourse. Others, who were neither very good

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nor very wicked, stirred up quarrels and fights among people, who would release a maximum amount of qi (breath) for them to absorb. At first glance, Gao Guanying’s story mentioned above and Li Wei-tsu’s ethnographic account largely agree about xian. But there are significant differences. Lang Ying reveals that Shandong locals knew about the fox’s pursuit of xian-hood, but they were more concerned with the creature’s magical powers. In a similar vein, Li’s informants saw that all three practices would help the fox achieve xian-hood, but they did not distinguish between good and bad foxes, and they did not mention transcendence at all. Instead, they elaborated on the fox’s self-cultivation in much the same way as Lang Ying’s informants had some four hundred years earlier, only with more details. The highest goal of the fox’s self-cultivation, as far as Li’s informants knew, was to attain the form of a human being. In order to achieve this, foxes had to make strenuous efforts for five hundred years and had to acquire the power to “assume certain transitory shapes in concentration and to dissolve these shapes into qi at ease (ju ze chengxing, san ze chengqi).” After a period of ascetic life, the fox would be able to “leave its own body to enter the body of human beings through their sensory and genital organs.” This would lead a fox to the spiritual possession of a mortal man or woman, who would go mad and whose vital energies would be exhausted. Li’s informants also believed that the heavenly way prevented the animals from succeeding in their self-cultivation unless they had done some virtuous deeds. One such deed was to first cause illness (sazai) and then cure it, under the condition that only one member of a family should be afflicted and that this person had to have a predestined link with the fox. For Li’s informants, the distinction between good and bad foxes was largely theoretical, and the foxes who affected their everyday lives were hybrids. The “ascetic life,” which was supposedly conducted only by good foxes withdrawn from the human world, turned out to be the very source from which the foxes gained magical powers to possess people, to extract life essence, and to afflict people with illnesses. In addition, in He Xiu’s story above, achieving the human form through the transformation of the fox’s heart only marked the beginning of becoming a transcendent. But Li’s informants understood it as the highest achievement of the fox’s cultivation that strengthened its capability to metamorphose. Both Lang Ying’s and Li Wei-tsu’s informants present a circular explanation: a fox absorbed human essence in order to master the art of metamorphosis and gain human form, but one who had attained the ability to metamorphose would do so, then engage in sex with mortals and accumulate more human essence. In their

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interpretations, xian’s meaning as divine transcendent seems to be minimal and superficial, and the term emphasizes the magical, spiritual, and ambiguous side of the fox. Li Wei-tsu noticed the gap between the oral usage of xian by his village informants and the literary and general understanding of the xian as divine transcendent. He found that in European languages there was not an equivalent word that could render the exact meaning of the term as used by his informants. He felt obligated to provide a literal translation of xian as genie or fairy, but throughout his ninety-four-page report in English, he never used “genie” for any animal spirit worshipped by his informants, and he used “fairy” only once, when he mentioned the good foxes who were bound to practice self-cultivation outside of the human world. In most places, he rendered the foxes who were worshipped at villager homes and at mediums’ altars as “spirits.” In some places, he called them “ghosts.” The term xian was used to address not only capricious spirits but also shamans and mediums who had mastered the art of communication with the spiritual world and put themselves at the disposal of these spirits. During the twelfth century, Hong Mai introduced the victims of Wutong possession thus: “Some [possessed] women turn into mediums. People then call them xian. Those who are inflicted by the [Wutong] spirits and fall sick are said to have contracted the xian disease (xianbing).” This observation resonates with Li Wei-tsu’s above-cited statement across time and space: foxes as xian caused as well as cured disease, often with the help of mediums. Li Wei-tsu also notes that people who showed the potential to become spirit mediums were said to have xian’gen (xian root), a natural gift for xian. Shamans and mediums sometimes called themselves shenxian. They communicated with the spirits by going into a trance, chanting and dancing, which was called “tiao daxian (dancing to [invite] xian)” or “tiao dashen (dancing to [invite] shen).” On these occasions xian was interchangeable with shen, which was vague enough to indicate a petty spirit, a ghost of a dead person, or a powerful deity. Ming-Qing anecdotal accounts also indicate that both spirits and mediums were called xian, even though many literati authors emphasized the former and remained evasive about the latter. In a story entitled “Shangxian (the xian on high),” for example, Pu Songling and his literati friends learned that “there is a huxian in the village.” The term here meant both the spirit and the female medium who represented it. But when they visited the xian altar in the medium’s home, they chose to ignore the mediating role of the medium and only addressed the descending spirit as xian. While the spirits themselves enjoyed re-

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spect and offerings from a wide variety of people, the shamans and mediums were generally held in contempt by official standards (chapter 4). The use of the term xian in the context of fox worship, therefore, embodied both respectful and contemptuous meanings and had little to do with the Daoist ideal of transcendence.

Xian: The Erotic Woman Young and beautiful women as sexual objects are also called xian in literary writings and the popular imagination. In some early Chinese traditions, sexual practices were essential for obtaining longevity and transcendence, and young women were depicted as great masters of sexual arts. Ancient and medieval Chinese literature also depicts shamans and shamanesses who sought the love of divine beings in their trances and mystic voyages, and compares them to Daoist xian. During the Six Dynasties, amorous relations with xiannü (divine maidens) was a fashionable topic among literati. By the Tang, xian often referred to sexually active Daoist nuns as well as courtesans, prostitutes, and pleasure women in general. For Tang erotic writers, the images of ji (courtesans or prostitutes) and xian were interrelated and even interchangeable. Encounters with female xian became allegories for actual romances with pleasure women. Meanwhile, courtesans luring men into their embrace served as the prototypes of divine maidens and goddesses who descended to the mortal world seeking the love of men. Yu Xuanji (844–71), the famous Tang courtesan, for example, was also a Daoist adept, thus blurring the image of ji and xian. Zhang Zhuo’s classic story of “Visiting the xian cave (you xianku)” describes in graphic detail a young scholar’s erotic liaison with a beautiful maiden in a mountain abode. The female imagery of xian in Tang romantic literature addressed neither transcendence nor magic per se. Rather, it evoked the fantastic pleasures and exalted emotions generated by men’s encounters with enchanting beauties, both real and imagined. This meaning of xian was widely adapted to the needs of Chinese erotic literature in later times. During the Ming period, courtesans were often compared to divine women. There was always an erotic undertone in the motif of wandering with divine transcendents in Ming-Qing literature, and love between men and women was given a transcendent dimension. The late Ming collection Yanyibian (A Compendium of Rare Beauties), for example, contains separate sections on xian and ji. A quick comparison of the two, however, shows that the author in fact deployed the same literary lan-

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guage and imagery to describe female xian and courtesans. When encountering literati men, the two types of women demonstrated common literary and artistic talents. In one story about xian, a divine beauty made several attempts to seduce a man into an erotic relationship and was once cursed as a “demon (yaojing).” In several stories about ji, male patrons often compared attractive and talented courtesans to xian. Both types of women were objects of romance and fantasy and evoked transcendent feelings among male literati, but they were a far cry from the xian pictured by either Gao Guanying and He Xiu or Lang Ying’s and Li Wei-tsu’s informants. The conflation of xian and ji may have had a great impact on the use of the term huxian during late imperial times. Although involved in both romance and self-cultivation, fox women in Tang and Song tales were never addressed as huxian. The term first appeared in the Ming collection, Humei congtan (Collected Stories of Vulpine Foxes), as a new title for an old Tang story, “The Visitor to Mount Hua (near Xi’an, Shaanxi).” In the original version of the story, a beautiful young woman knocked at the door of Dang Chaoyuan, a recluse in Mount Hua, on a winter night in 808. Overwhelmed by her glamour, Dang believed that she had to be either a divine transcendent or an extraordinary human, and that she visited him for sensual pleasure. But to Dang’s surprise, the beauty told him that she had no interest in sex, and that she was a demonic fox (yaohu) living in a graveyard south of Mount Hua and had been learning the Way for years. Now the time was coming for her to die and become a xian by shijie, “escaping by means of a simulated corpse.” She asked Dang to save her corpse from a hunter the next day and bury it properly to ensure her attainment of transcendence. Dang did as she said. Seven days later, the same woman knocked at Dang’s door again, thanked him, left him a fair amount of gold, and departed for the xian world. During the Song the story was cited in a miscellaneous collection entitled Leishuo (Treatises on Categories) by Zeng Zao (fl. 1131–93), who also wrote an important Daoist work on interior alchemy. In abbreviating the story, Zeng largely preserved the parts focusing on the female fox’s ascension to xian-hood and gave the work a different title, “The Graveyard Fox Learns the Way and Ascends to Xian-hood (zhonghu xuedao chengxian).” This was the first time that the title of a story included “xian,” indicating divine transcendence. Whether the Ming compiler of Humei congtan took the idea of accentuating transcendence from the Leishuo remains unknown, for the same story in Humei congtan contains more details of the Tang original than Leishuo

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does. It is also difficult to conclude whether the compiler of Humei congtan had invented the term or simply used a term familiar to his contemporaries. Nonetheless, to name such a story with the word huxian sent mixed messages. On the surface, the author intended to refer to the fox’s ascension to xian-hood and therefore regarded a huxian as a divine transcendent free of secular desire. However, the first part of the story contradicts this overt definition. It characterizes the young woman with beauty, elegance, and talent, qualities ascribed to both courtesans and divine maidens in erotic literature. Dang’s first reaction to such women also suggests that for men, the encounter with divine maidens would naturally lead to sexual contact. The paradoxical representations of the woman in this story indicate that the term huxian, from its very first appearance in literati writings, had multiple meanings. Later sources show the erotic connotation of huxian more explicitly and extensively. For example, a young scholar who was enchanted by a fox girl visiting his studio at midnight asked the xian to transform herself into a different historical beauty each day. A poor farmer, upon meeting a woman offering him sex, suspected her of being a fox and commented, “I have heard that all huxian are extraordinary beauties.” The early Qing scholar Xu Jiefeng provides a unique eyewitness account, “The Record of Meeting the Xian (huixianji).” It describes his and his nephew’s encounters with a female fox in 1682. The beautiful fox woman first visited his nephew Xu Dan’s home, claiming she was there to consummate a predestined marriage. She became Dan’s concubine. In addition to performing her family duties, she composed poems, sang songs, and demonstrated artistic talent and intellectual erudition. Her several maids, equally enchanting and skillful, were all named after famous beauties in history. A year later, she and her maids returned to the xian world, but still they descended to Dan’s home frequently at his request. Once Xu Jiefeng witnessed Dan invoking them, in the same way that mediums invoked their patron spirits, and then Xu met the xian in person. Xu was not able to see her physical appearance with his mortal eyes, but he heard the xian reciting poems, telling fortunes, and singing enchantingly. The xian in this story manifested herself as both a divine transcendent and a tutelary spirit of a medium cult. But above all, it was the erotic scene pervaded by her literary talent, feminine sublimity, and mysterious invisibility that captured the heart of Xu Jiefeng. The common practice of spirit writing, fuji or fuluan, among both literati and commoners also reflects the mixture of the multiple meanings of xian. We can trace the practice to divine revelations by female transcendents to

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Maoshan Daoist adepts in the fifth century. It was fully developed in the Song, first as a form of nonverbal divination by commoners and then as a process of recording messages revealed by divine beings and deified figures to people seeking healing, divination, and communication with the dead. Literati were active practitioners of spirit writing, and among the many different kinds of divine being they invoked were young females who could dance, sing, compose poems, and engage in literary criticism. The practice continued to flourish among the literati during the Ming and Qing, as something half serious and half entertaining. Female deities, especially Zigu (Purple Maiden), were among the favorite spirits to summon. Fox spirits were often invoked in spirit writing, either in their own right or as surrogates of other deities like Zigu. A Qing scholar once complained that “ghosts and foxes often took the place of xian in spirit writings and caused harm to people.” Revelations by fox spirits became a source of vernacular stories and cryptic texts that might be associated with some secret societies and sects. Huntington, for example, finds a story in a Guangxu (1875–1908) collection that “is told entirely from the point of view of an old fox.” Only in the end does the story reveal that it was received from the planchette, a form of spirit writing. I found in the rare book collection of Beijing University Library an incomplete handwritten copy of a book entitled Journey to the East (Dongyouji). The subtitle reads, “This is narrated by the huxian and cautiously collected by the All Happy Brothel.” The whole book was written with many unknown characters, mostly wrong combinations of radicals and parts. Given that prostitutes of late imperial and Republican times worshipped fox spirits as their patron deities (see chapter 6), it is very likely that the book was produced by spirit writing done in brothels, and the numerous incomprehensible characters might be attributed to the low educational level of the mediums and prostitutes, deliberate mystification by the mediums, or the malformations of characters typical of spirit writing itself. In any case, all spirits and deities appearing in such writing were called jixian or simply xian, and here the erotic xian and the spiritual xian converge and have very little to do with the sublime quest for transcendence.

Xian and Xian’er We should also note that in modern colloquial Mandarin, there is a subtle difference between xian and xian’er. The suffix “er” in northern dialect is usually regarded as an insignificant nuance and naturally dropped in writ-

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ten language. However, for most Mandarin speakers in today’s north China, its use can be vital. Linguists have found that in northern dialects the suffix “er,” among many other functions, can add to a word a sense of either intimacy or contempt. In dramas and vernacular novels, this suffix was already widely in use in north China no later than the early Ming, especially in the Beijing, Hebei, and Shandong regions. Given the profound influence of Ming-Qing colloquial language on the formation of Mandarin Chinese, we have good reason to assume the usage of xian’er and huxian’er had appeared in Ming-Qing times. The term huxian may convey a multitude of meanings that are derived from both literature and local beliefs, and it often first reminds people of the fox heroines in Pu Songling’s masterpieces. But huxian’er, with the suffix “er,” is a colloquial term reserved only for mediums and their patron spirits. It renders them personal, familiar, and easy to reach, but may also imply contempt for them. The seemingly insignificant switch between huxian and huxian’er in colloquial contexts can indicate dramatically different attitudes toward fox spirits and their mediums, yet such differences hardly show when people put them in writing, especially in classical Chinese. The term huxian, therefore, embodied multiple and mutually inclusive meanings—divine transcendents, spirits and their mediums, erotic beauties—and expressed both respectful and contemptuous feelings toward the fox.

Huxian and the Spread of the Fox Cult Huxian in Ming Writings Most Ming writers about fox spirits were southerners, and they can be roughly divided into two groups: those who observed contemporary fox worship while sojourning in the north, and those who learned about fox spirits from earlier and contemporary literature, particularly from the exceptionally rich repository of fox stories in the tenth-century Taiping Guangji, which was reprinted in 1566. The first group includes Lang Ying, Lu Can (1494–1551), Wang Tonggui (fl. 1530–1608), Xu Changzuo (fl. 1602), Xie Zhaozhe, Shen Defu, and Qian Xiyan (fl. 1613). They saw the fox as annoying and dangerous at certain times and not necessarily harmful at others, and tended to associate it with heterodox practices. Some tried to mix information from the Taiping Guangji with contemporary cult rituals in their writings. Qian Xiyan, for example, repeated the Tang theory that foxes took human skulls and bowed to the moon at midnight before they

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transformed themselves into beautiful young men and women. But elsewhere, he and Shen Defu both noted that in Beijing, foxes gained abilities of metamorphosis by licking menstrual blood from the dirty rags women threw away. Shen explained that drinking menstrual blood was a secret art of prolonging life that was also practiced by humans and especially by a member of the Ming imperial family during Taizu’s reign. None of the above writers used the term huxian. The author of the Wanli (1573–1619) collection Humei congtan, under the pseudonym Mochizi, seems to belong to the second group of southern writers. The book is devoted exclusively to foxes, but relies heavily on the written literature of early times, predominantly from the Taiping Guangji, and makes no reference to contemporary practices. The author made it clear with the title and the preface that the fox was a seductive and deceptive creature, mei (the character with the woman radical, instead of the ghost radical). As part of his efforts to reveal the creature’s seductive nature, the author renamed all stories in earlier sources to ensure that each title would include the character “hu” (fox) in addressing the subject matter of the story. Huxian as the new title of the Tang story, as described earlier in this chapter, seems to be derived from the transcendent and erotic content specific to the original Tang and Song versions, and therefore a literary invention. It shows no connection with contemporary popular worship and was not used as a familiar and fixed term. The most representative author of the second group is Feng Menglong (1574–1646). A native of Wuxian, Jiangsu, Feng spent most of his lifetime in Jiangnan and served briefly in Shouning, Fujian, in his old age. He wrote extensively on foxes, but his works show that he had almost no exposure to contemporary fox worship in north China. Feng published the revised version of Luo Guanzhong (fl.1330–1400)’s vernacular novel Pingyao zhuan (The Story of Quelling Demons) in 1620 and Taiping guangjichao (Selected Tales from the Taiping guangji) around 1626. As he states in the preface to the Taiping guangjichao, he was very familiar with the Taiping guangji, and the title itself suggests that it was a selective collection of the original Taiping guangji stories. Feng gives a brief summary of the nature of fox spirits in the section “Beasts” and includes other fox stories in a separate section entitled “The Demonic and Strange.” In Pingyao zhuan, he devotes a whole chapter to introducing three fox characters into the story and elaborates on the fox tradition, relying again on the information from the Taiping guangji. He emphasizes the fox as a bewitching, seductive, and deceptive creature, as humei (fox seducer or vulpine enchantress), and associates it

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with sorcery and rebellion. In recognizing the fox’s continuous striving for transcendence, he follows Tang tradition and calls the old fox “celestial fox,” and considers its self-identification with Buddhas or Daoist transcendents mere tricks to swindle people out of their offerings. The term huxian seems to have been unknown to him.

Huxian in Xingshi yinyuanzhuan (A Marriage to Awaken the World) In contrast with Humei congtan and Feng Menglong’s works is Xingshi yinyuanzhuan, a vernacular novel that appeared sometime between 1628 and 1728, featuring family and social life in Wucheng and Mingshui counties in Shandong. The identity of the author remains unknown, but it is generally agreed among modern scholars that he was a native of Shandong. Some even argue that the novel was written by Pu Songling, the master of fox tales. A fox spirit plays a key role, triggering the complex plot of this voluminous work. Killed by a vicious man in Wucheng, the fox takes revenge by reincarnating as a woman and marrying the killer in his next life as Di Xichen, a scholar and henpecked husband. The term huxian (or xianhu) is repeatedly used in the novel, and the contexts in which it appears show how Shandong locals understood the fox spirit in their everyday life. The fox was said to be a subject of Bixia Yuanjun, the goddess of Taishan, and to have practiced self-cultivation in a cave of Yong Mountain for over a thousand years (see chapter 5 on the relationship between Bixia Yuanjun and the fox). The author refers to her as xiangu (divine aunt) in the title of chapter 1, perhaps for the structural balance of the couplet, but it is also a polite term with which local people address fox deities. A careful reading of the chapter shows that the author never addresses her as xian from his own point of view. As narrator, he consistently calls the fox “hujing” (fox essence) instead. He recounts that the fox, in the process of self-cultivation, often came out of the cave and transformed herself into a woman to bewitch people. On one of these occasions, the author says, “she called herself xiangu.” This is the only use of xian in the chapter. In the following chapters the same fox, after being wrongfully killed, haunts the killer and his family members. In both the author’s narration and the many dialogues among the different characters, the fox is also generally referred to as hujing, a neutral term used to refer to fox spirits in the third person in colloquial contexts. On only two other occasions is xian used again. In chapter 7, the killer suffers severe diarrhea and ghost attacks in nightmares, all caused by the

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fox spirit, which is called “hujing.” The killer’s wife therefore plans to invite several religious specialists and perform a jiao ritual to propitiate the fox, which is now called “huxian.” Here the author swiftly changes from “hujing” to “huxian” within two paragraphs. As always, “hujing” refers to the fox in the third person in the narration. But when the same fox is made into a ritual object that demands respect from the propitiators, it becomes a huxian. The second occasion is in the last chapter, when a Buddhist master awakes the killer, Di Xichen, from his worldly sufferings by revealing to him his karmic link with the “xianhu” (transcendent fox). According to the verdict of the underworld lord, Di, for killing a xianhu—a subject of Bixia Yuanjun—in his previous life, deserves the humiliation and abuse he gets from his current wife, the reincarnation of the fox. He could save himself, however, by reciting ten thousand volumes of Buddhist scriptures. The term xianhu and the fox’s association with Bixia Yuanjun are mentioned here only to emphasize the sinfulness of Di’s killing of animals, a violation of Buddhist belief, and to justify the celestial principles of karmic revenge and causation. The xian attributes in Xingshi yinyuanzhuan were therefore deeply embedded in popular beliefs in fox spirits in Shandong and remained distinctly different from the literary xian in Humei congtan.

Huxian in Qing Writings by Northern Authors Beginning in the early Qing, more anecdotal collections were produced by scholars from north China, where fox cults were active. In using the term huxian, writers familiar with local fox worship showed distinct preferences for one aspect of the xian over another. Pu Songling, for example, created many famous fox heroines as romantic ideals that were later seen as the most representative huxian in Chinese literature. However, throughout Liaozhai Pu rarely uses the term huxian for these beautiful foxes. Rather, the huxian in his tales cure illnesses, save lives, bestow fortunes, offer sex, and play magic tricks and pranks. Moreover, Pu, like the author of Xingshi yinyuanzhuan, rarely refers to the fox as huxian in his own narration. That designation is used either by the foxes themselves, as self-identification, or in dialogues, when people address foxes face to face. The inconsistent use of the term suggests that Pu, as a literary master, followed the tradition of romanticizing divine women, but his direct contact with local cult practices might have affected his understanding of the fox as xian. Fully informed about the spiritual connotations of xian in those practices, he might have avoided using the same term to characterize the benign fox heroines. These

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fox women were not directly called huxian until later times, when the Liaozhai was copied by mid- and late Qing writers from both north and south China. Some of Pu’s literati contemporaries also promoted one meaning of the xian at the expense of the other. In the above-mentioned “Huixian ji (The Record of Meeting the Xian),” Xu Jiefeng’s nephew is in fact a spirit medium able to repeatedly summon fox spirits. But in recording the story, Xu chooses to ignore the spiritual aspect of the xian and announces at the beginning that the xian he met “was not a real xian,” that is, not a divine transcendent. He does not endorse his nephew’s vision of xian that combines romance with spiritual activities of mediums. Having described both his and his nephew’s meetings with the fox spirits, however, Xu takes pains to conclude in the end that physical beauty, fidelity, and other female virtues embodied by the fox woman qualified her as a xian anyway. In the process of reinterpreting the medium’s cult activities, Xu downplayed and reworked the elements of spirit possession to suit his romantic fantasies and moral ideals. Ji Yun also promoted the positive image of huxian. Ji spent a considerable part of his life in his hometown, Cangzhou, the heartland of fox worship. His fellow townsman Zhang Jingyun informs us that in the Cangzhou area, fox spirits invoked by mediums were called xian. Ji himself notes that “in popular custom foxes were called ‘xianjia.’” Nonetheless, all huxian in his accounts were divine transcendents expounding the Way of selfcultivation. When referring to fox spirits in medium cults, Ji always used “hu” or “hushen,” and therefore disassociated the huxian from illicit cult practices. Many scholars of northern origins distinguished the different meanings of huxian as Pu Songling, Xu Jiefeng, and Ji Yun did. Some equated huxian with fox demons and acknowledged the xian’s connections with haunting spirits and mediums. For example, He Bang’e, a Manchu literatus who was born in Beijing and toured and served in offices in the north, recounts that a mother and son were attacked by a family of strangers. Some senior villagers came to them, saying, “Huxian used to live here. They were often seen by the villagers, but they never did any harm. Now those who caused trouble for your family must be nobody but the foxes.” Other scholars tended to see old age, self-cultivation, or feminine charm of divine origin as basic qualities of huxian. Xu Kun (b. 1715), a Shandong author who was born in the year of Pu Songling’s death, considered himself a reincarnation of Pu. He calls an old man claiming to have engaged in many years of self-

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cultivation huxian, while another Manchu writer, Changbai haogezi, identifies several beauties who initiated romance with mortal men as huxian. In general, the early and high Qing writers based in the north used huxian only occasionally, even though different meanings of xian all surfaced to various extents in their writings. More often than not, these writers referred to fox spirits of variegated features simply as hu, the fox.

Huxian Transmitted by Storytelling and Publishing Oral storytelling, which provided primary materials for anecdotal writings, had long been a fashionable literati pastime. Ming-Qing anecdotal collections reveal the social circles in which the stories were told and transmitted in informal conversations among scholars from different parts of China and between scholars and members of the commoner classes. Leo Tak-hung Chan identifies five kinds of relationship networks that “furnished occasions for discourse on foxes and ghosts” in Ji Yun’s social life. They include participants in compilation projects, examiners and candidates, low-level functionaries, belletristic friends, and elite household members. He Bang’e reveals that many of his fox stories were the direct results of casual conversations with his relatives and fellow classmates. Fox stories were exchanged at drinking parties with participants of different regional origins. Such social gatherings allowed information to cross geographical and class boundaries. The booming publishing industry also transformed the use of the term huxian and helped spread the fox cult. The centers of printing for the elite market during the Qing were mainly in south China, in Shanghai, Jiangsu, Jiangxi, Hunan, Hubei, Guangdong, and Fujian. Leo Chan points out that the publication of zhiguai and biji collections peaked in the eighteenth century. During the years 1788–1798, “more zhiguai were published than at any other time during the Qing dynasty” and “perhaps more zhiguai literature appeared in those years than ever before in Chinese history.” Most of the famous Qing zhiguai collections containing fox stories, including Liaozhai, Yuewei, Zibuyu (What the Master Would Not Speak Of), Yetan suilu (Occasional Accounts of Conversations at Night), Liuya waibian (Unofficial Compilations of Willow Cliff ), Qiuping xinyu (New Words on Autumnal Plains), and Yingchuang yicao (Strange Grasses of the Firefly Window), were printed in this period. They were followed by another wave of zhiguai publishing and marketing during the Guangxu era (1875–1908) through the new media of newspapers and pictorial magazines such as Shenbao (Shang-

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hai Newspaper) and Dianshizhai huabao (Pictorial from the Lithography Studio), both based in Shanghai. For writers and readers who had less direct contact with the local cults and learned about fox spirits through social gatherings, hearsay, and published materials, the multivocality of huxian might have led them to use it indiscriminately for all foxes. Perhaps precisely because of the detachment from local cult practices, the dividing lines between spirit mediums, divine transcendents, and the enchanting beauties became blurred. Both readers and writers could fully appreciate the accounts of fox spirits as pure stories, without worrying about either the excitement or the danger of meeting a xian in real life. Yuan Mei (1716–1798), for example, was a southerner who served in Beijing and Shaanxi for short periods of time. An open-minded scholar with a keen interest in the entertainment value of the strange, he invariably addressed almost all fox spirits in his Zibuyu as huxian, whether they were male or female, young or old, benign or evil. When several fox stories from Ji Yun’s Yuewei were copied into Yuan Mei’s Xu Zibuyu (A Sequel to What the Master Would Not Speak Of), their titles included the term huxian, which they did not have in the original. Another southern scholar, Deng Xuan, published his collection of miscellaneous anecdotes, Yitan kexinlu (The Credible Records of the Talks of the Strange), in 1796. He claims in the preface that he simply copied stories from the books available on the market. The collection has a special section on foxes, which contains 34 fox stories that Deng had copied from earlier and contemporary Qing literature, mostly from Ji Yun’s Yuewei. Despite the variety of foxes, Deng named the whole section “huxian,” a significant contrast with the “yaoxie” (demonic and heterodox) or “huyao” (fox demons) that Ming compilers had used. Zhao Yi (1727–1814), a native of Changzhou, southern Jiangsu, observed that “the capital has many fox sorcerers (husui), who always occupy the upper floors of high buildings and empty houses. But they do not harm people, so they are all called huxian.” Local people addressed fox spirits as huxian to avoid being haunted by them; using derogatory terms such as husui could bring trouble. As an outsider, Zhao might have heard local people calling foxes huxian and deduced that it was the general term for all foxes. As mentioned earlier, the difference between huxian and the colloquial huxian’er would have been obvious to a native of Hebei or Shandong. But for southerners who, as today, did not have the suffix “er” in their vocabulary and tended to see it as nothing but a meaningless dialectal nuance, such a difference would be hardly noticeable. And this difference could not

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be expressed in written literature, for classical and colloquial Chinese were like two completely different languages, and almost all major collections of fox tales cited so far, save Pingyao zhuan and Xingshi yinyuanzhuan, were written in classical Chinese. The colloquial usage of huxian’er and its inevitable confusion with huxian in written language might also explain why Pu Songling rarely used huxian to describe his fox heroines, and why Ji Yun refused to conflate the divine transcendent xian with the spirit and medium xian used by his fellow villagers. In contrast, southerners who were usually unaware of the subtle significance of the suffix “er” and had no direct involvement in the cult practices could use the term more freely.

Huxian Transformed by Travelers and Migrants Travels of scholar-officials, examination candidates, and merchants also contributed to the dissemination of the fox cult. Many Qing anecdotes tell that scholar-officials and examination candidates encountered fox spirits in person when they traveled to the north either to serve in a post or to take the metropolitan exam. Some of them, willingly or not, brought the fox spirits home with them. The Jiashan (Zhejiang) scholar Huang Junkai, for example, records an allegedly true story of a Zhejiang man’s experience with a “chaste huxian” in the early nineteenth century. While working as an assistant for a county magistrate in northern Hebei, scholar Qian met a fox woman one night. He could only hear her voice and never saw her body. Later she followed him back to Jiaxing, Zhejiang, as a sister instead of a lover, and stayed with his family, including the wife and children, for more than a year. Her investment advice multiplied the family’s wealth. At Qian’s repeated requests, she once revealed her body as a young woman, and Qian became so infatuated with her beauty that he soon fell ill. The fox woman refused to have a sexual relationship with Qian, but cured him and then departed forever. She was then called a “chaste huxian.” The author further notes that she had to be called “huxian,” for whenever she heard people call her “hujing,” she would become angry. Here, as the huxian was brought south, she was still endowed with spiritual powers, a source of wealth and a healer, and an enchanting feminine beauty, but she was dissociated from mediums and sexual depredation. Merchants may have helped the spread of the fox cult too. One story recounts that an honest merchant from Sichuan doing business in Hankou, Hubei was often cheated by his wicked partners, but he had a character too weak to confront them. His honesty won him the support of a fox woman, who came to stay on the upper floor of his store and bestowed silver bullion

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on him in exchange for the rice he offered her. Through her help, he rid himself of the evil partners and finally obtained an enormous fortune. Returning to Sichuan as a rich man, he established a huxian shrine in his home at Chengdu. Another fox shrine was erected in a similar manner in Guiji (today’s Shaoxing, Zhejiang), but with a different twist of plot. The fox spirit enriched an impoverished young man sojourning in the north, but was soon abandoned by him. The young man returned to Guiji as a millionaire. The fox woman came to Guiji ten years later to seek revenge, and the confrontation was only resolved when a Daoist master intervened, promising to enshrine her for five hundred years in the local monastery. The fox was then called “the Great Xian from the North.” These stories suggest that in dealing with an unfamiliar and sometimes hostile environment away from home, traveling merchants were apt to draw on local spiritual resources for help. Moreover, as their wealth grew, the power of their new patron deities spread to their home bases and their local communities. Increasing familiarity with fox tales in both written and oral literatures might also have made people in the south interpret strangers from the north as foxes. According to Qian Yong, a writer from the Jiangnan region, two “huxian,” in the form of two beautiful young women, appeared on the streets of Hangzhou city in the fourth month of 1786. They spoke in northern dialect and asked to rent houses from the locals. They loved to read, but when someone showed them Jinpingmei (Plums in a Golden Vase), the famous erotic novel, they laughed at it and threw it away. Instead they ranked the Book of Changes the most readable and demonstrated profound knowledge about the principles of yin and yang. They communicated with people through a young boy, a reminder of spirit possession, and told people that their original home was Xishan, the mountain situated to the west of Beijing, and that in 1747 they came to Hangzhou as divine guardians for Emperor Qianlong on his famous tour to the south. They had been staying in Hangzhou to guard the financial treasury ever since and were therefore called “the Huxian of the Financial Treasury.” It is impossible here to trace whether Emperor Qianlong’s tours helped bring some of the northern beliefs to the south, but the story does suggest that northerners who traveled south might have helped expand the fox cult.

Huxian Becomes a Catchall Term By the late nineteenth century, fox shrines and temples had become notable in many parts of south China, and the term huxian was adopted as a

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general name for fox spirits in literature produced in both north and south China. Unlike earlier scholars of northern origin, the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century compilers of fox stories understood the different meanings of huxian as coexisting, and their emphasis on one aspect of the fox often included recognition of other aspects too. The Tianjin scholar Li Qingchen (?–1897), for example, regarded the xian in local medium cults as the same xian who was pursuing transcendence and involved in erotic romances. In one story he recounts that a certain merchant Wang piously worshiped a huxian on his domestic altar for business profit. Unexpectedly a beautiful woman came to him and initiated a two-year affair before she departed for the other world. Another story features a xian shrine dedicated to an old lady, Granny Bai, who was said to be a hedgehog spirit. She cured illnesses through a medium. Her magic power, in the xian’s own words, was derived from her “self-cultivation for many years.” Southern scholars interpreted the xian along the same lines. Xue Fucheng (1838–1894), a native of Wuxi, Jiangsu and a prominent advocate of reform in the late Qing, recorded two long stories about huxian, both featuring literati encounters with female fox beauties. While affirming their enchanting features, the story nicely weaves the transcendent and spiritual aspects of xian into the image of these fox beauties. In one story, the scholar states that “female foxes have to cultivate themselves toward xian-hood by imitating beautiful and virtuous mortal women in history. They need to take five hundred years to attain the mortal women’s physical shapes, and another five hundred years to attain their minds and hearts.” Another story reports that a scholar met a ravishing fox woman in an inn of Jinyang (today’s Taiyuan, Shanxi). She was a huxian who had been living for years on the upper floor, a setting usually reserved for fox shrines. The fox woman claimed that she was a guardian of Empress Wenxuan during the Northern Qi (561–589), and that she had been practicing self-cultivation for over two thousand years and would soon ascend to the xian-world. She later activated two donkeys made of paper. Riding on them, she and the scholar flew to a wonder world in an instant. In these accounts, huxian appear as a combination of erotic images, divine transcendents, and cult spirits capable of magic. The literary trend of combining the different meanings of huxian, however, did not change elite contempt for fox cult practices and fox mediums; literary records still brand these activities as vulgar and superstitious. For example, the late Qing author Xu Ke includes a section on foxes in his famous encyclopedic collection, Qingbai leichao (Miscellaneous and Unofficial Collections of the Qing Dynasty). He mentions foxes as huxian, but

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places the whole section in the volume entitled “mixin” (superstitions). This elite bias persisted into early Republican times, when local scholars started to include the worship of huxian, often along with the same critical remarks, in sections devoted to “local customs and superstitions” in many gazetteers of Shandong, Hebei, and Manchuria. The vitality of the term huxian therefore lies not only in the positive images it evoked but also in the complex and even conflicting meanings it encompassed.

~! Literati writings, social gatherings, contact with local cult practices, the publishing market, and travel all played important roles in shaping the meanings of huxian and facilitated the spread of the fox cult within and beyond north China. The increasing popularity of huxian from the late Ming to early Republican times marks continuous interactions between literary creations and popular cult practices. The complex ways of using huxian to characterize fox spirits in local practice and popular literature makes the term hard to match with any English word. “Divine transcendent,” “genie,” “fairy,” “enchanting beauty,” “spirit,” or “medium” may capture one or two aspects, but none of these alone can embrace the multitudes of its meanings. A huxian could be any one of the above or all of them at once, and it was up to the human agents to understand and to appropriate these different sides of huxian in different contexts. The word in itself allows people both to pay respect to the fox face to face and to show their disdain and suspicion toward spirits and mediums behind their back. It embodied conflicts and compromises in fox cult practices. Despite multiple interpretations of huxian, Li Wei-tsu, an ethnographer in the 1940s, reported that the rural informants in the early twentieth century worshipped huxian chiefly in two forms: Jiaxian (Family Xian) and Tanxian (Altar Xian). The former were worshipped in private homes. They had the potential to haunt and possess people, but once properly propitiated, they took care of the family’s financial situation, guaranteed good harvests, and protected the family from misfortunes. The latter exercised their power through spirit mediums and were approached by people only in times of need. They cured illness, warded off evil beings, and foretold the future. Fox worship might not be framed in exactly the same terms everywhere, but these two basic forms of xian have dominated fox cult practices throughout north China and Manchuria during late imperial and modern times. The next three chapters will explore these two basic forms of fox worship.

3 Foxes and Domestic Worship

Ming-Qing official regulations concerning popular religion stipulated that: The common people are to make offerings to uncared-for ghosts of the village and county and the spirits of their grandparents and parents. They may also sacrifice to the spirit of the stove. All other [sacrifices] are prohibited.

Historians and anthropologists of China have noted that the above three categories of spiritual beings—the Stove God, ancestors, and wandering ghosts—have been worshipped by Chinese families up until today. They occupy designated areas in the domestic arena: the Stove God resides above the stove, a symbol of the family as the smallest unit in the social structure; the ancestors are in the family altar inside the house; and the ghosts are outside the back door. The Stove God, with its many local variations, functions as an outsider, supervising the daily behavior of the family. Ancestors are the worshippers’ relatives and live under the jurisdiction of the local gods. Ghosts are associated with beggars, bandits, and all other dangerous strangers. The Stove God and the ancestors are generally respected, and the ghosts are despised and feared. Yet ancestors and ghosts can be identical: they are both spirits of the deceased. One person’s ancestors are another’s

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ghosts. Ancestors also contrast with the Stove God and other gods; ancestors exchange supernatural protection for food offerings from their descendants, and gods reward and punish people on behalf of society at large. The worship of these three categories of spiritual beings requires performing carefully defined rituals during specific calendrical festivals, and these rituals bring the family a sense of community, political authority, and the hierarchical social order. How did the fox fit into this nominal structure of domestic worship? How was its presence in a family interpreted in Ming-Qing tales? This chapter focuses on the various ways in which foxes were imagined in the domestic arena. Upon entering a human family, the fox wielded its power in the same realm as the above three kinds of spirits. Like the Stove God and the ghosts, the fox was an outsider, but it rarely assumed the supervisory role of the former. Engaging in haunting, possession, and other capricious activities, the fox was often associated with ghosts and was either propitiated or exorcised as a dangerous intruder into family life. Yet many propitiators converted the ghostly fox into a family deity, and as such, it sometimes received the kind of treatment proper to ancestors or was directly identified with an immediate ancestor. A volatile element, the fox crossed lines in regular domestic worship and mediated among the different spiritual forces. It answered personal and often immoral needs of individual families and sometimes empowered marginal family members, such as daughters-in-law and concubines, to pursue their suppressed or neglected interests. Through worshipping or exorcising the fox spirit, the Chinese transformed anxieties over their responsibility to the dead and tensions among the living into family peace and prosperity.

Foxes and Ghosts Foxes as Ghosts The Chinese term for “ghost,” gui, has multiple meanings. It refers specifically to the spirits of the dead, but also means demons, monsters, and other kinds of malign force. Ghostly features of the fox can be traced to ancient and medieval sources (see chapter 1). Many of foxes’ biological traits link them directly to ghosts: they roam in the wild and intrude into domestic spaces; they are most active at night; and they burrow homes for themselves down below the earth, especially in graves and abandoned houses. They represent the yin force that is associated with cold, dark, earth, the lower realm, death, or femininity, and therefore are close relatives of ghosts.

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In Ming-Qing texts, foxes and ghosts are still closely related, and they are either members of the same family or rivals with similar capacities. A fox woman, for example, was said to have been orphaned at a very young age and to have been raised by a ghost mother. Another fox claimed that she had temporarily dwelled in a house of ghosts. A ghost once complained that while he was away, his house—the grave—was taken over by a family of foxes, and he had to fight hard to reclaim it. In addition, fox spirits and ghosts were both considered weaker than gods, and could inflict harm upon only individuals and families, not large communities. Houses haunted by a spirit, whether a ghost or a fox, indicated domestic spaces that had been taken over by alien forces and caused the disorder of a family. Fox shrines, like those of ghosts, were sometimes erected outside the houses and in simple forms. When receiving offerings, foxes and ghosts maintained an equal exchange relationship with human worshippers and catered to personal and often forbidden needs. Like their predecessors in medieval times, both foxes and ghosts were considered the cause of a particular kind of illness: through sexual intercourse they would drain men’s yang essence and endanger their lives. Ming-Qing medical texts specify that physical debilitation caused by melancholic feelings and repressed desires was a symptom of “ghost attack” (guiji) or “haunting” (sui), a term frequently used to describe sexual possession by a fox spirit. Ji Yun thus discusses the similarities between foxes and ghosts: Ghosts are the lingering life energies, which will gradually reduce and disperse into nothing. If they obtain further life essence of living souls to replenish themselves, their existence can be extended. That is why female ghosts often have sex with mortals, in order to assimilate their essence. Male ghosts cannot assimilate the human essence [through sex]; therefore, they kill people to gain the life essence. Ghosts obtain the human essence through the art of caibu (gleaning essence from another to replenish oneself) [used by] foxes.

Fox women, together with female ghosts, often appear as sexual vampires in Ming-Qing literature. The story line is formulaic and predictable: a young man meets an extraordinary beauty when he is alone, usually during the night, in an isolated house or in the wilderness. He succumbs to her beckoning and starts a secret affair. Soon afterward, he becomes emaciated and is about to die, but still he cannot resist her sexual allure. A religious specialist intervenes, accusing the woman of being either a fox or a ghost sucking up the yang essence of the man to replenish her yin. In some stories the man

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dies in the end and in others he survives, thanks to the exorcist, the correct thought of the man himself, or the repentance of the evil temptress. The domestic worship of the dead played an important role in fostering the motif of sexual vampirism in medical and anecdotal as well as vernacular literary works. According to folk beliefs, the souls of the dead, when uncared for, could cause serious problems for the living. The souls of young and unmarried women were particularly dangerous. They were outsiders who had no place in the ancestral line of their natal families and left no descendants, therefore their natal families needed to marry them out in the underworld for them to gain a place in another family’s ancestral line. Otherwise, the unfulfilled sexual desires of these young women in life would be inverted into sexual insatiability when they became ghosts, and they would return to the human world and haunt the living. Fox women, because of their yin associations, shared the threatening sexual power of female ghosts in popular perception. Mortal men who had spent erotic nights with a female visitor were often unable to determine whether the enchanting beauty was a ghost or a fox. For them, the two had similar sexual potential. Also, the word mei, meaning “to bewitch men with feminine charms,” is used to describe both sexually active female ghosts and foxes in Ming-Qing writings.

Foxes Are Not Ghosts As much as the images of foxes and ghosts converge on the yin nature, they also demonstrate significant differences from it, and the similarities between these spirits only made worshippers distinguish them more carefully. Ghosts and foxes are associated with yin only when they are each defined against the yang of humans. When the two are compared as opposites, foxes occupy the yang side, as opposed to the pure yin of ghosts. Ghosts, according to Ji Yun, “have physical shapes but no substance.” They are disembodied spirits that will eventually evaporate as their life energies disperse. Foxes “have both physical shapes and substances.” They are living creatures who use magic to conceal their carnal bodies. That is to say, despite its unworthy animal origin, a fox embodies a form of life, and a ghost an intangible form of death. This conception gives the fox a unique position in the triangular relationship among fox, ghost, and human, as Ji Yun stated clearly: “Humans are yang, ghosts are yin. Foxes lie between humans and ghosts, but are still in the category of yin.” The “in-between” characteristics, together with the yin leanings, make foxes and ghosts inseparable but not interchangeable. For one thing, foxes

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could restrain the threatening force of ghosts and help humans placate them. In an eighteenth-century story, an official came to Ji’nan, Shandong to inspect local affairs. He stayed in an official building that was reportedly haunted by a ghost. At midnight a female voice repeatedly spoke to him from underground, saying, “Your Honor, please hear my grievances!” As he was bewildered by the disembodied voice, a young woman came into his room and introduced herself as a fox. The voice, she explained, was her underworld neighbor, the ghost of a chaste girl who had been killed by rebels in a recent uprising and improperly buried. The fox woman asked the official to rebury the body with a Buddhist ritual in order to appease her restless soul. The official did so, and the building was no longer haunted. Officials were supposed to have power to subdue demonic activities (see chapter 6), but ghosts of young women who died violently were viewed in popular belief as highly dangerous, and we are told at the beginning of the story that none of the officials who had stayed in this room before came out alive. Here it appears much less threatening to the official to have a fox serve on behalf of the ghost when she wanted to appeal to the secular authorities for justice. The yin connection of foxes enabled the official to propitiate the dead without actually dealing with death pollution. The mediating role is especially conspicuous when a human simultaneously interacts with a ghost and a fox. Pu Songling’s story “Lianxiang” is a good example. A young scholar is romantically involved with two beautiful women, one fox and one ghost. The fox, Lianxiang, identifies herself as “a prostitute from next door,” and the ghost, Miss Li, claims to be “a girl from a respectable family.” They visit him on different nights, avoiding meeting each other. The fox soon realizes from the man’s emaciation that he is also having an affair with a ghost. She warns him of the danger, urges him to stop, and provides him drugs to recover. The man does not listen to her, and as she predicts, finally falls deathly ill. Through the confrontation between the ghost and the fox at the scholar’s sickbed, Pu Songling reveals the differences between the two: “To engage in the sexual act with a living person night after night is harmful, let alone with a ghost,” said Lianxiang. Li asked, “Fox spirits can kill men. Through what art do you alone avoid this?” “There is a type of fox that sucks away human breath, but I am not of that species,” said Lianxiang. “So you see, harmless foxes do exist in this world, but harmless ghosts do not because their yin energy is so abundant.”

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Zeitlin notes that Pu Songling demonstrates Li’s attractiveness in great detail; her tiny feet, cherry mouth, slender figure, and emotional sensitivity all evoke a fragile and delicate image that represents the ideal of feminine beauty during the Qing. Many of the fox heroines in Ming-Qing writings share the qualities of Miss Li when they face humans alone, but a fox like Lianxiang, who is placed in contrast with a ghost, is different. Pu only mentions in passing that she is a beautiful woman, and for most of the story she assumes the role of a healer and an exorcist. She quickly diagnoses the “ghost symptoms” for the man and forces the “yin poison” from his body with herbal medicines. In contrast to the ghost’s various aspects of yin that are associated with “disease, melancholy, coldness, and infatuation,” Lianxiang represents yang features with “healing, laughter, warmth, and wisdom.” In the second half of the story, Lianxiang plays a key role in transforming Miss Li from a threatening ghost into a life-affirming wife. Realizing that Li is genuinely in love with the scholar, Lianxiang makes her perform the most critical step in rescuing him from death. She places a pill in the mouth of the scholar and orders Li to press her mouth onto his and to wash down the pill with Li’s “fragrant saliva.” This marks a turning point for the resuscitation of the patient and Li’s advances toward life. From then on, Lianxiang begins to promote the union between the scholar and Li. She praises Li’s beauty and encourages her to stay overnight. When Li is finally reincarnated in the body of a girl from a nearby Zhang family, Lianxiang urges the scholar to send a matchmaker to the Zhangs and makes wedding preparations for him. After the marriage is consummated, however, Lianxiang chooses to die. As Li changes from yin to yang, Lianxiang undergoes a process of changing from yang to yin. Lianxiang reappears ten years later; she is reincarnated as a fourteenyear-old girl of a poor family. Although the story does not specify, it is clear that Li, the ghost of a girl from a “respectable family,” is a more appropriate candidate for the wife of the scholar. Lianxiang’s return as a young girl who is brought into the family by Li suggests that Lianxiang, a fox impersonating a prostitute, will now be a concubine. The new human identity changes little about her marginal position in the scholar’s family, but her single effort in the story serves to ease the tension between the living and the dead. The presence of the fox therefore has ritual significance: she exorcises the demonic force, heals the afflicted, and converts harm into blessing.

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Foxes and Ancestors When they haunted human families and claimed domestic spaces, ghosts and foxes also received different ritual treatment. People propitiated ghosts so that they would leave. Haunting foxes, to the contrary, were sometimes propitiated so that they would stay and play a protective role in family life. A Ming story demonstrates how worshippers temporarily conflated ancestors and foxes for pragmatic purposes: Sifter Zhang’s family in Kaifeng offered fruits and cakes to the ancestors during the New Year. For two days, some of the offerings disappeared. Zhang wondered about it, and in the night he hid under the altar table to find out. At the second drumbeat, a white fox appeared to steal the food. Zhang stood up at once and obstructed its way. The fox suddenly turned into an old, grayhaired man. Zhang then called him “father” and prepared him food and drink with great care. The fox was really pleased, saying, “I have a filial son,” and drank till he was inebriated. He decided to stay permanently at Zhang’s home. Whatever Zhang needed, the fox would get it for him. In three years, Zhang’s wealth amounted to tens of thousands, and he was able to build extravagant mansions. His eldest son bought an office, and the youngest son married a daughter of a prince.

Food offerings are a determining factor in securing the reciprocal relationship between living descendants and ancestors. In presenting food, the living hoped the ancestors would bestow upon them wealth, rice harvests, and offspring in return. They also put out food for the wandering ghosts, to prevent them from pilfering the offerings made to the deceased. In this Ming story, the fox first appeared as a ghostly figure stealing food offerings to the ancestors. But instead of exorcising it, Zhang promptly approved its consumption of the food and voluntarily made the fox into an immediate ancestor, perhaps expecting the creature to wield its powers in the same capacity as his ancestors. Reciprocity characterized the relationship: upon receiving Zhang’s offerings as his father, the fox acted as a responsible ancestor and brought the Zhang family wealth, prosperity, and the well-being of its offspring. The same principle also contributed to the tragic ending of the story. After Zhang had enjoyed his wealth and prestige for a period of time, he worried that “if my descendants neglect the fox, he will impoverish my family.” That is to say, the fox would compete with him for food

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offerings when he himself became an ancestor. Therefore, he killed the fox, thus denying it a permanent position in the family and treating it again as a ghostly figure. But breaking the rule of reciprocity was dangerous. Zhang’s murder of the fox did not secure his family fortune for future generations as he wished, but brought about the total elimination of his family line: three days after the fox’s death, Zhang’s house caught fire, and all they had was burned to ashes. The next year, Zhang’s second son committed murder and died in prison. The year after, a plague wiped out the rest of the Zhang family. “People believed that this was the retribution for killing the fox.” The efficacious power of the fox in bringing wealth to the Zhangs ran against the prevalent Confucian teachings in the morality books and ledgers of merit and demerit, that the accumulated merits of ancestors could make one suddenly rich and conversely, an inability to get rich or stay rich might well mean that one either lacked or had exhausted the moral capital of the past generations. Zhang exploited the ritual form of ancestor worship to please the fox and compromised his filial obligations to his ancestors for practical gain. The intruding fox, once carefully propitiated according to the principle of reciprocity, could provide shortcuts to wealth, free of moral responsibilities of any kind. The story echoes the popular writings of its time in showing how greed for money not only distorted human relationships in this world but also corrupted the ties of blood between the living and the dead within one family. The confusion of foxes with ancestors also allowed some people to express bitter feelings over the emotional and financial burdens brought by their obligations as descendants. In a tale entitled “huguai (fox specter),” a man returned home exasperated after failing the metropolitan exam. But a voice came from the roof beam to console him: “Don’t worry, you will pass!” Astonished, he saw an old woman descending from the beam. She identified herself as his great-grandmother and predicted that he would obtain the degree three years later. He did. But from then on the great-grandmother visited frequently, demanded food and drink every time, and meddled in family affairs. The family agonized over serving her, but they satisfied her demands for twenty years, partly out of fear and partly because of her useful prophecies. When she finally stopped coming, they concluded that she was probably a fox spirit. The accusation allowed them to complain about the insatiable demands of the self-appointed great-grandmother without offending the spirits of their ancestors. One special category of fox woman was particularly benevolent when intervening in family life: they claimed to be concubines or mistresses of

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deceased household heads, and that they had left the human world after their men died. They came to the descendants in times of need to offer help. In one story, the scholar Wang Muzhen met an old woman crying over the death sentence of her only son. He sympathized with her, donated money, and saved the son’s life. But the son, when going to express his gratitude to this complete stranger, told Wang that his mother had died many years before. That night the old woman came to Wang again and explained: “The truth is that I am the old fox of the Eastern Mountain. I had a love affair with that man’s father twenty years ago, so now I cannot bear to see that [with his son’s death] his ghost would be left uncared for.” This type of fox woman helped descendants of declining families rectify themselves and regain the lost wealth and prestige of their ancestors. In another tale, Wang Cheng was a scion of a prestigious family; his grandfather had married the daughter of a powerful prince. By Wang’s time, however, the family’s property had melted away as he idled along, and Wang and his wife became so poor that they had to live in a small, tumbledown house and share one tattered quilt. One day Wang found a gold hairpin and made an effort to return it to the owner, an old lady. Impressed by Wang’s honesty, the lady claimed to be “a fox who was your grandfather’s mistress over a hundred years ago.” Wang indeed recalled hearing that his grandfather had a fox mistress, so he and his wife called her “grandmother.” Lamenting the sharp contrast between the family’s glorious past and its current destitution, she pawned the hairpin for grain to feed the starving couple. Several days later she came back again with forty taels of silver for Wang to use to make a profit in trade. The money, she said, was her personal savings from the grandfather’s day. Wang stumbled in the market several times, but eventually he was able to multiply the original investment by twenty. The “grandmother” advised him to buy hundreds of mou of land and build houses. She ordered the man and his wife to supervise the farmers and weavers they hired, and scolded the couple whenever they were indolent. In three years, the Wangs became wealthy again. The “grandmother,” despite their plea for her to stay, silently vanished one night. The experience of another man, Zhao Sunyi, reveals the multiple roles a fox woman played for a family: she was a benign mother, a shaman, a mediator between the living and the dead, and a preserver of the ancestral line all at once. Zhao, like Wang Cheng, was born to a well-off family as the only child. The family soon declined, but the parents pampered him so much that he always lived in clover, indifferent to their sacrifices. It was only after both his parents had died of illness and poverty that Zhao finally regretted

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his unfilial deeds and wished to follow them to the underworld in order to make it up to them. At the very moment when he was about to hang himself at his parents’ grave site, an old, gray-haired woman appeared. “Are you the son of Zhao Ji’an? If you are, you are my son too,” said the old lady. Zhao was bewildered, and the lady continued: “My son, don’t you know that your father had a mistress? Ever since his death, I have always felt lonely and resented that I have no children around to keep me company. . . . If you can serve me, you will be doing something to repay your father, and you will have opportunity to see your parents again.” Zhao vaguely recalled that his mother once mentioned that his father had a fox mistress. Looking at the lady more carefully, he found that she looked like his mother.

Zhao therefore brought the fox woman home and served her dutifully as a filial son. She helped Zhao improve his financial situation and gain an official post. Here, casting the fox in a motherly role had a cathartic effect on Zhao’s sense of guilt. It was too late to ask the dead parents for forgiveness, and his contrition almost cost his life. The integration of the fox woman into Zhao’s broken family, however, provided him a chance to relive the past experience of parental care and repay it with due respect and devotion. When the reciprocal relationship between children and parents fell out of balance, people resorted to fox spirits to set it right. Serving the fox mother was only the first step for Zhao in changing from an irresponsible to a filial son. As he repented at his father’s altar that “the richest offerings to their spirits cannot match even the slightest service I can provide to them in person,” Zhao needed more merit to entirely offset his guilt. Accordingly, the fox changed from a mother to a shaman. She guided Zhao’s soul into the dark world and pointed him the way to meet his father. With her help, Zhao was finally reunited with his parents in the underworld. He won the chance to comfort them face to face, and obtained their forgiveness. Furthermore, he received their blessings: as the only son, he was sent back to the yang world and married a woman selected by his parents. The woman then gave birth to a baby boy. The intervention of the fox in the story marked a process of ritual purification through which the guilt of an ungrateful son was redeemed and the ancestral line of the Zhaos continued. Men were the center of ancestor worship in a Chinese family, and women received ancestral rites only as subordinates of their male partners. Further distinctions were made between wives and concubines, mistresses, and the

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like: only the former had the right to fully enjoy the descendants’ offerings with their husbands; the latter remained marginal to the family and rarely could claim a place on the ancestral tablet. The presence of fox spirits in the practice of ancestor worship challenged as well as supported these ideas. The cases of Sifter Zhang and the great-grandmother show that when foxes claimed legitimate positions as ancestors to be worshipped, they often created both opportunity and disorder. People wished foxes to fulfill ancestral responsibilities, yet they also projected their negative feelings about ancestors onto the creatures. Worshipping foxes in the same way they worshipped ancestors was a strategy for them to play with the official ritual language, either to gain from or to release tensions embedded in the daily routine of life. In both cases the worshippers conceded the position of ancestor to the foxes only temporarily, as an adulatory gesture. Though receiving practical benefits, they refused to undertake the long-term obligation to serve them as real ancestors. The reciprocal relationship between the worshippers and the foxes was either carefully maintained or easily dissolved, depending on the concern for family interests. The fox lovers of male ancestors were imagined differently, as a positive source of ancestral care and protection that were hardly credited to concubines and mistresses in the official rituals of real life. The foxes helped the living fulfill their obligations to their ancestors by preserving the family line and restoring wealth and prestige. Unlike the foxes who aspired to legitimate positions on the ancestor altar, these fox women offered aid not on the basis of material reciprocity, but through transforming the faulty characters of the descendants. Furthermore, even though no kinship relation existed, both Wang Cheng and Zhao Sunyi retrieved childhood memories to confirm the fox women’s self-identifications, suggesting that the descendants willingly acknowledged a position for these women in their families. The stories emphasize a high degree of reciprocity based on genuine respect and emotional devotion between mother (or grandmother) and child, relationships that were generally downplayed in the male-centered ancestral rites. Moreover, the foxes as returned lovers of the male ancestors were now called and treated as “mother” or “grandmother” by the descendants, a significant change of status that was usually impossible for concubines and mistresses. Yet the stories also show that such reversal of the normal structure of ancestor worship was only temporary. The descendants embraced the fox women largely based on the prior understanding that these women, as the embodiment of concubines and mistresses, had no permanent place in their ancestral line. They never became objects of worship on the ancestral

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altar, and they all vanished after their missions were accomplished. These perceptions reinforced the ambiguous status of concubines, mistresses, and similar kinds of women in family life and strengthened the traditional ideas of ancestor worship.

Engendering Family Wealth: Foxes, Sex, and Female Virtue Fox spirits in Tang tales already used divine visions to make commercial profits for their human partners (recall Miss Ren in chapter 1). In one Southern Song story, foxes bewitched a wife, and one of them claimed: “The reason I came here is that I want to enrich your family.” The saying “the fox can bring wealth (hu ke zhifu)” recurs in Ming-Qing stories and was a common topos in popular belief. The late Qing scholar Xue Fucheng (1838– 1894) observed that “Northerners believe that fox, snake, hedgehog, rat, and weasel are gods of wealth. People do not dare to offend these five creatures when they see them.” Reverend Owen confirmed Xue’s observation in 1887. He found that the five sacred animals in the Beijing and Tianjin areas were worshipped as the gods of wealth, and in popular prints they were represented with a silver shoe in their hands and the fabled wealth-collecting pot at their feet. “The little shrines built as shelters for these animals in a corner of most threshing floors and gardens are called ts’ai shen fang (caishen fang), ‘house of the wealth-god.’” Sixty years later, Li Wei-tsu and Nagao Ryuzō both noticed that the Five (or Four) Great Xians were called “minor gods of wealth (xiao caishen)” and won fervent devotion from rural and urban inhabitants in north China and Manchuria. A Chinese sociologist from the early twentieth century also found that peasants in certain parts of Shandong considered a fox entering a household an auspicious sign, of good fortune for the family.

Sex and Wealth: The Fox Man and the Mortal Woman In Ming-Qing accounts, fox possession of women was indeed a source of family fortune. One late Ming account, for example, involves a family in Dezhou (Shandong): During the Jiajing (1522–1566) period the wife of a Dezhou man, Zhou, was [sexually] deluded by a demonic fox. In the beginning the family suffered bitterly. Later they tried telling the fox what they needed, and the fox always stole

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things to satisfy them. Because of this, the family soon became very wealthy. Therefore they piled two haystacks behind their house and let the fox live there. [When] Zhou’s grandson [became the head of the family], he disliked this and wanted to tear down the haystacks in order to build new houses. The fox became very angry: “I have made your family enjoy wealth and happiness for generations. If you kick me out perfidiously, don’t you believe that I can send you back to poverty?” The grandson was deeply terrified. He raised the haystacks every year, so much so that they looked like hills from far away. The family remained the richest in the whole prefecture.

Another late Ming story involves a Yuan family in Shangcai, some ninety miles due south of Kaifeng, Henan: In the beginning a fox had illicit sex with Yuan’s daughter-in-law. Yuan found an opportunity to capture the fox in a bag and was about to boil it. The fox pleaded with him, saying, “If you release me, I will make you rich. There is gold hidden in such-and-such place; please go check it first.” Yuan dug where the fox indicated and indeed found gold, so he let the fox go. The fox then stole more things for him. The man became rich and did not criticize the fox again. Now his family has continued for several generations, and all women who marry into it are subject to the fox’s wanton desires, yet the family grows richer and richer. People call them “the Money Spinner Yuans.” A regional inspector heard of it and disapproved. He was about to confiscate the family’s wealth. The fox sent him a message in a dream, threatening to ruin his fortunes. So the regional inspector did not dare to take any action.

In pursuing the connection between acquisition of wealth and possession of women, von Glahn argues that the capricious Wutong cult was closely tied to the volatile economy in the sixteenth century and that its capriciousness disappeared as money and wealth were perceived more positively in the stability of the eighteenth-century market. Robert Weller discusses a similar cult with ghostly features, the Eighteen Lords, which grew in modern-day Taiwan amid economic opportunities. The case of the fox shows that such marginal cults thrived in north China, an area ecologically and economically very different from late imperial Jiangnan or modern-day Taiwan. Indeed, late imperial Chinese society witnessed great urbanization, commercialization, steady population growth, and consequently, a sharp decline in the size of landholdings. More people were employed in nonagricultural pursuits, and their livelihood depended on a volatile market

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economy. North China, which includes today’s Hebei, Shandong, and Henan, was integrated into the national market network as a peripheral area. Despite agricultural commercialization brought by the spread of cotton cultivation since the Ming, population growth consumed profits from household handicraft production. Small family farming persisted, accompanied by insulated villages and general poverty among the peasants. For most families on the northern China plain, wealth was aspired to but beyond reach. Unlike their southern counterparts, village elites in the north were no more than a small number of “managerial farmers.” They could not accumulate lineage corporate land as a stable source of income or gain greater wealth from commerce and public offices. They managed to profit by certain commercial activities, but they were rich only compared with their poor neighbors, and could barely maintain the wealth for more than a generation or two. The heavy reliance on cash crops made both the rich and the poor extremely vulnerable to natural disasters, bad harvests, and other unpredictable accidents—factors easily attributed to fate. The Neo-Confucian reformulation of kinship and familial morality further complicated the uncertainty of family wealth. The primary requirement of filial piety was to produce a male heir to continue the family line. The ideal family promoted by the state and the elite was “five generations under one roof,” and prosperity was judged largely by how many male heirs it produced. Primogeniture was replaced by a more egalitarian system of patrilineality, which included all family branches in the joint ancestral cult and required that the wealth be equally divided among all its male members. These Neo-Confucian reforms had multiple social effects. First, they encouraged population growth and intensified competition for land and other social and cultural resources. One single partition of the family fortune among its many sons could easily drive a rich household down to middle or poor peasant status. Second, family reproduction and female fertility became both a private and a public concern. On the one hand, the late imperial law code permitted a man to divorce his wife for failure to produce a son and to take a concubine if his wife had not borne him a son by the time he reached the age of forty. On the other hand, female sexuality had to be safeguarded so that it would serve only the patrilineal and patriarchal family. The official cult of marital fidelity and chastity reached an unprecedented eminence in Chinese history: young widows refusing to remarry until old age received the state’s public commemoration, and those who lost sexual purity were expected to commit suicide.

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In popular perception, the temporary and fluctuating nature of family wealth was sometimes explained in terms of exclusive relationships between a capricious spirit and a single family member. Here we see striking similarities between the fox and the Wutong spirits. A male fox’s attachment to debauchery went hand in hand with the riches he bestowed. Young wives and daughters-in-law were generally considered polluting and dangerous, yet necessary in the patriarchal and patrilineal Confucian families: they were outsiders who married into the family and therefore a divisive factor, often blamed for creating disputes over family properties and friction between parents and sons or among siblings. But they also represented the female fertility that guaranteed the continuation of the family line. As von Glahn has argued, for the Wutong in sixteenth-century Jiangnan, wealth—and women—were perceived as “alluring but inconstant and fickle, pregnant with destructive power.” Also as in the case of the Wutong, sexual debauchery provoked by capricious spirits could be a weapon for young women under psychic and physical pressures brought about by betrothal or marriage to men they hardly knew. When possessed by spirits, they claimed exclusive access to the other world and thereby associated themselves with a different source of power. Although in the above accounts the two afflicted women remained mute, it is conceivable that they were the sole mediums through which the family heads communicated with the foxes in order to obtain wealth. Another Ming account shows more explicitly that women used fox possession to defy social norms. The daughter of a certain Li was possessed by a fox as soon as she became betrothed. A few years later, when the wedding day approached, her family found that the fox had changed her into a man, and the marriage contract was therefore annulled. When the local official investigated this anomaly, he found that Li’s daughter was still a woman. Bewildered and agitated, the official threw her in jail. There she was protected by the fox spirit and was soon released. She was later married to a man living far away, but the fox followed her and killed her husband. It was not until she returned to her natal home that the fox finally disappeared. Women of low status used fox possession to negotiate their own interests with patriarchal authorities. For example, a maid who had long passed the age of marriage in Zhang Xuan’er’s household, a well-known gentry family in Cangzhou, Hebei, suddenly went crazy and ran away several times, only to be found asleep under the haystack behind the house. She was allegedly possessed by a fox. Zhang was about to punish the maid for the illicit sex she had engaged in while possessed, but the fox laughed at him: “She has

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passed the age of marriage, yet you have not found her an appropriate mate. Is this the maid’s fault alone?” Zhang halted, and the next day he called upon a matchmaker and soon married out all old maids. The family heads’ consent to the sacrifice of the household women and incessant effort to keep the fox within their family are equally revealing, for both actions violated the public moral code of female chastity. Here the economic values of women and women’s bodies might make the sexfor-wealth deal real in poverty-stricken north China. Exploiting female members by selling and renting wives, daughters, or daughters-in-law was an important survival strategy. Ji Yun, for example, records many such incidents in his home area, Cangzhou, and it seems common for men to have lived on the income from their wives’ sexual service to other men. In one account, a family sold their daughter-in-law to a rich household to gain handsome pay. Another family sold the household wife out of poverty. A village hoodlum lost his family property, and his livelihood depended on his wife’s prostitution. A cousin of Ji Yun even provides an anecdote that a local man used the income from his wife’s prostitution outside marriage to support a fox mistress. Such practices were generally considered dishonorable, but in reality popular attitudes toward them were not harsh and sometimes even encouraging when there was an economic necessity. Frequently, concerns for actual profits overrode moral ideals for “those who chose to accumulate money rather than honor, or . . . the merely poor.” The fox man who sexually defiled a mortal woman might serve, to borrow a Freudian term, as a “projection” of the household men who gave up moral principles to pursue monetary gain, “the unconscious attribution to other people of thoughts, feelings, and acts of our own which would otherwise be felt as unpleasurable—perhaps feelings of guilt or inferiority.” By attributing both the illicit sex and the wealth to the fox, the male members of the family could legitimately enjoy the riches brought in by the fox/ woman without being blamed for sacrificing honor for practical profits. The projection of the fox ritually mitigated moral tensions in real life. Furthermore, worshipping the fox allowed these men to convert the threatening spirit into a helpful deity. In propitiating it, they could subjugate the potential power of female family members, who might use spirit possession to achieve goals unattainable through ordinary means. By making the fox an object of worship and establishing an equal exchange relationship with it, the family heads were able to mediate the moral and immoral, the ideal and real, and male dominance and female resistance in everyday life.

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We can also detect an even more subtle and ambiguous attitude toward sexual politics on the part of a third party—those who watched Zhou and Yuan grow rich and spread the stories around. We can only guess their sentiments through the records of these cases. No respect was given to the fox. It was described as “demonic,” its sexual advances were “adulterous,” and the woman it possessed was “deluded.” The fox accumulated wealth for its host family mainly by theft and robbery. Yet locals appear to have passed no moral judgment. The Zhous were considered “the richest of the whole prefecture.” The fox who enriched “the Money Spinner Yuans” even successfully blocked a government official’s attempt to eliminate the cult. Behind the negative features ascribed to the fox, mixed feelings of both contempt and admiration may have emerged among many onlookers: the immoral means by which someone obtained wealth had to be publicly denounced, but to become and stay wealthy could be a wish secretly held by all. In the eyes of both the fox’s host family and the people surrounding them, the fox was a tutelary spirit who served only private and often selfish interests. The personal bond between the fox and its human host was exclusive, and the benefit of fox magic would not extend beyond the immediate family of the possessed. The relationship between the human family and the tutelary spirit was based on a fair exchange of practical favors without any involvement of moral judgment. Such deals required a delicate balancing of interests. In the Zhou and Yuan cases, the family heads demonstrated their initial neglect of and even aversion to the foxes. However, when the spirits promised riches and the family’s coffers expanded, the Zhous and Yuans started to treat them with extreme care. The sharp contrast between attitudes people held before and after reaching agreement with foxes indicate a businesslike relationship between foxes and humans, and such a relationship was often fragile, easily terminated by either side. In fact, the interest-driven reciprocity between the fox and the human family could be so fragile and practical that it might affect the ways the fox was worshipped in the domestic arena. The fox was satisfied with a den made of straw in the backyard of the Zhou family. This kind of den was common in rural homes of north China until the twentieth century. Its simplicity indicates that the fox’s magical powers could be personally invoked by a wide array of people, even the poorest of the poor. Also, content, rather than formality, seems to have been important. The above cases and many other stories all lack elaboration on ritual manners but specify the particulars of material offerings: wine, fruits, eggs, and chicken—all expensive delicacies for normal farmers in north China. An obnoxious spirit

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serving selfish interests of the human family, the fox was conceived of as useful but not necessarily respectable, and worshippers showed their confidence by gaining an equal footing in negotiations with the fox and exploiting its power for their own personal ends.

Wealth and Female Virtue: The Fox Woman and the Mortal Man Foxes, unlike the Wutong who invariably assumed male form to violate women, also appeared in female form, as the following story shows: A certain Li from Henan emigrated to Suzhou (Anhui). He was utterly destitute and earned his livelihood as a hired laborer. One day a beautiful woman called to him from the field ditch. Li did not dare to respond. The woman said, “I am a fox. The predestined fate of our past life brings us together, so I venture to be my own matchmaker.” She also said, “I am not the kind that harms you. . . .” Li was suspicious of her bewitchment but fascinated by her beauty, so he lived with her thereafter. She suggested Li move to another village and build big houses. In a few years, his properties and farms extended for miles. The whole village looked up to the Lis, and the place came to be called Li Village. The fox was virtuous in nature. She did not produce any heir, so she bought a concubine for Li and raised the concubine’s son as her own. Having lived like this for a long time, she began to introduce the art of guiding energies to Li and exhort him to abstain from sex. She urged Li to sleep alone, and that the concubine should not be in his company. Li’s relatives believed that she was an alien species wielding bewitching arts and they sought art to exorcise her. . . . One day when she was drunk, Li beguiled her into shrinking her body and entering a bottle. He sealed the bottle with a charm and boiled it. A while later, a few drops of blood were left in the water. Li’s family soon declined: Li and his concubine died, and this was followed by the untimely death of their son.

The fox woman in this story is also a source of wealth, but with the gender switch between the fox and the mortal, the illicit sex is replaced by legitimate marriage, and the wealth the mortal man thus obtains is morally justifiable. Such wealth might be associated with women’s capability of bringing assets, which included not only income from household production but also dowry and the male heirs they bore, into the family through marriage or other acceptable means in real life. In this marital relationship, the fox is not the cause of sexual indulgence but a woman who avoids procreation. She personifies female virtues: making unconditional contribu-

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tions to family welfare, getting her husband a concubine to secure an heir, and raising the concubine’s child as her own. These female virtues make her a model woman who serves her husband’s best interests and assures male authority over family wealth. Familial hierarchy, instead of exchange on equal terms, characterizes the relationship between the mortal man and the fox woman. The power of the fox woman in the family had to be controllable by the established moral order. If it grew uncontrollable, it had to be suppressed and eliminated. At the moment when Li’s wife stepped out of the role of a model woman by asking her husband to withdraw from sexual life against his wishes, she met her destruction. Like the fox concubines and mistresses of male ancestors, these benign fox women might be worshipped by local people, but few appeared as objects of worship in literati stories, because featuring them as such would formally acknowledge female power in the male-centered family setting and undermine male control over the family fortune. However, the ultimate death of Li’s family does imply that female power was still well recognized in informal ways: the principle of divine retribution counterbalanced the dominant male-centered ideology and proved that women in patriarchal families might be invisible but were by no means negligible. The image of fox women as passionate lovers and caring wives was the most extensively written about and most aspired to by literati men. Among the eighty-three stories of foxes in the modern edition of Liaozhai, for example, about thirty-six involve romances between mortal men and fox women, and in as many as thirty of them the fox women are young, beautiful, and benevolent. All but six of these thirty stories bear the fox heroine’s name as title, and most of the names invoke literary imagery. The fox women are depicted as eager to shake off their supernatural features and attain identities as human beings. Allan Barr has keenly observed that Pu Songling adopted a strict male perspective to delineate these women. Sexual liaisons between them and mortal men were morally justified by either matrimony or predestined fate. In marrying mortal men, the fox women committed themselves to traditional values and strove to be fully integrated into human families. In associating themselves with men by predestined fate, on the other hand, the women were bound to leave when the allotted time expired. As transient beings in human society, they violated conventional expectations by refusing to have children. But they never harmed mortal families, and they even sought to conform to traditional moral codes by arranging for appropriate mortal women to marry their men in order to produce male heirs.

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Such fox women were well accepted not only as products of literary creation or objects of male fantasy but also as wives and concubines in real life. The author of Liuya waibian, Xu Kun, for example, recounts that his close friend and neighbor, Wang Peng, married a fox woman. She bore him a son and helped the Wang family win a lawsuit against a local bully. When Xu and Wang traveled together, Xu even shared with Wang the cookies made by his “fox sister-in-law.” Ji Yun records several times that men in his hometown had fox wives or concubines. Among them was one member of the prominent local gentry family of Zhang Tingxu. The man once asked his fox concubine whether her yin qualities would harm him, and she explained: “Foxes maintain sexual relations with mortals either by bewitchment or by predestined fate. Men who are bewitched lose their yang to replenish the fox’s yin. They fall ill and die when the yang is exhausted. Those who come together by predestined fate follow the natural course; their energies respond to each other spontaneously, and the yin and yang exchange normally. Therefore their relationship can last long and peacefully.” While authors like Pu Songling elaborated on oral materials to suit their own literary tastes, the recurrence of these benign fox women in different types of anecdotal collections compiled by authors with various purposes (many claimed faithfulness to their informants) suggests that folklore and literati writings shared and mutually reinforced similar perceptions of fox women. Female power was recognized and even exemplified by fox heroines who were satisfied with short-term romances with men without family burdens. However, behind the common acclamation of foxes as model women perhaps also lay uneasiness in a male-dominated society about constant challenges to such images by mortal women in real life. Alan Barr summarizes the different types of women in the stories of Liaozhai: The power that [mortal] women exercise over their husbands or other women, their resourcefulness in protecting and promoting their own interests, are themes common to many of these tales. We see how a teenage girl quickly brings her unruly husband to heel, and maintains her supremacy into old age (9.1272–73); how a shrewish wife subjects her spouse to one humiliation after another (6.861); how a jealous wife will beat a concubine so as to provoke a miscarriage (6.723), or mount an insidious campaign to terrorize her rival and drive her to suicide (7.883–84); how a woman can be a tyrant towards her daughter-in-law, only to be dominated herself by the wife of her second son (10.1409–11); and how husbands are so often helpless or acquiescent in the face of female assertiveness (7.902–4, 8.1112, 10.1409–11, 11.1564).

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These colorful images perhaps expressed the female predicament throughout late imperial Chinese history, as Rubie Watson puts it: “Women may be property holders but have few or no legal rights to property, they may be decision makers without the authority to make decisions, they may have physical mobility but are socially and economically constrained, they may exercise the power of an emperor but have no right to the imperial title.” The wider appeal of fox women, therefore, still lay in their complementary roles in the patriarchal society. Their supernatural powers had to be restrained within the limits of secular male authority. There are counterexamples. In bringing wealth, foxes also formed samesex friendships with mortals. A fox man, for instance, shared with his human host a love for wine, and the two spent many nights drinking and talking together. Feeling sympathy for the mortal’s modest life, the fox revealed hidden treasures to the man and advised his family to grow different crops according to market fluctuations, but he was never featured as an object of worship. Genuine friendship cast the fox/man interaction in a positive light, and the fox disappeared soon after the man’s death. In another case, a fox woman enriched a mortal family by whom she was enshrined. She granted financial favors by communicating with the wife. Unlike the wife of Li, this fox woman had no secular position in the mortal family. The wealth she generated for them bore an immoral imprint: the money she generously distributed among the family members was stolen from others. She also misused her power to help the husband in a nasty cause: to pay his gambling debt. To maintain this lavish source of income, however, the husband and wife emptied a room for the fox and made offerings to her every day. These two stories reverse the gender roles we have seen in earlier cases, but they retain the innate connection between moral justifications and worship of foxes, and they still emphasize personal reciprocity between the fox and the mortal.

Grandpa Hu and Mandarins During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, images of fox deities were commercially printed and widely sold in northern China and Manchuria. Some popular prints depict foxes as Qing mandarins wearing official uniforms (figure 3.1). Others show the fox as an old man with gray hair and beard in the center; he is either accompanied by his fox wife or flanked by two middle-aged men who in turn have two young men attending them. Nagao Ryuzō believed that they actually mimicked the three generations,

Figure 3.1 Portrait of the fox, Hu Santaiye (Grandpa/Master Hu the Third), and his retainers dressed as Qing mandarins. Printed in 1936. Takizawa Shunryō, Manshū no gaison shinkō (Folk Beliefs in Manchuria), 211

Figure 3.2 Portrait of the Five Animal Spirits in the early twentieth century. Nagao Ryuzō, Shina Minzoku Shi (History of Chinese Folk Customs)

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from grandsons to grandfather, in the worshippers’ families (figure 3.2). As imperial bureaucrats and old men or women, the foxes appear to have been sexually inactive beings. But the fading of the sexual connotations did not correspond to a positive conception of wealth. First, even for male foxes who engaged in sex in the earlier stories, we have no information about how they were depicted; people might have made them after the image of celestial bureaucrats or Daoist transcendents, and the early twentieth-century prints might have simply followed early visual traditions. Second, regardless of the foxes’ solemnity in prints, people still related to them in personal ways. The old man was addressed as “Xian,” “Ye” (grandpa and/or master), or “Grandpa/ Master Hu the Third” (Hu Santaiye), and his wife as “Grandma/Madam Hu the Third” (Hu Sannainai). When pictured as women, the foxes were called “Divine Aunt” (xiangu), “Divine Granny” (xiangu laotai), or simply “Aunt” (gugu). All these were courteous terms reserved for senior members of one’s family or community, and when a whole Hu family of three generations was placed in shrines, all members were given specific generation names and organized as a huge human family of three generations. Each family had its own foxes to worship. Using the male title of respectful familiarity to address the fox, pairing him with a female counterpart, and attributing plentiful descendants to them, people established a familial intimacy and made the foxes symbols of fertility and patrons of family prosperity. The efficacy of the fox’s power may symbolize intense competition for limited financial resources in a continuously destabilized society in late nineteenthand early twentieth-century north China. Worshippers in the Beijing and Tianjin areas claimed that they “depend on the xian deities for our daily bread (zhangzhe xianjia guorizi),” and that a family blessed by the “minor god of wealth” would have an “endless supply of fuel and grain (chai jin shao, mi jin chi).” But like Lang Ying’s Shandong informants in the sixteenth century, they also understood that such wealth was actually transported by the fox from one family to another, mostly through an exclusive relationship between the fox and a family member by means of possession. They believed that the fox “makes one family prosper by ruining another (xing yijia, bai yijia),” and a family had to maintain the lodge of foxes and made regular offerings to them with great care so that it would not lose its fortune to others and would even be able to gain from others’ loss. A nineteenth-century author summarizes the spirit worship popular in both rural and urban Tianjin: Some people have predestined fate with [the five animal] spirits, and the spirits will bring them good fortune. This is called doing spirits’ business (xianjia

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maimai). Merchants and shopkeepers will triple their profits, and farmers will have bumper harvests of a thousand granaries. . . . But when the predestined fate expires, all the wealth will be dispersed by debt, spoiled heirs, disasters, or supernatural transfers. As the idiom goes: “Wealth and honor do not last more than three generations. Easy come, easy go.”

Despite a lack of sexual overtone, wealth was still perceived as a result of personal connection with spirits, and it was just as fragile for farmers as it was for urban merchants. As Huntington points out, foxes “did not promote increased production but engaged in what was, in the Confucian vision of the economy, the suspect world of profit without production.” The worship of the fox as a minor god of wealth was closely associated with the sense of insecurity about family fortunes, and it had little to do with a shared bourgeois code of “collective entrepreneurship and solidarity” that marked the transformation of the Wutong god in Jiangnan. In the midst of political chaos and economic disruptions in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China, “grandpa” foxes in official uniforms might only have more power to serve the private, practical, and sometime illicit pursuits of individual families.

~! Traveling between this and the other world and crossing gender boundaries, foxes remained as outsiders who brought transforming powers into a family to ease tensions between the living and the dead. Some had kinship ties with the family, while others were threatening or vengeful. A fox might act as an ancestor, a lover, a wife, or a friend, all positions that privileged the private and practical interests of the family, and it rewarded and punished people according to the principle of reciprocity. It represented an outside force that could enhance the power of one’s ancestors, expand one’s marital and social network, bring out suppressed female voices, and strengthen the family’s potential to pursue practical interests beyond the governance of bureaucratic disciplines and public morality. The reciprocal relationship between a fox and a family member, however, was fragile. The private, and often immoral, connotations of the fox cult and the possible domestic tensions embodied by foxes were still regulated by official order and public morality. In his study of gender and religion, Sangren has pointed out that in China “female deities are unambiguously positive,” rejecting women’s role as wife while affirming their role as mother. The

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case of the fox confirms and supplements this view. While male foxes were propitiated with family shrines to justify the pursuit of private interests, young, female foxes in a given family, however benign they might be, were more likely to be exorcised in one way or another to diminish potential threat to the male-dominated social structure. Family wealth, as well as the moral value of that wealth, was interpreted in gender terms, and women’s roles in family life were expressed in the gendered construction of the fox’s magic power. With their ambiguities and gender flexibility, fox spirits provided ample choices for families in north China to deal with the uncertainties of everyday life and to find a balance between the public good and their private needs.

4 Foxes and Spirit Mediums

Spirit mediums have been an important component of Chinese religious life from archaic times to the present, and certain ritual forms and practices have persisted through the vicissitudes of time. Ming-Qing anecdotal records capture certain moments of spirit mediums’ practices, but modern ethnographic works are necessary to construct a more complete picture of the fox cult in local communities. Through these sources, we see that fox possession became an efficient tool for the underprivileged, especially women, to assume authority outside of family structure and to provide professional services to a variety of social groups. The gentry elite might hold bias against spirit mediums and suspicions of illicit cults, but as individuals some had worries, desires, and an occasional seamy side that attracted them to medium cults for possible solutions. The illicit content of the fox cult, therefore, appealed not only to the underprivileged and the subordinated but also to personal, yet universal human interests. Fox mediums, by providing healing, fortune-telling, and other services, had important social functions: family disputes were interpreted as spiritual disturbances, and illnesses were associated with moral flaws. In resolving conflicts and restoring order in family and community life, they became an alternative source of authority in villages of north China, where degree-holding gentry

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elite were relatively weak. The mediums’ role in the fox cult was rather paradoxical: they served personal and local needs, but they often turned to bureaucratic language and public morality to strengthen their legitimacy and gain a foothold in the public arena.

Becoming Mediums In his classic studies of spirit possession in African communities, I. M. Lewis shows that in a male-dominated, rigidly stratified society, two types of people play prominent roles in cults of malign spirits: women, particularly married women, and men of low social position. Mystical bonds with capricious spirits enable these women and men to seek higher social standing and to protest against those to whom they are normally subordinated. Similarly, fox mediums in north China included both women and men from lower classes. In a suburb of Republican Beijing, three kinds of people were most likely to be chosen by animal spirits to be mediums: those with certain physical and mental deficiencies; those who were originally of animal species, a lower form of life, and were incarnated as human beings in this life; and those who had transgressed certain prohibitions issued by an animal spirit. In sum, those who became mediums, both men and women, were considered genetically inferior to their fellow villagers. A sixteenth-century story offers a glimpse of how women took advantage of sexual liaisons with foxes to become spirit mediums and thereby sought to escape family confinement and change their social status. The fox spirit from the rear hill of the Zhou residence maintained a sexual relationship with the palace maid Little Three. During the Hongzhi (1488– 1505) reign, she was married to Ju Fule, a man from Bian (Kaifeng, Henan). The fox followed her, saying, “I can tell fortunes and I am also well versed in medicine. If you make offerings to me, I will make you rich.” Three reported the words of the fox to her husband, who was a man without dependable means anyway and therefore let her do as she wished. [Three] cleaned a separate room, hung a red curtain in the middle, and placed a seat behind the curtain. When the fox came, he never showed his physical shape, but only yelled Three’s name. Three stood aside, and all the people who came to ask for fortunes or medicines would kneel down in front of the curtain. The fox stayed behind it and made divinations on fortunes and misfortunes, and all his divinations proved correct. So Three’s family gained one or two ounces of silver daily.

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Much like the wives and daughters-in-law in the previous chapter, Little Three was a young woman who suffered the fox’s debauchery but was compensated by the opportunity for material gain. By marketing her exclusive access to the fox’s magic power, she became a woman with two roles: a housewife and a religious professional in the community. As such, she was able to bring wealth into the family without being fully subject to the patriarchal authority. Little Three’s husband, himself a man without income, had to rely on her profession to make a living. He showed no intention of interfering in her communication with the fox. Even though Ming-Qing anecdotal sources, while emphasizing the efficacy of fox spirits, rarely mention the background of spirit mediums, modern ethnographic reports allow us to make some conjectures. Henry Doré’s work around the turn of the twentieth century reports that in northern Jiangsu, the great majority of fox and weasel mediums were married women. The profession of spirit medium afforded them a means of subsistence and allowed them to “eke out a scanty livelihood.” Li Wei-tsu notes that in 1940s Beijing, animal spirit mediums were chiefly women, especially married women from poor families. They enjoyed significant respect from their husbands and fathers-in-law because of the considerable income they brought in. Brigitte Baptandier’s fieldwork in contemporary Fujian finds that “most of the female mediums are married and are mothers,” and their ritual performance “weighs down the women with the suspicion of orthodox Confucian and Daoist structures about their powers and their sexuality.” It seems that married women, normally required to be subordinate to their husbands and seniors, were able to reverse the hierarchical order by marginalizing their position in family life and assuming a public role in the community. Little Three was a dismissed palace maid, and her husband a man without dependable means. They lived at the bottom of society. When primary concerns of a family were to survive and to improve their financial situation, patriarchal order and male authority could be (or had to be) compromised. The process of initiation, as Little Three experienced, involved spiritual possession during which the new medium’s hysterical behavior deeply disturbed their family members, yet their physical strength was greatly enhanced. Two female mediums in 1940s Beijing had similar experiences. The first one, Woman Wang, was presumably possessed by an old lame fox, who was respectfully addressed as the Old Lame Master (que laoyezi): She claimed to be a shen-hsien (shenxian), a spirit xian. Her husband, annoyed by her condition, said to her, “I shall give you thirty strokes with a whip,

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because you call yourself shenxian. If you can stand the whipping, I shall acknowledge you as a fairy; if not, I shall know that you are simply mad.” She got the thirty strokes but did not show any signs of pain, and her husband had to recognize her as a hsiang-t’ou (xiangtou,“incense head”; see below).

The other medium, Woman Li, went through a similar process: Every day after four o’clock in the afternoon she was in a state of ecstasy. She paid little attention to her domestic affairs and ran vehemently around the village. He husband beat her with a rod, but she did not seem to be afraid of it. Neighbors informed her husband that at night several persons had seen an old woman go into their house. Probably the xianjia had changed into the shape of the old woman. Nothing but saying prayers was left to the husband. He asked the spirit to abstain from further possession and promised to let his wife be the servant of the spirit.

The initiation process is a familiar story for students of shamanism and spirit mediumship throughout the world. However, in the case of fox spirit mediums, the role the husbands played in these women’s transformation from victims of possession to mediums is significant. As did Little Three, the wife had to gain her husband’s permission before she became a professional spirit medium. During this liminal stage, the power of the fox and the power of the male family authority confronted each other, and the victim battled her traditional role in the family to gain a new social identity. She recognized as well as challenged the patriarchal authority in a traditional Chinese family. It was customary for the spirits, through possession, to negotiate with the family heads and gain their permission to claim the service of the possessed. Opposition, however, often brought relentless harassment from the spirits. Most families, like the two husbands cited above, would surrender to the will of the spirits and let the possessed become a medium. Permission from family heads is also necessary for men to become mediums. In 1997, I visited a fox cult in northern Shaanxi (see chapter 5). The medium had died the year before, but I interviewed his son, his friends, and some of his patients. According to them, the medium, Lei Wu, was born in 1927 to a dirt-poor family. He was an illiterate shepherd until he the age of twenty, when a fox spirit from a nearby temple first visited him. Whenever the fox came, Wu would go crazy, running naked in the coldest winter night, wearing a heavy coat in the hottest summer sun, and sleeping in the dirtiest manure pit. After he regained consciousness, he knew noth-

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ing about what had just happened. Two years later, the fox revealed to Wu that in his previous life, he had done a favor for the fox, who now wanted to pay him back by making him a medium so that he could cure diseases and the fox could cultivate the Way. At first Wu and his family refused the spirit’s request and even cursed him, but the fox continued to possess him until a sore grew larger and larger on his hip and he could no longer walk. The fox spirit came again and promised: “Should you agree to serve me, I will cure you in seven days.” When Wu finally agreed, the fox said, “Your words do not count. I need the family head’s approval.” It was not until Wu’s father gave his consent that the fox entered into Wu’s body, enabling him to suck out the sore by himself and regain his health. An even greater challenge to the patriarchal authority during the process of initiation comes from the hierarchical network formed among the mediums once out of their family. This feature of the fox medium cult is well documented by nineteenth- and twentieth-century ethnographers and is likely derived from Ming-Qing or even earlier traditions. Doré, for example, mentions that in northern Anhui, a woman who fell ill would become a medium after she was allegedly cured by an animal spirit and sought to return the spirit’s favor. She would have to become a disciple of the animal spirit. Other mediums served as teachers for such novices and instructed them “in the secrets, incantations and trickery of the art.” Li Wei-tsu provides a detailed record of the whole initiation ritual. It begins with a long conversation between the possessing spirit and an initiated medium, during which the reason for possession, the exact identity of the spirit, the nature of the candidate’s service, and the promise of the family head are clearly stated. Thus master-disciple relationships between the spirit and the medium and between the old and the new medium are established. Next, the master medium introduces the new one to his group, which is hierarchically organized with the master’s own master (shifu) at the top and the master’s fellow-brothers (shixiongdi), the master’s disciples (tudi), and the disciples of the master’s disciples (tusun) at successively lower levels. The name of the new medium is written down to join the names of all the others in the group. Then the master medium, as the head of the spirit family, leads the ceremony of burning incense, inviting the spirit, and submitting petitions to it in order to officially notify the spirit of the coming of a new member into the group. This is followed by the ceremony of “taking a master,” during which all the disciples and their patron spirits are present. The newly initiated medium prostrates himself before the master medium, recognizes him as his own master, and obtains from him two new religious

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names indicating his membership in the community of worshippers and his position among other disciples of the same generation. Only now can the ceremonies of installing the spirit in a picture and a shrine be held. Again, invitations are first sent out to all the members of the same animal spirit family, be it of the fox, the weasel, the hedgehog, or the snake. The subsequent ceremonies are held at midnight, under the leadership of the master, and in extreme secrecy. All irrelevant people, particularly children and pregnant women, are prohibited from attending or even peeping through the window. The participants ritually cleanse their faces, comb their hair, and animate the spirit picture with holy water, cinnabar, and a mirror. Incense and consecration documents are burned and prayers are recited. Each spirit finally descends before a picture of it prepared by the participants, and a shrine of the animal spirit at a medium’s altar is formally installed. I have followed Li Wei-tsu here in using male pronouns to refer to both the master and the disciples, and Li does not specify or discuss gender in his report. But we must be fully aware that many mediums were females and therefore the initiation ritual must be performed by either women alone or a mix of men and women. The master-disciple relationship might also cross gender boundaries, and women might assume the role of a master. Perhaps not every spirit medium in late imperial north China underwent the same complex process of initiation and joined a hierarchical network similar to the one described above. Yet many of the key elements of the ritual procedure, such as the master-disciple relationship, the nighttime ceremony and secrecy of transmission, incense burning and divine petition, the prominent role of women, and the possible “mingling” of both sexes at ritual gatherings are familiar to students of Chinese religions. In becoming a fox medium, a person not only assumed a new social identity outside family and kinship but also joined an independent social network that provided professional guidance and comradery.

Mediums in Practice Healing Modern ethnographers distinguish two forms of service by fox mediums. In the first, a medium burns an incense stick and reads the flame or the color and shapes of the ashes as signs given by the spirit. She is not a “medium” in the strict sense, since she stays conscious throughout the process. In the

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second, incense is burned to invoke the spirit, and the medium, in a state of trance, mutters and acts on behalf of the spirit. Throughout north China and Manchuria, variations of these forms of service, including trance, possession, and the use of incense, remain the most distinct feature of the fox cult. In northern Jiangsu, for example, they can be performed by the same medium, who invokes the spirit to enter her body after she has failed to read the signs. In Beijing and the Hebei area, mediums are commonly called xiangtou, “incense head.” The two kinds of services are performed separately by two different types of incense head. The first is “incense watchers” (qiaoxiang de) and the second, “incense lifters” (dingxiang de). In northern Shaanxi, trance and spirit possession is called dingshen, “lifting the spirit,” and the medium is called “horse lad” (matong). These different forms of performance enable spirit mediums to claim exclusive communication between this world and the divine, and ultimately to interfere with human affairs. They are most frequently used in the process of healing. When a family member is bewitched by a spirit or ghost, the family relies on the medium to find out what the spirit wants and how to placate it. Zhang Jingyun describes a healing process performed by two spirits, the “senior xian” (laoxian) and the “junior xian” (shaoxian), invoked by a female medium in Zhang’s hometown, Cangzhou. The patient’s family heard the two xian spirits descending into their house, talking to each other and to the medium, eating and drinking the offerings, and in the end leaving the medium with a prescription. Li Jinghan, a sociologist of the 1930s, discovered that in Ding county, Hebei, “villagers worship fox spirits by regularly offering incense, kowtowing, and offering food and clothing, and sometimes they invite the spirits to cure illnesses.” He thus describes the ritual healing: When farmers contract mental illness or fall severely sick, the family invites a woman who can invoke a Great Xian. The xian usually descends in the night, and a separate room has to be prepared and shielded tightly in advance. No light is allowed. Cooked eggs and liquor have to be offered on the table on top of the kang (a platform particular to northern China serving as both bed and dining area). When the woman arrives, she has to first burn incense to invite the xian until the incense burns out. Then she sits on the side of the kang, and reserves the main seat on the kang for the xian. Suddenly something rattles, and she says that the xian has come. The family members quickly kowtow and invite the xian to drink the liquor and eat the eggs. The sounds of drinking and eating can be heard. Then the medium asks the xian, “What kind of disease

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has this patient contracted?” The Great Xian answers, half-speaking and halfsinging, “This person has contracted such-and-such disease.” The questions and answers go back and forth for a while, and the causes of the disease, the cures, and several kinds of simple medicine are explained clearly. The voice of the xian is so thin and weak that it sounds like a woman’s. Sometimes the Great Xian even uses a white, fleshy hand to massage a patient.

My own informants in rural Yulin, northern Shaanxi province provided more details on the healing ritual of a fox medium. When a patient arrived, the medium, Lei Wu, would first burn incense and then, sitting on the kang, would drink a substantial amount of liquor. The incense and the liquor would soon make him look sleepy, with his mouth open and tears in his eyes. In this state, he would usually walk toward and stand by the door, acting nauseated and then vomiting. Then he would return to sit on the kang, now possessed by the fox. He would start to sing, giving his patient instructions in the local dialect. If the patient happened to be a Mongolian from nearby Inner Mongolia, he would speak Mongolian. According to my informants, “there were thousands of kinds of illness, and the huxian had thousands of ways to cure them.” While conversing with patients and inquiring about their symptoms in trance, the fox/medium often performed magic by grabbing some miraculous pills from the air to give to them. He once boiled cooking oil on the stove, dipped his hands into the oil, and applied it to someone’s joints to cure rheumatic arthritis. On another occasion, the medium pasted a piece of paper on a patient’s bare back and let him get dressed. Then he rolled a piece of yellow paper and blew air through the roll toward a liquor bowl. Soon the liquor turned from clear to yellow. He then set the liquor on fire and sprayed it onto the patient’s back. The paper on the patient’s back was burned, while his clothes remained intact.

Mediating: Ethnographic Reports In addition to healing, fox mediums played a variety of mediating roles in familial and village life. They performed magic to prolong life, looked for lost souls, served as young children’s fictive mother to prevent spirit attacks on them, and directed local families to build shrines for animal spirits as Gods of Wealth. Li Wei-tsu documented many such cases. A farmer girl, for example, remained unmarried at the age of thirty-five and claimed to be frequently molested by some animal spirits. A female medium was hired to

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communicate with the spirits, and through her a spirit ordered the girl to get married in a hurry and found her a match. When the actual go-between lied about the man’s age, the spirit revealed the truth through the medium, and when the girl’s family showed unwillingness to marry their daughter to the man, the girl was haunted again until both families consented to the marriage. Another woman gave birth to a cross-eyed baby in the year of the tiger. The father took it as an inauspicious sign and demanded his wife abandon the baby. When she refused, he left home for many days. One of the father’s relatives went to ask for help from a village medium, who, in the voice of the spirit, predicted that the father would return home soon. So he did, but he still disliked his newborn son. He was then taken to the spirit medium’s shrine, where the spirit reproached him and ordered him to accept his child. The father repented and lived together with his wife and son happily ever after. People also resorted to mediums and their spirits’ divine insight to deal with theft, a petty crime commonly committed by kinsmen and neighbors. They believed that “it is not good to report the case [of stealing] to the police,” and the medium was expected to take the matters into her own hands. Here are two cases: A couple of years ago a workman of a dairy lost more than ten dollars. Six of his comrades as well as the manager went to the t’ank’ou (tankou) of Magician Li to assure her of their innocence and at the same time to ask the spirit to reveal who the thief was. The spirit said to them: “I need not say it plainly. Every one of you may in turn burn a bundle of incense.” Each of the six men burnt a bundle of incense one after the other. The flame of the incense of five of them was very brilliant, but one man could by no means succeeded in lighting his incense; it emitted only a heavy smoke. The spirit again said: “I don’t need to say more. Just look at the incense you six have burned!” The culprit found himself betrayed by his incense burning. He turned pale and sweated. He dared say no more. The master said to the spirit: “You need not say it openly. I have seen the matter clearly.” Thus the thief was found out. Once a woman who lived in the neighborhood of the t’an-k’ou (tankou) of Magician Li lost more than ten dollars. This amount of money was to be used as funds for a petty trade. The woman had hidden the money in one of her son’s stockings as it was the safest place she could find in her house. When his mother asked him for the money, the boy began to lie and said that no money had ever been in his stocking. He remarked that she had probably

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forgotten the place where she kept the money. The woman, assuming that the money might possibly have been stolen by her neighbor, went to Magician Li and asked for the spirit’s indication. The spirit said to her: “The money is still in your house. It is still in one of the stockings of your son. Ask him for it!” Meanwhile the boy was listening furtively outside the worship room. He hastened home and put the money back into the stocking. When his mother asked again for the money he said: “I feel something inside my stocking.” The money was found.

In both cases, fox mediums successfully relieved tensions in family and community life yet averted direct confrontation between the involved families and community members. They formed a local force that detected and punished petty crimes without resorting to the secular legal authority, and mediated not only between the living and the dead or the divine but also among the living themselves. They filled a power vacuum left empty by the formal bureaucracy and gentry elite in local communities.

Mediating: Ming-Qing Anecdotes Li Wei-tsu’s ethnographic work puts many Ming-Qing anecdotal accounts into perspective. We saw in the previous chapter how fox spirits mediated between the living, their ancestors, and wandering ghosts in domestic settings. Even though these stories do not mention spirit mediums, we see traces of their involvement. In the story of Lianxiang, for example, the female fox transforms the female ghost into the scholar’s wife. She sees, communicates with, exorcises, and cures the ghost—roles normally played by mediums in real-life situations. The medium’s role is even more evident in the story of Zhao Sunyi, a pampered child who, after his parents’ death, is transformed into a filial son by a fox woman. The fox woman, much like mediums interviewed by Li Wei-tsu, adopts him as her son, leads him on an underworld journey to meet his deceased parents, and ultimately blesses him with a wife and a male heir. A close reading of a seventeenth-century story further shows how religious professionals intervened in family life with their exorcistic power: In Yidu (in Shandong) a certain Yue Yujiu’s family was haunted by a fox. Clothes and utensils were thrown over their neighbors’ walls. . . . The family members suffered from many things like these and could not help but curse the spirit. Yue warned them against cursing, “In case the fox may hear us.”

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Just then the fox spoke from the roof beam: “I have already heard you.” The fox then intensified its haunting activities. One day it carried their clothes away before the couple got out of bed. They squatted down on the bed naked, looked up in the air, and begged. Suddenly they saw a good-looking young woman come in through the window and throw their clothes onto the bed. . . . Yue put on his clothes and bowed to her, saying, “[We are honored that] the xian on high (shangxian) descends to our humble family. Please do not harm us. I would like to have you as my daughter; do you agree?” The fox said, “I am older than you. How dare you wishfully elevate yourself?” Yue then asked her to be his sister, and she finally agreed. Yue therefore ordered his family to address her as “the Great Aunt Hu (Hu dagu).” In the meantime, another fox lived on the upper floor of Mr. Zhang the Eighth’s house in the town of Yanzhen and liked to talk to people. Yue asked [the fox at his own home], “Do you know that fox?” She answered, “That is my Aunt Xi—of course I know her.” Yue said, “Your Aunt Xi never harms people. Why don’t you follow her example?” The fox did not listen and haunted the family as before. She disregarded other people and only went after Yue’s daughter-in-law: her shoes, stockings, hairpins, and earrings were often spread out on walkways, and when she ate, dead rats or filth were mixed with her food. At these moments the daughter-in-law always threw the bowl away, cursed the fox, and refused to beg the fox’s pardon. Yue prayed to the fox: “My sons and daughters all call you aunt, why don’t you behave like one?” The fox answered, “Let your son divorce his wife and take me as your daughter-in-law, then we can have peace.” The daughter-in-law scolded her: “You shameless, lustful fox! Are you trying to vie with me for my man?” While she was saying this . . . heavy smoke came out of the wardrobe and all her clothes were burned to ashes. . . . The fox then tried to force Yue’s son to divorce his wife, but was rejected. . . . She was furious and hit him on the head with a rock. His wound bled so much that he almost died. Yue became more worried . . . and hired a Li Chengyao from the Western Mountain, who was skilled at the art of incantation. Li took three days to write a charm on a piece of silk with golden ink. He also attached a mirror to a stick and asked his child assistant to hold it, check the whole house, and immediately report to him when he saw anything. The assistant stopped at one place and told him that something like a dog was on the wall. Li placed the charm on the spot, paced the Steps of Yu in the courtyard, and recited incantations. In a while the dogs, pigs, and fowls of the family all came in. . . . Li pointed at one chicken and released the others. . . . Li said, “This is the Zigu (Purple Maiden) spirit you invited into your family.” . . . The family remembered that

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they had played [the game of inviting] the Zigu three years earlier and that the haunting activities had arisen since then. Li searched for the manikin of Zigu [the family had made before], found it on the roof beam, and threw it in the fire. He then took out a wine bottle, recited incantations, and shouted three times, so the chicken left the ground and entered into the bottle. . . . Yue asked Li to heat the bottle in the fire, but Li refused to do so and took it with him. Some saw at Li’s house dozens of wine bottles hanging on the walls, and within all the sealed ones were foxes. They also said that Li released the foxes in sequence to haunt people so that he could then earn money [by exorcising them]. That was why Li stored [foxes] at home, like rare commodities.

The story exemplifies the contrast between the two types of fox. The fox of the Yue family appeared as a haunting fox, and the fox in Mr. Zhang’s house was described as a fox who “lived on the upper floor.” Much like the Dezhou man Zhou and Money Spinner Yuan, who both enshrined foxes and exchanged their women for family wealth (chapter 3), Yue lived in the cultural environment of Shandong, where people were well aware that the stable presence of fox spirits in a family meant wealth and prosperity. Therefore, when Yue suggested to the haunting fox that she should learn from her Aunt Xi, who “never harms people,” he was dedicated to exploring the opportunity brought by the fox. On his first encounter with it, he did not take any hostile action in response to its haunting. Rather, by quieting the family members’ curses, he tried to make peace with it. His later negotiations with the fox show this intention more clearly: despite all the damage the fox caused to family properties and the mischief she had played upon Yue and his wife, Yue did not try to convince her to leave. Instead, he asked the fox to stop haunting them and yet to stay within the family. However, neither a direct exchange of sex for wealth nor a marital union between foxes and humans, like we saw in the previous chapter, could be established. Instead, what Yue offered to the fox contrasts significantly with what the fox asked from Yue. Since the fox approached the Yue family as a young woman, Yue intended to offer her the position of a family member, first his daughter and then his sister. In the patriarchal and patrilineal society of China, daughters and sisters, because of blood ties, could be emotionally attached to their natal families as insiders. But they were denied a permanent position in their natal family from birth and were considered outsiders. On account of daughters’ temporary membership, families tended to evaluate them in economic terms. That is, daughters were supposed to repay their debt to their parents for giving

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them life, raising them, and preparing their dowries by helping with housework at a young age and giving their parents any income they earned until the day they married. By defining his relationship with the fox as that of father/ daughter or brother/sister, Yue perhaps sought to take the fox’s powers under his own control and make her serve the family’s interests. The fox, however, only temporarily settled for being Yue’s sister and the children’s aunt. The position she really aspired to was that of the daughter-in-law and wife of the male heir. Unlike daughters or sisters, who gradually changed from insiders to outsiders in a given family, daughters-in-law were conceived of as outsiders who would eventually become insiders. While the position of an unmarried daughter in her natal family would become increasingly insecure as she grew older, that of a daughter-in-law strengthened as she gave birth to sons and gradually gained the right to run family affairs. In refusing the role of daughter or sister, the fox sought a permanent place in Yue’s family. Daughters-in-law have always been an unsettling factor in Chinese family life. While law and orthodox moral teachings advocated a woman’s total submission to her husband and to the senior members of his family, anecdotal collections and vernacular works show that shrewish wives and unruly daughters-in-law were common in actual life. They were often blamed for creating disputes over family properties and friction between parents and sons or between brothers and their unmarried sisters. According to Emily Ahern’s modern informants, it was common for a young married woman to resort to unorthodox spiritual powers in order to consolidate her status in the new family. Some were said to use sorcery, for example a charm, to make their husbands subservient and thereby undermine old family ties. Such a practice can put the fox’s haunting of Yue’s daughterin-law into perspective, and we may wonder whether it could also be found in earlier times. The fox’s attacks on the Yue family suggest tension between the parents and an unruly daughter-in-law. First, when haunted by the fox, the daughter-in-law displayed her rough temper by hurling things at it and cursing it—behavior incompatible with the image of a well-reserved and submissive woman. Second, unlike the Zhou and Yuan cases, in which the family heads had absolute power to negotiate with the fox while the wife or the daughter-in-law remained silent, Yue’s daughter-in-law reacted to the fox very differently. Yue prayed to and ingratiated himself with the spirit, but the daughter-in-law unyieldingly scolded it and “refused to beg the fox’s pardon.” Yue had no control over his daughter-in-law’s conduct and was unable to wield authority over her.

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impotent in disciplining an unruly daughter-in-law as in taming the haunting spirit. Negotiation with the fox seems to be a process during which a family’s authoritative seniors and incoming female subordinates negotiated among themselves in pursuit of a balance of power within the household. When negotiations with the fox failed and the family felt unable to restore order by its own efforts, it hired a religious specialist to exorcise the fox. Edward Davis’s research shows that beginning in the twelfth century, the exorcistic role of spirit mediums and Daoist or Buddhist ritual masters became indistinguishable. In this story we see exactly such a convergence. The religious affiliation of Li Chengyao is not clearly identified, but the ritual procedure he performed largely resembled the expulsion rites conducted by popular Daoist priests. Some of the techniques, such as the use of charms and containers (jars, sacks, or bottles), were also known to laypeople. Li’s assistant, a child spirit medium, proved indispensable for communication with the divine. Moreover, while successfully containing the fox spirit of the Yue family, Li turned out to be a collector of fox spirits who would then release them to haunt people for his own profits. This capability to command the magic power of fox spirits was commonly ascribed to both popular Daoists and spirit mediums. Li identified the fox with the Zigu, about which different versions had circulated simultaneously in both north and south China ever since the Six Dynasties. They all featured her as a concubine who suffered physical abuse by the wife and wrongful death in the latrine. She was consecrated as a latrine deity (ceshen) in the popular pantheon. In rural north China, she was regularly worshipped in the form of a homemade manikin on the fifteenth day of the first month every year. On this day, her women worshippers would play a ritual game of “inviting Zigu” in the latrine during the night. They recited prayers to the manikin, telling her that both her husband and the wife were absent so that she could now come out at ease. The motions of the Zigu manikin, sometimes as automatic writings invoked by the worship, indicated the prospects for things the worshippers asked about. In a popular Ming novel, the latrine deity became three sisters. They were said to be in charge of the Primeval Golden Dipper (hunyuan jindou), a celestial equivalent of the toilet bowl, from which all beings, from immortals to mortals and from the son of Heaven to those who tilled the soil, were born. Like the fox, the Zigu spirit was tinged with ideas of pollution, fertility, and female powers. Based on the story of Azi (see chapter 1), the Chinese scholar Xu Dishan (1893–1941) speculated that the name of Zigu

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might have been derived from Daoist conceptions of fox spirits during the Six Dynasties. Another modern scholar observes that in some parts of twentieth-century southern Shandong, the Zigu spirit who actually performed the automatic writing often turned out to be a female fox spirit. Having died of domestic abuse as a concubine, associated with household pollution symbolized by the latrine, worshipped widely by women, and wielding powers only in the absence of her husband and his wife, the Zigu spirit unequivocally spoke to oppressed household women in general. In exorcising the intruding fox spirit as the Zigu that the Yue family (most likely the women of the family) had invited in three years before the haunting began, Li linked the family disorder possibly incurred by the daughter-in-law to a publicly recognized symbol of female subversion and menace. Worshipping the Zigu during the New Year celebration offered a legal respite from the hierarchical order that governed everyday life, but the permanent presence of Zigu would be too intrusive. As the ritual procedure itself suggests, her power was only efficacious when the husband and the wife were absent (figure 4.1). Both greedy family heads and subordinate women intentionally used the topos of fox possession and fox haunting for their own advantages. They either kept foxes in private space and placated them for personal gain or borrowed the outside force of spirit mediums to tame things they perceived as harmful and beyond their own control. In the case of Yue, he might not have been able to subdue his unruly daughter-in-law after all (if she indeed was one), but the ritual exposure of a symbolic scapegoat, the fox/Zigu, by the exorcist Li would have had both prophylactic and cathartic effects on Yue’s family.

Mediums and Gentry Elite State and Elite Criticism and Moral Exorcism Spirit mediums had long been associated with illicit cults in Chinese history. As Ming-Qing laws made clear, the following people were to be severely punished: All masters and shamans (shiwu) who call down heterodox gods, write charms, [chant] incantations [to make] water [magically efficacious], perform planchette, and pray to sages, calling themselves duangong (First Lord), taibao (Great Protector), or shipo (shamaness); and those who wildly call themselves the

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White Lotus Society of the Buddha Maitreya, the Mingzun (Manichaean) sect, or the White Cloud Assembly with their heretical and heterodox techniques; or those who hide pictures [of heterodox gods or patriarchs] and gather in groups to burn incense, meeting at night and dispersing at dawn, pretending to do good works but [actually] arousing and misleading the people.

For the state, what made the medium cults illicit was their organizational potential derived from social networks beyond family ties, between masters and disciples, and across gender boundaries. Donald Sutton points out that Confucian elite in earlier periods tolerated and even patronized spirit mediums’ cults, but during the Ming and Qing, Neo-Confucian scholars shared the state’s suspicion to a great extent and formed an “anti spirit medium consensus.” They criticized spirit mediums not because of the cult practices per se, but rather because like the elite, the mediums could be well organized, assume authority through written words (spirit writing), and make moral and political claims. Indeed, during the late sixteenth century, the leader of a “heterodox” sect called the Teaching of Smelling the Fragrance (Wenxiang jiao) in Shandong and Hebei was reportedly initiated by a magic fox. By incense burning and transmission of knowledge between master and disciples, they gained followers in northern and central China, and rebelled in 1622. The late Ming historian Tan Qian (1594–1657) connected this sect with another called the Teaching of the Black Fox (Xuanhu jiao) that spread through several prefectures in central Shaanxi during the same time. He highlighted the evil nature of the spirit medium, the “demonic master,” in sect activities: Wherever the demonic master went, every family served him as they would their ancestors and followed whatever he ordered. For whatever drink and food the demonic master touched once, every family member from young to old would all kneel down begging him to leave the blessings to them, and they would rush to eat and drink what he had left. When the master retreated into a vacant room, the family would send in virgin girls and young wives one after another. If these women were kept to serve the master at his pillow mat, that was considered by the family a great fortune and blessing.

This paragraph shows clearly that elite criticism was mainly targeted at the mediums’ sexual predation upon young household women. This was perhaps the best way for Neo-Confucian scholars to establish their own moral authority in local communities.

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Ming-Qing elite believed that women’s work should be confined to the domestic arena to maintain social and moral order. Even for peasant women, it was not considered respectable to work outside the home except on their own families’ land. Ming-Qing texts, both classical and vernacular, repeatedly warned female members of respectable households to keep away from women who lived on the fringe of the family system and provided professional services to communities. A special term, the “three kinds of aunties and six kinds of grannies” (sangu liupo), was reserved for these marginal women, indicating Buddhist nuns (nigu), Daoist nuns (daogu), female fortune-tellers (guagu), procuresses (yapo), go-betweens (meipo), shamanesses (shipo), adopted mothers of the brothels (qianpo), medicine sellers (yaopo), and midwives (wenpo). Usually from lower-class families, these women enjoyed a special advantage over their male counterparts in that they could visit elite households to meet the demands of the house-bound elite women. The warnings against the professional women might have been issued precisely because they actively interacted with women from respectable families and enjoyed popularity among them; in any case, in male elite eyes, they threatened the male-dominated social order with their economic independence, their physical mobility, and their professional knowledge. Although many Ming-Qing accounts and modern ethnographic works testify that both men and women from all different social backgrounds, including the elite (see below), visited fox mediums, Ming-Qing writers tend to assume these visitors were women and lower classes only. A nineteenthcentury author recorded the special appeal of female mediums to “foolish village folks” and women: Female mediums in Tianjin claim to be able to invoke spirits as mediums and cure illnesses by watching burning incense heads. People call them “Aunties” (Guniangzi). Foolish village folks are ignorant and often call them when they are ill. The medium burns incense, murmurs as in her sleep, then after a while says the spirit she invokes has descended. Some spirits claim to be Granny Bai (Bai Laotaitai); some are called Mistress Huang (Huang Shaonainai) or Auntie Hu (Hu Mogugu). The names they choose are mostly female. As iron is drawn to a magnet, women are easily deluded. The female members of modest families all believe in this. The mediums treat illnesses by either giving pills or bestowing holy water. If the patient is cured, they take credit for it; if not, they blame [the patient’s] fate. They ask quite high prices for incense and medicinal expenses.

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Ji Yun also claimed that in his hometown, Cangzhou, female mediums found customers and friends among women, especially servant women. In some of the anecdotes he collected from his relatives, fox mediums were even punished by their own deities, who reprimanded them for monetary greed and denounced their services: The old woman medium Hao is a deceitful village woman. When I was young I once met her at my Aunt Lü’s house in Cangzhou. She claimed to be possessed by a fox spirit so she could tell fortunes for people. She knew every single detail of things that happened in a household; therefore, she attracted a large crowd of believers. In fact, she just recruited disciples and befriended maids and servant women, so that they could detect hidden family affairs, for which in turn she would sell her services by deception. Once a pregnant woman asked about the sex of her baby, and Hao promised her it would be a boy. Later the woman gave birth to a girl and came back to berate the spirit for its broken promise. Hao glared at her and said, “Originally you had a boy, but on such-and-such day, your mother gave your family twenty pancakes. You only presented six to your parents-in-law and hid the other fourteen for yourself. The underworld god changed the boy into a girl to punish your unfilial act. Aren’t you awake now?” The woman did not realize that the medium had pried into this incident earlier and admitted her guilt with fear. Hao was clever at covering herself like this. One day while she was burning incense to invoke the spirit, she suddenly sat up and announced loudly: “I am the real fox spirit. Even though I live among humans, I in fact absorb energies and refine my body. Why would I care to bond with an old village woman and interfere with people’s trivial matters? This woman uses schemes and borrows my name to accumulate money wickedly. I possess her body today to reveal her schemes to the public.” The fox then listed her numerous evil deeds and the names of her followers and disciples. After his talk, Hao suddenly woke up from the trance and fled in embarrassment.

The mediums’ authority through healing and fortune-telling was largely derived from a combination of divine insights and public morality. It was precisely such functions of spirit mediums in family and community lives that worried gentry elite like Ji Yun, who themselves were supposed to play leadership roles in local communities. Monetary gain from the medium’s profession was judged as deceptive and immoral, and the information network formed by women around the medium was interpreted as a source of gossip. Most of all, Ji Yun used these charges to discredit the moral messages delivered by the medium, for these were the same messages Ji Yun preached

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in his many stories. Hao, on behalf of the fox, was in fact teaching a lesson of filial piety to one of her female followers. This was rather common, for in villages in China as well as elsewhere, spirit attacks and misfortunes were often interpreted as a result of moral failure, and the spirits communicating through mediums acted as the “censors of society.” Even though they were criticized for “swindling money” and some of them might indeed have been greedy, modern ethnographers show that the mediums usually upheld moral principles and claimed to have “charitable motives” for their spirits to accumulate merit. Visitors had the freedom to give any amount of money they wanted. If the mediums charged too much, they ran the risk of being abandoned by their spirits. Ji Yun’s stories tell of hidden family discord and neighborhood conflicts similar to those in Li Wei-tsu’s ethnographic records mentioned earlier. In one story, a young boy played with his mother’s shoes and later abandoned them in the backyard. The father found them and grew suspicious of his wife’s chastity, for a woman’s shoes, together with her bound feet, were considered private and sexual objects untouchable by anyone other than her husband. Unable to prove her innocence, the wife decided to commit suicide. Just then a fox haunted the house, throwing women’s intimate stuff all over the place. The haunting lasted for half a month. The husband’s suspicion of the wife vanished. Another family cursed a fox, for one day someone threw rocks at their house and broke a flowerpot. At midnight the fox came, trying to calm the family’s anger: “As villagers we all live next to each other. It is normal that our young children may sometimes get into fights with each other. Forgive them if you can, or tell their fathers or brothers to discipline them. But please do not turn to hostile insults.” The family head was touched and apologized, and the neighborhood returned to peace. The fox’s words were recalled again some time later, when a quarrel among some village boys evolved into a bloody feud. In these stories, foxes alone appear to be the mediators and promoters of family and community harmony. While reserving respect for the spirits, Ji Yun ignored the mediums who might well be the intermediaries through which the foxes’ voices were heard and the familial or communal tensions relieved. Ji Yun and like-minded scholars believed that the magic power of foxes should be turned against the moral authority of spirit mediums, and such moral exorcism should be the exclusive right of the gentry elite. They repeated a famous quote from Zuozhuan, “yao you ren xing (anomalies arise from men),” and believed that weakness of mind attracted foxes. Ji Yun further stated that in dealing with evil spirits, “Daoism talks about exor-

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cism. Buddhism talks about repentance. Confucianism talks about defeating them with moral cultivation. Daoism and Buddhism only tackle the incidentals, and Confucianism defeats them at the fundamentals.” Ji Yun’s father, a high-ranking scholar-official, always served as a moral exemplar in Ji’s didactic discourse. At one point, he was said to be immune to haunting while his servants in the same house were constantly troubled by foxes’ pranks. An old man visited him and claimed to be a fox. He informed Ji’s father that “foxes who haunt and do evil do not dare to come close to a righteous man.” In contrast, a prudish Confucian scholar who often disciplined his friends with strict moral codes became seriously ill after sleeping two consecutive nights with his wife, who was then identified as a fox spirit in disguise. His friends rebuked him: “The demonic cannot overcome the virtuous. . . . We never heard that demons ever visited Zhou [Dunyi], Zhang [Zai], Cheng [Yi], and Zhu [Xi] [all Song dynasty Neo-Confucian masters], but Mister, they visited you! Could it be that you still have some moral defects?” Ji and his scholar-official friends used fox hauntings as opportunities both to expound their moral agendas and to ridicule the conduct of some Confucians of the Zheng-Zhu school during their time. They replaced mediums as interpreters of fox spirits’ intervention in human affairs, and it was up to them to uphold public morality and social harmony in local communities.

A Medium in a Gentry Family? What Little Three’s husband saw as a profitable profession, that of the medium, was regarded by elite members as something extremely shameful. The following story shows how in a gentry family, a concubine tried, to no avail, to become a medium: The concubine of Provincial Graduate Zhou in Dongguang (in Cangzhou, Hebei) was possessed by a female fox. She cried and laughed abnormally and talked nonsense. She said, “I am a fox from the Western Mountain and have been practicing self-cultivation for hundreds of years. I now need to find a xiangtou to cure diseases on my behalf so that I can bring blessings to people and finally attain xian-hood. If the concubine would agree to be my xiangtou, she would be cured immediately.” Xiangtou is the local term for mediums who are possessed by spirits. Zhou felt deeply humiliated by the request and instantly rejected her in a frenzy. The concubine, with disheveled hair, cried, shouted, and jumped around ceaselessly. Zhou could not stop it and just let

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her be. One day Zhou spoke to the fox in jest: “I have heard that xianren (divine transcendents) are capable of bringing wealth. I am running short of money. Could you help me out?” Before he had finished, more than ten strings of coins dropped from above. At midnight one day Zhou wanted to drink wine, but thought that at that hour, none was for sale. Before he could say anything, he looked back and saw a bottle of wine behind the candles. . . . From then on Zhou and the fox lived in peace. The fox confined her activities to the concubine’s room and was never heard coming out. This lasted for several months. One day Zhou bowed to the fox and then said, “I have heard that humans and transcendents (xian) live in different worlds but follow the same principles. Now it has been several months. I would rather let my concubine die than allow her to be a medium. If her life span is deemed to terminate now, take her with you; if it is not, your possession of her will lead to nothing. Would you kindly agree to leave her and find somebody else? I will make substantial offerings to you in exchange.” The concubine looked up and seemed to seriously think about it. A while later she said,“Okay. I have given your words some serious thought, and they do make some sense. You can prepare your offerings and see me off as you just said.” Zhou cooked chickens and prepared wine, dozens of cooked eggs, fruits, and vegetables. He offered them to the fox and bowed to her again. The concubine happily poured the wine, cut the chicken, held the fruits and eggs, and gulped them down. In an instant she consumed them all, pulled a quilt over her head, and went to sleep. Next day she woke up and acted normal. When asked about what had happened, she had no knowledge of it at all.

Concubines were not to have any say in family matters. When the fox possessed and spoke through the concubine in the Zhou household, the spirit and the woman became one. While Zhou negotiated with the fox, he negotiated with the concubine, who gained an opportunity to talk to him on equal terms. And by asking to become a spirit medium, the concubine/ fox in fact was asking to step out of Zhou’s domestic sphere and provide services to the community. It is not hard to imagine how her status could have been improved by bringing in money as a healer, because, as Zhou himself mentioned later, he might be in real financial stress and needed some sort of extra income. But Zhou was different from Little Three’s husband and those family heads whom foxes had enriched, as discussed in the previous chapter. Mediums like Little Three were from lower-class families. Zhou, on the hand, was a Provincial Graduate (juren), and therefore his family enjoyed

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status and prestige in local society. Zhou’s sense of humiliation and fury over the fox’s request shows that the profession of spirit medium was considered inappropriate for women from elite families. However, Zhou was also fully aware of the fox’s power. He held no sincere respect for it, but did try to negotiate with it rather than simply launching into an exorcising fight. He asked the fox to show off her magic by bringing money, which the concubine might have wished to accomplish if she were to become a medium. While receiving this monetary gain, Zhou shrewdly diverted the tension caused by the concubine’s ceaseless jumping, crying, and yelling. Zhou then provided opportunities and time for the spirit to wield her power within the house, during which the concubine was able to stay beyond the familial power structure and enjoy respect as the embodiment of the fox. Zhou’s “laissez-faire” approach strengthened his hand at the bargaining table several months later: while humbling himself before the fox and showering her with extravagant offerings, he remained uncompromising in the matter of the family’s reputation, even at the cost of the concubine’s life. The fox finally gave up and left, which can be understood as a sign that the concubine realized her own limits. She might have had made a wrong bet in demanding to be a medium, but she lost nothing by ascribing the request to the fox. Zhou reasserted his authority and succeeded in protecting his family’s social reputation. Women in elite families, especially marginal women like Zhou’s concubine, might take the opportunity of fox possession to temporarily express their suppressed ego, but they would bring social stigma on their families if they actually acted on their spiritual bond with the foxes.

Elite Visits to Fox Mediums Despite elite criticism and contempt, the concubine/fox’s ventures suggest that popular attitudes toward spirit mediums were rather ambivalent. Doré notes that the local people in northern Jiangsu believed that female mediums gained magic power by having sexual intercourse with the animal spirits, and therefore were “ill-considered, and held in low repute.” But he also observed that official edicts forbidding medium practices went unheeded. In inviting spirit mediums to perform cures, both the wealthy and the poor showed extreme care and respect. Village informants in Beijing told Li Wei-tsu that the social reputation of a medium was even lower than that of an ordinary peasant, and most people regarded her as “nothing else than a swindler.” This general bias was well acknowledged by the mediums them-

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selves, for most were initially unwilling to be at the service of the spirits, and an initiate lost social status. But a spirit medium Li interviewed also believed that in rendering service to a family of a sacred animal, she would “acquire good fortune by means of righteous conduct.” While a medium enjoyed a high position in his (or her) own family, he might be “in high esteem among his followers, but at the same time despised by people who do not believe in his supernatural power and in the existence of animalspirits.” Gentry elite and officials were among the visitors to fox mediums. Occasionally, their visits left traces in anecdotal writings. The above-cited story of Little Three continues after she began her service: At the time the wife of a certain administration vice-commissioner was suffering from profuse uterine bleeding, and none of the doctors was able to cure her. Seeing her dying, the vice-commissioner had no choice but to send inquiries to the fox. The fox answered, “Let me go to the Eastern Peak to check her life span, and I will be back in a while.” When he returned he yelled [Three’s name] again and said that the wife’s life should not end yet. He then presented a pill and asked the patient to “take it with well water, and the bleeding will stop by midnight.” It happened as he said. The wife took two more pills and was cured completely. The vice-commissioner then paid a visit to the fox in person, to express his gratitude and also to make further investigation into [the powers of] the fox. The fox talked with him from mid-air and touched upon myriad things of Song and Yuan, and only became vague on the late Tang and the Five Dynasties. The vice-commissioner was genuinely convinced and gave free rein to people to erect a shrine to the fox. . . . Early in the Zhengde reign (1506–1521), Liao Peng, brother of Eunuch Liao, who had the power of a Grand Defender, summoned Fule, demanding a thousand jin of money from him. Fule claimed that they had spent as much as they had earned and nothing was left. The angry Peng threw him in jail, and the fox came no more.

The story shows two kinds of local power reacting to the fox shrine: the official power represented by the vice-commissioner and the local bully’s power represented by the brother of Eunuch Liao. The vice-commissioner was reluctant to seek help from the fox in the beginning, indicating that visiting a shrine was not considered a normal choice for someone of his position. His suspicion was in accord with the official stand and elite bias against popular religious practices. However, the impending death of his

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wife was a serious personal matter that could not be altered by his official power. The failure of all other medical means and her instant recovery with only three miraculous pills from the fox convinced him of the unusual efficacy of the spirit’s power in answering personal pleas. Yet for a learned man with an office, it took more than healing miracles to make the fox shrine acceptable. The fox’s familiarity with preceding dynasties convinced the vice-commissioner that it had indeed been living for several hundred years. By consulting the fox about historical events and anecdotes he had learned from literary sources, the official satisfied his intellectual curiosity and finally approved the erection of the shrine. He had a certain degree of admiration for the fox but cautiously shied away from worship. He appeared to be dealing with the male fox but not with the female spirit medium, thus overcoming both gender and class barriers in the interaction between a high-ranking official and a female medium of lowerclass background. The personal appeal of the fox at both the practical and intellectual levels, rather than any possible threat the shrine might pose to the official’s position, prevailed in changing an official’s attitude from suspicion to tolerance and tacit permission. Even with such support, however, Little Three’s fox shrine did not last long. Local bullies’ greed for money, not offi cial campaigns against illicit cults, terminated the prosperous “career” of Little Three and contributed to the downfall of the shrine. The brother of Eunuch Liao did rely on official power to throw the husband in jail and cut off the personal bond between the fox and the medium, but he did so for selfish purposes. The end of the story also reminds us that even though Little Three was the one who maintained the shrine and made the money, she was not considered the representative of the family wealth in the public realm. Male authority over family property was reasserted when local bullies summoned her husband, not her, for extortion. Pu Songling’s account entitled “The Xian on High (shangxian)” offers another record of literati scholars’ personal visit to a local medium (figure 4.2): In the third month of 1683, Gao Jiwen and I went to Jixia (Linzi, Shandong) and stayed in an inn. Jiwen suddenly fell ill. At this time Gao Zhenmei also followed Mr. Niandong to Jixia, so we planned to find a doctor. Yuan Lingong told us that the Liang family to the south of the town had a huxian who was skilled in the art of medicine, so we went to see the huxian together. Liang was a woman in her forties, and she conducted herself with the air of a fox. We entered her house and saw a red curtain hanging in the inner

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room. We peeped through the curtain and saw a picture of Guanyin on the wall, along with two or three portraits featuring figures on horses, holding spears and surrounded by retinues. Against the north wall was a table on which a miniature seat less than one foot tall and a silk cushion were placed. [Liang] said that when the xian came he would sit there. We burned incense and bowed. Liang beat the gong three times and recited something. After the prayer she asked the visitors to sit outside. She stood beside the curtain and talked about the marvels the xian had performed. A long time passed, and it was getting dark. . . . We asked her to summon [the xian] again. She beat the gong and prayed for the second time. She then turned to us and said, “The xian on high loves night talks. It is difficult to meet him at other times. Last night a Government Student (xiucai) brought wine and food and drank with the xian. The xian offered his own drink and meal to treat him. They composed poems and had fun. It was dawn before they departed.” Before she had finished, we heard chirping in the inner room, like the sound of bats flying. While we were listening carefully, suddenly we heard a blasting sound, as if a huge rock had dropped on the table. . . . Then we heard somebody sigh at the table, and he sounded like a hearty old man. . . . A loud voice came from the seat: “It is destiny [that we meet]! It is destiny [that we meet]!” Then [we heard] him asking the visitors to be seated, and it seemed that he also made an obeisance to us by cupping his hands in front of his chest. Later he asked the guests, “What may I teach you today?” Gao Zhenmei asked, according to the instructions of Mr. Niandong, “Have you seen the bodhisattva?” The fox answered, “The South Sea is on my familiar route. How could I not see her?” Gao continued: “Does the King Yanluo (the king of the underworld) change?” And the answer was: “He changes as things [change] in the yang world.” “What is the surname of the [current] Yanluo?” “He is surnamed Cao.” We then asked for a cure for Jiwen. [The fox] said, “Upon your return please make offerings of tea in the night. I will give you the medicine I have asked for from Guanyin. Whatever the illness is, it will cure it.” Everybody asked questions, and he answered each one of them. We then saw him off and returned. Next day Jiwen felt better. Zhenmei and I packed and returned home soon so we did not have time to visit [the fox] again.

Pu was a man of literary talent but earned only the first degree. The three Gaos were kin from a prominent gentry family of Zichuan. Gao Jiwen was a literary man who worked hard all his life for a degree. I have found no information on Gao Zhenmei. Judging from the story, he might have been a student of Mr. Niandong. “Mr. Niangdong,” whom Pu addressed with great

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ducted through informal yet polite conversation. To Pu and his friends, the visit to the fox shrine was not merely a search for cures, it was also an opportunity to explore literary and religious questions and to verify their own learning with a divine source. With the medium as go-between, the fox and the literary men might not seek the same things as their fellow villagers, and in fact the men did not even care whether they received an efficient cure. Instead, they and the fox communicated in a pleasant relationship characterized by the exchange of questions and answers, drinks and meals, and mutual respect. It was a kind of meeting that differed little from the social gatherings of the literati. The official stand against popular religion was also tested in this account. Like Little Three, Woman Liang worked for money. Also, as Huntington has rightly noted in her discussion of this story, there must have been a gender and class tension in such a visit by a group of male literati to a woman without the company of her male relatives. However, no financial transaction was mentioned, which seems at odds with Pu’s otherwise extremely detailed description of the entire visit. Nor did the presence of a village woman affect the subjects of conversation between the old fox man and the scholars. These characteristics of the narrative indicate that Pu and his partners preferred to view their encounter with the fox as a spiritual experience on its own merits, free from the involvement of the medium. Pu’s silence echoes the previously discussed elite disdain of spirit mediums, for their monetary gains and their female gender were the focus of elite attacks. By leaving out the role of the medium, literati like Pu Songling played down the illicit aspect of the shrine as well as the gender and class tensions in the encounter between the male literati and the village woman. They revered the fox cult as individualistic, without intermediaries, and therefore kept their communication with the fox spirit personal. We can also explore the simultaneous fascination with and caution about the fox cult through an important figure in Pu’s record, Mr. Niandong. Pu specified that the questions they asked the fox were actually formulated by this man, a prestigious member of the local gentry and the only one among the three who had held office. Yet Mr. Niandong himself avoided direct contact with the fox and let his disciples ask questions on his behalf. It seems that it was inappropriate for him to address the fox in person. But still, he was fascinated by it. All three questions show his curiosity about popular gods and his eagerness to confirm their existence. Elsewhere in Liaozhai he is an enthusiastic informant of Pu Songling, telling a story about a monkey spirit who resembled the fox in healing, prophesying, and conducting liter-

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ary discussions with visitors. Nowhere in these accounts, however, does he mention any moral concerns in dealing with the strange and the supernatural, which contrasts with his own claim in the preface to Liaozhai that writings about the strange should primarily elucidate Confucian virtues and moral order. For him, personal encounters with spirits and writings about such encounters for social effect seem to have had different meanings. Pu Songling’s record suggests that literati and scholar-officials had two modes of thinking when dealing with popular cults: they might assume an official stance when undertaking their duties or writing for the public, but as individuals they could be drawn to practices of spirit mediums in order to address personal concerns. The line between official and unofficial or public and private was not clear-cut. Men of elite status alternated between the two attitudes in different contexts, which allowed them to both assume moral leadership in the community and pursue their personal interests in private.

~! The two modes of thinking, official and unofficial, that gentry elite used to deal with mediums and their cults were available to others as well. Like their patron foxes, spirit mediums straddled the boundaries between the private and the public. While resorting to mediums and foxes for help with personal concerns and family matters, human beneficiaries, regardless of their social status, recognized the low status of mediums and the illicit contents of their fox shrines. The different ways of perceiving the use of official and unofficial powers distinguished one social group from the other. While literati and scholar-officials regarded themselves as moral exemplars and state representatives in their public life and remained critical of spirit mediums, ordinary people tended to associate daily struggles with the capricious character of the fox spirits, whom they pacified through mediums in order to gain peace and harmony in their family and social life. The mediums themselves, given their own low status and frequent association with cults that were illicit by official standards, also made intentional efforts to connect their fox patrons with public morality and higher deities. The dynamism of the paradoxical and self-promoting medium cult of the fox is best exemplified by the physical layout of the fox shrine in Pu Songling’s account. In it a painting of the bodhisattva Guanyin and two other paintings of unknown armored figures were worshipped. We learn from the conversation between the fox and Pu’s friends that the spirit’s abil-

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ity to reach higher gods or goddesses, the bodhisattva Guanyin and King Yanluo, was exactly what captured the attention of Mr. Niandong. While the image of Guanyin was hung on the wall, the altar of the fox, symbolized by the miniature seat, was set up on a table. The physical positions of the two divinities demonstrated a hierarchical order. The image on the wall represented a higher authority that had a greater capacity to invoke reverence but was harder to reach. The altar on the table was less powerful, less worthy, but more accessible. Furthermore, the image of Guanyin was forever present and yet motionless, whereas the fox, although invisible, constantly came and went upon human requests submitted by the medium. The layout of the shrine may reflect the mentality of the people who engaged in cult practices: the fox actively answered worshippers’ pleas, while the presence of the higher deities—however aloof and silent—enhanced the credibility of its cult. Similar connections are found in many Ming-Qing accounts, in which the fox appears to be a subordinate of a female deity, such as the Queen Mother of the West, Guanyin, or Bixia Yuanjun, who was publicly celebrated and officially sanctioned but embodied amoral powers beyond political control and granted self-interested favors. As the next chapter will show, it was due to their connection with the respected female deities that fox medium cults, for all their dangerous potential, were considered justifiable and controllable in a given community.

5 Foxes and Local Cults

We have seen fox worship and fox exorcism in domestic settings and through spirit mediums. However, foxes by no means dominated domestic worship and spirit medium cults in north China; they were marginal in people’s religious life. How did fox spirits fit into the rich and complex religious landscape of north China, and more specifically, how did the Chinese imagine fox spirits in relation to other popular deities? Only by studying fox spirits in the context of other prominent local cults in north China can we reach a fuller understanding of how the marginal foxes embodied both subservience and resistance to official power in the popular mind.

Foxes and Celestial Bureaucrats Bureaucratic and Clerical Exorcism Many Chinese gods are imagined as celestial bureaucrats, and they are expected to operate according to rules similar to those governing the secular state. Among them, the earth god and the City God were worshipped as the official representatives in almost every village and county, respectively, all over China. The earth god patrolled the underworld of his territory, re-

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ported the deaths of villagers to the City God, the supernatural equivalent of the county magistrate, and protected the living from the depredations of wandering ghosts. Gods with bureaucratic and military functions were an important source of fox exorcism, and they were often directly invoked by afflicted individuals and families. In a late Ming story, an audacious man in Qianzhou, Shaanxi volunteered to fight fox spirits who were haunting a family in his town. Contrary to his expectations, the foxes followed him to his own home and caused damage every day. Knowing his limits, the man delivered a plea to the temple of the City God: “Your honor is the master of the whole city. Please exterminate the evil for your people.” Two foxes were found dead under the city wall the next day, and the man’s family regained peace. Ji Yun recorded that a peddler staying in a City God temple claimed that in the night he witnessed a lawsuit brought by one fox against another. The accused fox, after sucking up a man’s life essence and driving him to death, shrewdly led vengeful hunters into the den of its neighbor, the plaintiff fox’s home. As a result, the plaintiff ’s family was destroyed, and the killer fled. The City God investigated the case, checked the underworld records, and acknowledged the validity of the suit. But he also punished the plaintiff fox, for the dead members of its family also had a history of bewitching people and taking human lives. In another story, a young widow known to one of Ji Yun’s nephews had maintained her chastity for many years until a radiantly attired stranger, presumably a fox spirit, suddenly came to harass her every day. Unable to drive him away on her own, the widow cried out her complaints at the she shrine, an equivalent of the earth god temple in some villages. The deity did not respond immediately, but seven days later lightning struck an ancient tomb south of the village, and the fox subsequently disappeared. The delay of the response was fully justified, Ji Yun explained, because the she deity had to file a report to his superiors before he executed the sentence. Fox haunting had also been subject to the bureaucratic power of clerical Daoism since the Song (see chapter 1). Exorcistic manuals specifically targeted at fox demons circulated among Qing Daoist specialists. The use of talismans and incantations alone, however, was despised within orthodox Daoist schools, which emphasized their image of maintaining a celestial government and an alliance with the secular state. A Qing author, after describing an expulsion ritual performed by Celestial Master Zhang, commented that “the art of talisman and incantation was in the lower level of Daoist practices.” A Daoist master denounced such practitioners as sorcer-

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ers. He claimed that their use of talismans and incantations diverged from the original ideal of the Way, and that their practices of summoning souls were merely arts of “commanding fox demons.” Along with the rise of the Five Thunder Rites, the idea of foxes having to face thunderbolts as a life crisis in advancing toward humanity and transcendence had developed since the Song. Ji Yun observed that “foxes fleeing from thunderbolt crisis can be found in miscellaneous writings since the Song dynasty.” This idea persisted into the twentieth century. Li Wei-tsu’s informants believed that according to the law of Heaven, fox spirits had to face a crisis (zaojie) before they could reach a higher state of being, and the most common is the “crisis of the thunderbolt” (tianlei jie). It is a recurrent theme in Ming-Qing stories that clerical Daoists employ the Five Thunder Rites to strike foxes. In a Qing story, the Daoist priest Huang was said to have mastered the Secret Teaching of Taiyi (Taiyi mifa) and the Five Correct Thunder Rites (wulei zhengfa). Another story features a Daoist priest in the Temple of Heaven who recited the Incantation of Thunder and produced thunderbolts to strike many foxes to death. The ritual procedure of the thunder exorcism followed Wang Wenqing’s example during the Song (see chapter 1). In one story, for instance, the son of a scholar-official was about to die after being afflicted by two fox demons. Celestial Master Zhang came to the rescue. Zhang raised a thunder altar and chanted incantations for three days before he launched his attack. His assistant used a mirror to locate the otherwise invisible demons. The master captured one of them, sealed it in a jar with a talisman, and threw the jar in a river. Zhu Ermei (?–1682), a popular Daoist during Emperor Kangxi’s reign (1662–1722), became famous among the upper class in the capital for his magic and fortune-telling techniques and won the title of “divine transcendent.” However, when he challenged Celestial Master Zhang, the orthodox Daoist priest, his magical arts failed to work. Master Zhang explained: “He depends on the support of a demonic fox, and I rely on the Correct God of Five Thunders. When the Correct God arises, the demonic fox flees.” Clearly, Daoist priests, armed with the Five Thunder Rites, regulated fox demons as divine officials.

Foxes Rival Celestial Bureaucrats Despite the exorcising power of divine bureaucracy, village people might show a considerable degree of tolerance toward the evildoings of foxes. The following story illustrates these subtle feelings:

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A girl of the Dai family in Yancheng village (northern Jiangsu) was possessed by an evil spirit. . . . The family filed a complaint with the Temple of the Holy Emperor north of the village, and the evil spirit soon disappeared. Later a golden-armored deity appeared to the family in a dream, saying, “I am General Zou under the command of the Holy Emperor. I have decapitated the fox that haunted your family. Its fellow foxes plan to come tomorrow for reprisals. You should beat gongs and drums in the temple to assist me.” The next day the Dais gathered their fellow villagers and went to the temple. They heard fighting sounds in the air and beat gongs and drum zealously. As a result, they saw black air drop to the yard and many fox heads fall around the village. Several days later General Zou came to the Dais in a dream again: “Since I killed too many foxes, I have offended the Patriarch of Foxes (Hu zushi). He brought the matter to the Holy Emperor. The Emperor will descend to this temple and investigate the case. Why don’t you go and pray for me?” The villagers went to the temple at the appropriate time and lay prostrate on the ground. At midnight . . . a man in imperial costume arrived in a carriage with a great retinue. Behind him was a Daoist master, who . . . was holding two tablets with golden characters: “Patriarch of Foxes.” The Holy Emperor received the Patriarch of Foxes with reverence. The Patriarch of Foxes said, “The little fox disturbed people and deserved to die, but your general punished my people too ruthlessly and cannot be forgiven.” The Holy Emperor nodded. The villagers knelt before the emperor and asked for forgiveness on behalf of General Zou. A first-degree holder, Zhou, reprimanded the Patriarch of Foxes: “You old fox, at such an old age you dare to connive with your descendants raping our women and ask the mercy of the Holy Emperor. What a patriarch you are! You should be executed a thousand times.” The Patriarch of Foxes smiled without anger and asked him calmly, “What is the punishment for rape according to human law?” Zhou replied, “Flogging.” The Patriarch continued, “So one who committed rape does not deserve to die. My descendant raped a human. Even if as a nonhuman he should be punished more severely, at most he should be exiled, but by no means decapitated! Also, it was enough that General Zou killed one of my descendants; why did he kill dozens more?” Before Zhou came up with an answer, an announcement was delivered from within the temple: “The Emperor has an order: General Zou . . . executed the law too severely and killed too many lives. Given that he was motivated by the public good . . . , he will be deprived of one year’s salary and transferred to administer Haizhou (northern Jiangsu).” The villagers cheered. They dispersed after they clapped their hands, thanking Buddha.

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The Holy Emperor might well be the god Zhenwu, the Chinese God of War. One of the Jade Emperor’s many incarnations in popular beliefs, Zhenwu was often addressed as the “Supreme Emperor of the Dark Heaven,” “Holy Emperor,” or simply “Emperor.” Many villages in north China had a temple to Zhenwu, usually on the northern edge of the village. The god was believed to have subdued many demons and evil spirits and to command dozens of heavenly generals. In the story, the Emperor and General Zou, as well as the degree holder, represent legitimate authorities who spoke to the villagers and the readers. The actual victims, the Dais, together with their fellow villagers, followed the orders of General Zou but remained silent through the whole process. It was the Patriarch of Foxes, as a kinship authority and a Daoist master, who argued with the bureaucratic authorities. On the face of it, the villagers supported the emperor’s law that was carried out by General Zou. But the dialogue between the Patriarch of Foxes and the bureaucratic authorities reflects their unspoken views on the matter. They seemed to believe that the foxes’ evil should be punished only proportionately and that the abuse of the power of office should be restrained. They imagined that the old fox, receiving the emperor’s reverence as a religious authority outside of the imperial bureaucracy, had the power to bypass the local administrators and keep them in check. Age has always been a significant factor in popular beliefs about fox spirits. As foxes aged, their magic powers grew stronger (see chapter 1). While as young men or women, foxes preyed on humans of the opposite sex to gain life essence, foxes as old men, like the Patriarch of Foxes, were often described as wise and erudite Daoist masters who had comprehended the ultimate principles of the changes of yin and yang. An old fox, for example, showed up in a class of young students and taught them the abstruse theories of the Book of Changes. Another account thus describes an old fox man: “He looks clean, pure, and pleasant, and carries himself swiftly as a divine transcendent. He evokes immediate respect.” Iconographically, such foxes shared considerable similarities with many of the Daoist legendary figures who had no bureaucratic functions but enjoyed high prestige in the official Daoist pantheon. Like the Patriarch of Foxes, old fox men embodied the foxes’ unofficial power in their challenges to bureaucratic forces. The Patriarch of Foxes acted as a responsible ancestor protecting his descendants. Similarly, old fox men were imagined as fatherly figures managing families when they came to live in close proximity to humans in a given community. It is a common motif in Ming-Qing stories that men or women asking to rent houses from human residents turn out to be foxes.

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Being neighbors with foxes made people vulnerable to their pranks and depravities. However, when headed by an old fox in the position of a father or grandfather, a fox family rarely caused harm. Instead, the old fox himself was often described as a learned scholar, and he governed the family, comprised of his consorts, children, and servants, with Confucian morality. Under his leadership the fox family lived in harmony with its human neighbors, and any member who ventured to assault humans met the fox man’s severe punishment. One story recounts that a fox family surnamed Hu rented a house from a man named Sun. The old Hu showed extraordinary knowledge about Daoist classics and Confucian philosophies, and was nicknamed “Hu the Learning of Dao.” He disciplined his family rigorously. When one of his grandsons harassed a maid of Sun, Hu apologized to the maid. Next day the Hu family moved away, leaving thirty taels of silver as rent and the corpse of a young fox. In another story, an old fox man claimed that he and his family were from Shaanxi and wanted to rent the storage room of the Jiang family in Xinshi, Zhejiang. The old man “had red cheeks and gray hair, and dressed elegantly.” He discussed history and philosophy with his landlord, and acted as a fatherly figure, admonishing Jiang about the harm of indulgence in drinking. To a certain extent, these old foxes acted like family patriarchs who enjoyed public respect and authority. This image of an old man with characteristics of both Daoist transcendents and village elders most frequently appears in fox shrines and temples in local communities. In the stories discussed in chapter 4, the fox who possessed Little Three first appeared as a sexually active man, but after Little Three took on the role of medium, the sexual connotation diminished and the fox changed into an aged man. Woman Liang’s fox deity in Linzi, Shandong was an old man too. Another seventeenth-century scholar found a temple dedicated to a fox deity famous for fortune-telling in Dezhou, Hebei. This deity spoke through the caretaker of the temple, behind a screen, and his voice was that of a man eighty years of age. The scholar addressed him politely as “Hu the Old Man (Hu laoren).” In another story the fox cult also features an old man, who was well versed in Daoist classics and addressed as “Old Man of No Truth (Wuzhen sou).” These old men frequently appear in popular paintings as ye, laoyezi, or taiye, meaning both “master” and “grandpa” (chapter 3, figure 3.2). It is important to note that such images resemble the common iconography of the earth god, who was also depicted as a gray-haired old man. But unlike the earth god, foxes rarely exerted influence on the welfare of a community as a whole, by making rain, as-

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suring harvests, or preventing plague. They normally provided healing and fortune-telling services and addressed individualistic and utilitarian needs. While saluting the earth god and similar beings as celestial bureaucrats, people harbored doubts about the real effects of these gods’ power upon their personal lives. Ji Yun, for example, questioned whether each household had its own Stove God and noted that if this were the case, there would be “as many Stove Gods under heaven as the sands of Ganges.” For him this was simply impossible. Yuan Mei cast doubt on the real power of Guandi (Lord Guan), another officially promoted god. He explained why there were so many Guandi temples in the country: “Whenever establishing a Guandi temple in a village or town, [the local people] would follow the order of the Supreme Emperor and select the ghost of an upright man native to the village to be the surrogate of Guandi. The real Guandi serves at the side of the emperor and would not reveal himself to the secular world.” Such perceptions led people to approach foxes and officially promoted gods in different ways. Li Wei-tsu observed that his farmer informants, while devoted to the domestic cult of five sacred animals, “have no high esteem for the statues in the temples as far as supernatural influence on human welfare is concerned. . . . The idols are worshipped more as symbols of perfect goodness than as a source of help for the needs of earthly life.” In other words, temple gods were for public good, while animal spirits were for personal needs. One farmer expressed the same doubt about Guandi. He told Li that “requests to Guandi idols must be useless, as there is only one Guandi in the world and thus he can hardly dwell in every temple named after him. But even if he could, he would not deign to listen to the common man’s prayers for assistance and help.” Other gods depicted in the New Year prints, the farmer added, were just the same as Guandi. The people worshipped these gods “merely as a sheet of paper” in annual festivals, and they turned to the petty animal spirits when they needed real and efficacious help.

Foxes and Female Deities Let’s Marry the Fox to the Earth God Foxes as young women were considered sexually active, and like wandering ghosts, such fox women vied with other local deities for people’s offerings and remained a potential threat to the established gods. An eighteenth-

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century account reflects the tension between legitimate gods and the cult of the fox in competing for spiritual, ritual, and financial devotion from the local people. The author, Fang Yuankun (fl. 1799), found the arrangement of the earth god temple in a village interesting: in the front quarter was a female statue, and the earth god was situated in the back hall. He received the following explanation from the villagers: The earth god used to be worshipped here. But since it had been standing here for a long time, the incense offerings abated. Suddenly a young woman appeared to the villagers in dreams, saying, “If you establish a shrine for me, I will bestow favors on you.” The villagers first refused [her request] with the excuse that they did not have any spare piece of land. [The woman] said, “You can [place my shrine] in the temple of the earth god.” [The villagers] then thought, “The earth god has no spouse. Why don’t we give him a statue of a wife?” They therefore refurbished the temple and painted the statue red. From then on their prayers received efficacious responses, and the sacrifices and worshipping activities boomed. Subsequently the image of the lady became more opulent every day, but that of the earth god still had his gray hairs and tangled beard, and the clay fell off. One night a beggar slept under the eaves of the temple and heard someone curse inside: “You damn clay idol! Ever since I came here your residence has been renovated, and meat offerings have poured in incessantly. What efficacious power do you have [so that] you deserve to sit on my right and enjoy [these offerings]?” Another voice cursed back: “You wild fox spirit! You always skulk out in the night to bewitch people and covertly misuse your power to bestow favors. The house is mine, and the incense offerings are also mine. I would rather be hungry all year long than be a cuckold.” [The beggar] then heard them fight. Next morning he told the villagers, “This is indeed strange! The lady wants to rule the roost, but the god does not concede.” Thereupon [the villagers] moved the image of the earth god to the back. All sacrifices are offered to the lady first and then to the earth god. They have been getting along well ever since.

The establishment and maintenance of popular shrines and temples drew on various kinds of local resources, among which land remained the most precious. Valerie Hansen notes that popular temples in the Song usually had very little or even no land in order to avoid tax obligations and other expenses. In many Song tales, gods demanded beautiful portraits, accurate images, refurbished temples, and government titles, “but never [asked] for

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land.” Because of the lack of land endowments, popular temples relied heavily on regular offerings from devotees for upkeep and easily fell into disrepair when the gods failed to perform miracles at people’s requests. Sarah Schneewind shows that during the Ming, temple land lay at the heart of the competition between state institutions and nonstate religions for local people’s financial support and ritual allegiance. The story under discussion makes it clear that Qing villagers were also concerned with the use of land in temple building. When they wanted to start a new cult they were reluctant to occupy a new piece of land, but were apt to accommodate the new deity in inactive temples. Financial considerations, however, only partly account for the villagers’ decision to add a new cult to an old temple. The deeper significance of the villagers’ rearrangement of the temple rests in the different yet complementary roles the earth god and the female fox could play in the religious life of a village. As the earth god’s curse reveals, the fox’s power was associated with the sexual exploits of men, and she wielded power covertly and not from a position of divine office. Female deities of suspicious origins, because of their appeal to personal interests and individual needs, could attract people away from local gods who were viewed as divine bureaucrats protecting the collective welfare of the community. The villagers restructured the relationship between the earth god and the female fox with marital terms instead of bureaucratic ties. We may assume a double-featured mentality behind this arrangement. The villagers found it necessary to pay respect, even if it was only lip service, to official symbols, but they also genuinely cherished the practical and efficacious powers of the fox. The temple layout reflects this dual mentality most succinctly. Spatial arrangements of Chinese buildings indicate hierarchical order. Chinese temples generally consist of several sets of halls and often house the most prestigious god in the main hall, with the subordinate deities at the entrance and in the side rooms. The temples of the earth god were usually small, and this particular temple seems to have had only two halls, the front and the back. To place the fox deity in the front and the earth god in the back elevated the status of the earth god above the fox. But the respect paid to the earth god only remained as a necessary display of how the official structure should be. Beyond the hierarchically ordered spatial structure were the actual practices of the villagers, who offered devotion to whichever deity they liked. Through the physical and marital arrangements, the villagers were able to use the official symbols and gender hierarchy to tame the vices of the fox

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and to enhance its power for their best interests. They directed offerings toward the female for personal favors, but such actions could be interpreted as efforts to glorify the earth god as well. And through the mouth of the female deity we are indeed told that the earth god also gained practical benefits from devotions drawn by the fox. As the dominant ideology promoted wives’ submission to their husbands, the illicit content of the new deity could be simultaneously confined and concealed by the official functions of the earth god. The female fox, who tried to “rule the roost,” might have mirrored real-life situations in which women overpowered men in some families. The gender relationship between a husband and a wife could be both hierarchical and personal, depending on how it was interpreted in actual situations. It served as a useful code for ordinary people to manipulate two different kinds of divine power at will. More accounts show how local people used the gender relationship between a husband and wife to convert harmful foxes into benign deities. In one late Ming story, a cunning fox called Aunt Mao the Third (Mao sangu) haunted Qisi village in Gushi county (Henan) and caused severe harm. One day she delivered a message to the villagers: “The Supreme Emperor has ordered me to be the lady of the [God] of the Eastern Peak at his circuit palace (Dongyue xinggong furen). If you build a temple to worship me, I will bring you blessings and protect you against disasters.” The villagers satisfied her demands and addressed her as Lady of the Eastern Peak. In return she answered people’s prayers and attracted crowds of believers for years. The Eastern Peak, Taishan, had been the center of imperial worship since ancient times. By at least the Tang, “the Great Emperor of the Eastern Peak (Dongyue dadi)” had evolved in popular belief into the lord of the underworld, leading an infernal bureaucracy similar to that of this world. During the Ming and Qing, the god received official titles from imperial rulers and enjoyed immense popularity among both the elite and commoners. The status of the fox as “the lady of the [God] of the Eastern Peak at his circuit palace” deserves special attention. The title “Lady” is often used for popular female deities associated with female sexuality and shamanistic traditions. The term xinggong, “circuit palace,” is exclusively reserved for an emperor’s residence outside of the capital, used when he toured around the country. In using such a term the Qisi people recognized the power of the god in the capacity of an emperor, while defining the power of the female deity as territorial, limited only to the village. Marital ties, instead of the usual bureaucratic terms, came to shape the hierarchical relations between the central and the local authorities. Furthermore, the local nature

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of the female deity implies that she was not quite pictured as a wife, who should dwell at the Eastern Peak. Rather, she was more like a concubine, largely confined to her own private quarters, whose marital association with the male authority granted her power only to a certain extent. She was in a subordinate position in the official structure of the household, but she could also wield power not included in bureaucratic offices. She was expected to dominate the private sphere of people’s life and address practical and personal concerns.

The Fox and the Cult of Bixia Yuanjun (Mother Taishan) The Qisi village case might have been one of the numerous local variations of the female cult of Bixia Yuanjun, which rose to prominence at this time. Her cult first emerged during the Song and became one of the most celebrated in north China after the mid-Ming. The goddess received a series of imperial honors, won the official title of “Heavenly Immortal and Holy Mother” (Tianxian Shengmu), and was adopted into the Daoist pantheon. Numerous local temples were built in her honor during late imperial times, to the extent that almost every county in Shandong and Hebei had a Bixia temple. People commonly addressed her as “Mother Taishan” or “Lady Taishan” (Taishan niangniang) and worshipped her as a benign goddess answering all the needs of her devotees. A Daoist text claimed that she could “protect the nation and the people, save all sentient beings and preserve life.” More specifically, she, like other celebrated female deities such as Guanyin and Tianhou, was conceived of as a life-giver who bestowed children and good health upon her devotees. Bixia, however, differed significantly from unambiguously positive female deities such as Guanyin and Tianhou. She was often associated with subverting female roles and female sexuality, and in this regard demonstrates inextricable connections with fox spirits in popular lore. Both her cult and the fox spirit cult prospered in roughly the same area, north China (and later Manchuria), and around the same time period, from the midMing to the early twentieth century. People conceived of the two as having similar functions—efficacious yet dangerous. The Qisi village story reveals that people of the late Ming were ready to elevate the dangerous fox spirit to the position of the female Taishan deity. During Ming-Qing times, in the Taishan Palace and many local temples, the goddess was pictured as a beauty with small bound feet wearing embroidered slippers as her special trademark. The same motif also appears in many Ming-Qing accounts of

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foxes. The main offerings to fox shrines in Shandong consisted of tiny women’s shoes, based on the belief that foxes had bound feet when they transformed themselves into women, and Daji, the infamous fox concubine of the Zhou King of the Shang dynasty in Ming-Qing popular literature, was believed to be the inventor of foot binding. The fox and Bixia had similar identities. In an eighteenth-century story a female fox, in order to obtain incense offerings, inhabited a temple of Guanyin, who was often identified as and shared temples with Bixia Yuanjun. She drew bountiful offerings for her efficacy, but her statue differed from that of Guanyin; she looked so beautiful and alluring that the statue, like Bixia’s, had to be hidden behind screens in order to prevent male devotees from having impure thoughts. The three female deities, the fox, Bixia, and Guanyin, converge in the story. In pursuing a particular kind of divine help, some people might pray to Bixia, while others petitioned fox spirits. To the devotees of Yongping (in today’s Hebei), for example, Bixia was a patron of children and specialized in healing chicken pox. In the Temple of the Eastern Peak in Beijing and the Bixia temple in Taishan, one of her nine subordinate ladies undertook this task. The Wuhu (Anhui) people worshipped a fox as the goddess of chicken pox. In certain places people used the same term, Niangniang (Mother or Lady), to address both Bixia and foxes. The fox and Bixia were also associated with similar types of unorthodox power. Marginal groups who had important functions in everyday life but no respectable status in the social hierarchy, such as midwives, matchmakers, healers, eunuchs, yamen runners, and most of all, young wives/daughters-in-law, were the most enthusiastic followers of Bixia, who offered them means to attain power and leadership unavailable in the orthodox social order. The same can be said about foxes, whose popularity relied heavily on spirit mediums (chapter 4) and whose dangerous potential was closely linked to the sexuality of young women (chapter 3) and females in other marginal social categories such as prostitutes, courtesans, and entertainers (chapters 1 and 6). The fox and Bixia were similar, however, only when they interacted with people as separate entities. When they were perceived in relational terms, a hierarchy was established. In Xingshi yinyuanzhuan, the seventeenthcentury novel from Shandong discussed in chapter 2, it appears to be a wellknown fact among the local people that Bixia was the lord of all foxes under heaven from Taishan. Anecdotal accounts also mention this connection. In one story, a young scholar married a beautiful woman, knowing she was a fox spirit. Every month his fox wife would take a leave of seven days, saying

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that she was going to serve Mother Taishan. Another fox who claimed to be from Chan River (which runs through Luoyang, Henan) told his human friend that he had been dispatched by Mother Taishan to summon another local deity. Bixia had the power to control the dangerous aspects of fox spirits, and her Taishan residence was a place of salvation to transform foxes from beast to human. A fox once confessed that he had been engaged in deluding women of good families into sexual liaisons, and his long-term lover, Woman Li, gave birth to four sons, whose appearance was human except that each had a tail. One day the fox came to the woman and cried, “Our predestined fate has come to an end. Yesterday Mother Taishan learned of my crimes of deluding women. I am therefore being punished with building roads for pilgrims and will never be allowed to leave. I will bring our four sons along.” He had Woman Li cut off their sons’ tails and left, believing that only after they got rid of the tails could they then gain human identities while serving Bixia. Bixia’s control of fox spirits was sometimes imagined in bureaucratic terms. One story tells that all foxes in pursuit of transcendence would take examinations, equivalent to the civil service examinations, under the supervision of Mother Taishan. Only those who had gained the shengyuan degree, the lowest degree on the ladder to an official career, could proceed to the higher levels of cultivation, and those who failed the exams were categorized as “wild foxes” and forbidden to take any other measures toward transcendence. Official power and transcendence were two opposite pursuits for scholars of traditional China, and those who chose transcendence over office were usually more admired and praised. Yet in this story the parallel between the secular world and the fox world dissolved the boundary between office holders and Daoist recluses. Transcendence was to foxes as office holding to examination candidates, and the fox and Bixia formed a power structure parallel to the official hierarchy. During late imperial times, pilgrimages to Bixia’s temples became immensely popular among different social groups but also encountered elite criticism and public distrust for their disruption of normal moral order. They were occasions during which men and women mingled and premarital or extramarital relationships occurred. They also provided opportunities for close contact between young women and female mediums, midwives, and matchmakers, whom women from honorable families were supposed to avoid while living at home. In Xingshi yinyuanzhuan, for example, the father of the male protagonist tried hard to keep two daopo, religious lay-

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women who organized pilgrims, away from his daughter-in-law. When she forced her husband to go on the pilgrimage, the father wanted to stop them by pointing out the inappropriateness of going with the daopo and the casual mingling of men and women. While the term daopo can be literally translated as “temple worker,” it is also the pun of daopo, “thieving old woman” or “temple thief.” One eighteenth-century story reveals how the relationship between Bixia and the fox could be used to reconcile conflicting views of such pilgrimages. It was widely believed that by jumping off Taishan’s “throw body precipice,” a person could cure sick parents and extend their lives. Ping Xi, a filial son from Fei county, Shandong, came to Taishan after all medical means had failed to cure his sick mother. He prayed at the Bixia temple and then took the fatal leap without any hesitation. Moments later, he found himself lying thousands of feet below the precipice, alive. Finding a route back up, he ran into two women, who led him into a cave and tried to force him to have sex with them. Enraged by his flat refusal, one of the women brandished a sword above Ping’s head. Just then thunder rumbled, and a golden-armored deity broke into the cave, shouting, “How dare you two demons harm the filial son! I now arrest you by the order of Bixia Yuanjun.” The two women turned out to be two foxes, who were immediately taken away by two spirit soldiers. Ping was lofted through the air. When he opened his eyes, he was back at his own home and his mother had already recovered. While he was gone, his mother told Ping, a gray-haired lady had appeared in her dream and fed her a pill. She woke up with a fragrant taste in her mouth and regained her health. As Pomeranz argues with regard to several other tales of this time, the story avoids the tragic result of suicide jumps in real life and allows people to achieve the goal of filial piety without subjecting themselves to the moral corruption associated with pilgrimages. The dangerous elements of the pilgrimages were projected onto foxes, while Bixia became a pure motherly figure who tamed them. She reinforced the cardinal Confucian virtue of filial piety and absolved herself of responsibility for human sacrifices. This conception of the relationship between the fox and Bixia highlights the role of ordinary people in legitimizing popular cults in actual practice. Just like the elite, commoners might be aware of the “heterodox” content of the Bixia cult. In imagining the capricious fox under the supervision of Bixia, people redirected the dangers of the cult onto the fox, and thereby promoted the legitimate power of the goddess. The improvement of her status was due to intentional or unintentional efforts by devotees to consistently “purify” unacceptable features and apply publicly endorsed standards.

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As Bixia was seen alternately as a young woman like a fox and a motherly goddess free of female pollution, people were able to simultaneously tame the vices of foxes and enhance potentially subversive power structures of both Bixia and the foxes, beyond the institutional control of the celestial bureaucracy.

The Fox in the Cults of the Queen Mother, Mother Taishan, and Granny Wang We can better understand the dynamic of the fox cult by examining the changing relations between the fox and a series of female deities over the course of history. As early as the Han dynasty, the fox was believed to be an attendant of the Queen Mother of the West, a female deity of local shamanistic origin who granted life and immortality yet imposed sexual danger. Although the link between the Queen Mother and the fox later disappeared in the Daoist pantheon, it persisted in popular tradition (chapter 1) until Ming-Qing times. For instance, a literati friend of Pu Songling dreamed that he met several young fox beauties and enjoyed their romantic company. These foxes turned out to be “emissaries of flowers and birds” summoned by the Queen Mother of the West. Another story discloses that foxes could be mirror images of the Queen Mother of the West. When asked why she could only take the appearance of her fox sister when she transformed herself into a woman, a fox answered, “[My sister and] I followed our mother to the celestial palace and met the Queen Mother of the West. We secretly admired the Queen Mother and worked hard to imitate her. My sister was more talented and able to be like her in spirit in one month. I reached this stage in three months, but still I am not as good as my sister.”  As the Queen Mother enjoyed national prominence during late imperial times, the fox began to be affiliated with Bixia, the new local female deity with ambiguous features similar to those of the Queen Mother in earlier times and more popularly known as Mother Taishan. For Ming-Qing people, the names of the Queen Mother and Mother Taishan produced different impressions. Ancient legends associated the Queen Mother with Mount Kunlun, a distant paradise far from north China. Daoist as well as popular literature made her wife of the Jade Emperor, a celestial being who had no permanent earthly dwelling. She was imagined to be powerful yet distant and aloof, rarely tending to secular affairs in person. By contrast, both literary and oral sources agree that Bixia was a native of Taishan, the Eastern Peak, which she took as her permanent residence.

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For people in north China, especially in Hebei and Shandong, she was geographically within reach, and any local Bixia temple could be hierarchically and cosmographically related to Taishan. One literary version features her as a divine woman who was sent to Taishan by the Yellow Emperor, a famous disciple of the Queen Mother. In some oral sources in Shandong she was a gifted girl from an ordinary local family. She met a divine transcendent (in one version, the Queen Mother) at a young age and learned extraordinary arts. Upon returning home, she performed healing miracles and other benevolent services for people in her neighborhood. She later retreated to Taishan, where she attained transcendence and became a goddess. The origin of Bixia in the oral sources and the heavy involvement of women in cult activities led one modern scholar to contend that she was a deified version of female healers, midwives, and the like who provided specific services to women in village communities of north China. Iconographically, Bixia/Mother Taishan retained traits of ordinary women, such as bound feet and beautiful looks. When performing miracles, she met the petitioners face to face, as a loving mother or grandmother living next door. Like the fox and the Queen Mother in earlier times, the fox and Mother Taishan formed a structure subversive to the normal order and addressed people’s concerns for life and fertility through both publicly acceptable and unacceptable means. As the Bixia cult reached its peak in north China and rapidly expanded to Manchuria during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a new local cult of a female deity, named Granny Wang the Third (Wang Sannainai), emerged in Beijing and the Tianjin area. In the Bixia temple complex atop the Mountain of the Marvelous Peak (Miaofeng shan), a pilgrimage center about forty kilometers northwest of the city of Beijing, Granny Wang was worshipped in a side room of the Bixia palace. Beside Granny Wang’s statue were two small altars, one for Perfected Liu, a snake spirit, and one for Grandpa Hu the Second, a fox spirit. Folk literature explanations vary greatly as to exactly who Granny Wang was. Some believed that there was only one Granny Wang the Third, who was also called Granny Wang. Some held that there were many Grannies Wang, and only the one popular in Tianjin was called Granny Wang the Third. Some directly identified her as a “fox fairy of local fame, said to perform miraculous cures through a human medium.” Some designated her a deity commanding the fox and four other sacred animal spirits and following the orders of Mother Taishan. In Tianjin, she was believed to be an old maidservant. Believers in Beijing claimed that she was a native of that city

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and married to a poor farmer. Throughout her life she toured local village communities in Beijing and Hebei and offered healing services to the poor. One story recounts that she was an enthusiastic pilgrim herself, died and became a deity in the Mountain of the Marvelous Peak, and attracted huge crowds of pilgrims. A medium cult in the city of Beijing claimed that she descended to the altar through spirit writing in 1924, lectured on Buddhist scriptures, and recruited dozens of disciples. She revealed her true form to them one day in 1927, and beside her statue in the temple of the Mountain of the Marvelous Peak was a photo of her, presumably taken on this occasion. Among the offerings dedicated to her in shrines and temples, the most typical were embroidered shoes made for bound feet. Despite differences among sources, it is clear that the cult of Granny Wang was derived from popular belief in fox spirits, and Granny Wang herself was a deified representation of female mediums and other marginal women who played active roles in local community life and had special appeals to women. Her hagiography in popular sources strikingly resembles that of Bixia, but compared to Bixia, who was now a famed regional deity, Granny Wang was more local, personal, and accessible. This is illustrated by the sharp contrast between the image of Bixia and that of Granny Wang in the Mountain of the Marvelous Peak temple. In accordance with the official title of “Heavenly Immortal and Holy Mother” and frequent imperial patronage, Bixia appeared as a middle-aged lady wearing a phoenix coronet and a golden mantle, both symbols of nobility and royalty (figure 5.1). Two other goddesses with similar appearance stood by her side. Granny Wang, in a side palace, looked like an old countrywoman. She had her gray hair combed up in a coil and wore a long robe and loose trousers of plain blue cloth (figure 5.2). On one side was her young son, dragging a donkey on which she went out to cure people; on the other side was another young boy holding a long smoking pipe, typical of women of low background. Moreover, her only title, Granny Wang the Third, evoked much more familial sentiments among her followers than either the formal “Bixia Yuanjun” or the informal “Mother Taishan.” As the Bixia cult grew more powerful, people created subcults to keep female deities personal and approachable. The cult of Granny Wang was also full of official language and public symbols. All sources agree that she died on the Mountain of the Marvelous Peak and became a “Holy Mother,” a title people had long ascribed to Bixia and the Queen Mother. The changes in her title and iconography in the Bixia temple show even more clearly how devotees used standard terms and symbols to promote her cult. In 1925, when Granny Wang was still a rela-

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Figure 5.1 Bixia Yuanjun (The Perfected of the Azure Clouds), also known as Taishan niangniang (Mother Taishan), in the temple of the Mountain of the Marvelous Peak, Beijing, October 1997. Photo by author

tively new presence in the temple, she was described by an ethnographer as an “old maidservant” (laomazi). Only four years later, another ethnographer noted that the “old maidservant was now transformed into a bodhisattva.” Although some of her commoner’s traits were still preserved, she was wearing a phoenix coronet and a golden silk dress. A huge banner flying on the Bixia temple now read: “Conferred by the Emperor: Protecting the Country [on] the Golden Summit of the Mountain of the Marvelous Peak [are] Heavenly Immortal and Holy Mother [and] Granny Wang the Third [who] bless [people] from all four directions and respond to every plea (Chifeng huguojinding Miaofengshan Tianxian shengmu WangSannainai moyou sifang youqiu biying).” On the honorary sign hanging from the ceiling of her room she was given the titles of “bodhisattva” and “Holy Mother.” The medium cult that obtained her photo claimed that she had descended

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Figure 5.2 Wang Sannainai (Granny Wang the Third) in the temple of the Mountain of the Marvelous Peak, Beijing, October 1997. Photo by author

to their altar at the behest of the Jade Emperor, and that she had received the title of “Holy Mother” from him. All these elements suggest that ordinary worshippers freely deployed official language and symbols to promote local cults, whether or not they were approved by state authorities. To different extents the Queen Mother, Mother Taishan, and Granny Wang all grew out of the local culture of shamans and spirit mediums, had special appeal to women, and, as their common association with fox spirits suggests, had dangerous potential. But over the course of their development the three cults also advanced hierarchically as worshippers used public codes and official symbols to promote their powers. As one cult expanded from local to regional and national levels and gained public or even official recognition, a new subcult, diminutive and local in nature, would emerge. The fox itself is an example of such upgrading. During the

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late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fox in north China and Manchuria was often worshipped as a member of the group of five (or four) sacred animals, including the fox, weasel, hedgehog, snake, and rat (see chapter 2). The fox was given the highest rank among the five, and many of its vices were “shifted” to the weasel, a similar but less valued animal in real life. The official and personal features of the three cults, the Queen Mother of the West, Mother Taishan, and Granny Wang, represented not only different phases of hierarchical upgrading among relational cults but also different faces of a single cult. In other words, well-established cults, with official recognition and public celebration, still encompassed personal, local, and practical elements that characterized their subcults. As discussed above, Bixia was the most important female deity in north China and the equivalent of the more universally accepted deities such as Guanyin. But in folk stories she was sometimes a fox spirit and sometimes an old woman just like Granny Wang. Her official title is “Bixia Yuanjun,” but she was more commonly addressed by a familial name, “Mother Taishan.” The example of the Queen Mother illustrates the point even more clearly. By the Ming era, the Queen Mother cult had attained national fame, and her romance with Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty was a well-known legend. Medieval literature eulogized the couple’s meeting in lavishly decorated royal palaces. The Queen Mother laid out a celestial feast of fragrant flowers, exotic fruits, and, most of all, the famous peaches from the celestial garden. While enchanting music played, she lectured Emperor Wu on the arts of gaining immortality. A Ming account, however, adds a strong local flavor to the story: To the northwest of Pingshan county (Hebei) . . . there is a shrine dedicated to the Queen Mother of the West. Farther west there is a famous hot spring. Local lore has it that Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty met the Queen Mother here. The emperor made some ribaldries toward her, and she spit on him, which made him grow sores. The emperor apologized to the Queen Mother. Soon a deer ran by, and a hot spring spurted up. The Queen Mother pointed at it and said, “Bath in the spring water and you will be cured.” He followed her instruction and was indeed cured. Up until now the locals still bathe in the spring water to cure sores. A temple of Emperor Wu stands by the side of the spring. The temple stele reads: “The Queen Mother of the West was from the Sang family and grew up in Pingshan. She went into Fang Mountain (in Hebei) to study the Way at a young age. Having attained transcendence,

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she returned to visit her relatives and liberated herself here by means of a simulated corpse.” The [current] statue is her remains. She answers prayers efficaciously and is earnestly worshipped by the locals. The village is named the Village of the Queen Mother.

Village vulgarity replaced the romantic embellishment of the meeting in elite literature. For the people of Pingshan, the Queen Mother was an object of active worship not only because of her great fame but also because of her local connections. Much like Bixia in the oral sources mentioned above, the Queen Mother appears to be a woman of native origin associated with healing practices. She was believed to have attained transcendence at a local sacred site of Hebei and to have chosen to come back to serve her own community. Many such local versions must have been extant to keep the power of the Queen Mother efficacious despite the widespread interpretations of her as a Daoist goddess of transcendence.

On the Margins of Established Cults: Reflections from a Modern Fox Cult Modern ethnographic works testify that just as fox spirits appear as subordinates to female deities like Mother Taishan, they were also found at side altars in major Buddhist and Daoist temples. Li Shiyu, for example, noticed that two fox altars were set up in a prominent Buddhist temple in Shanfangbao village of Wanquan county in northern Hebei during the early twentieth century. A photo collection book shows that in Jilin, Manchuria during the 1900s, a fox shrine, featuring Grandpa and Granny Hu, was housed in the Temple of the Dragon King. Japanese scholar Uchida found that in a small village of southern Manchuria the fox shrine was placed in the Guandi temple. Men of the village worshipped Guandi, and women prayed to the fox. By the early twentieth century, the fox had also been invited into the Temple of the Eastern Peak in Beijing, a Daoist temple sponsored by the Qing government. The God of the Eastern Peak, along with other major Daoist gods, was placed in the main palace of the temple complex. In the rear section, on the upper floor, were images of Mother Taishan and other female deities, with Granny Wang and Grandpa Hu on side altars. My own fieldwork in northern Shaanxi in 1997 led to the discovery of a modern fox cult that thrived on the margin of a well-established Buddhist temple. Spatial arrangements, written texts, and orally circulated stories represent different layers of interpretation of the Buddhist temple and the

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affiliated fox cult. An investigation of the interplay of these interpretations provides a much richer picture of the cult than that in earlier sources and puts the fox cult tradition into sharper historical perspective.

The Temple and the Written Texts The fox cult is located in Boluo, a small rural town in the Yulin region, northern Shaanxi, bordering the Ordos desert of Inner Mongolia to the north and facing the vast yellow earth plateau spanning Shaanxi, Shanxi, and Ningxia Muslim Autonomous Region to the south, east, and west. When I asked the local people to take me to see the fox spirit, they first took me to a majestic Buddhist temple and gave me a pamphlet about it published by the local government in the early 1990s. The temple, named the Receiving Temple of Boluo (Boluo Jieyinsi), is situated on a hillside, with the Yuding highway—the only highway that connects this rural town to the outside world—and the Wuding River passing by its front. According to the pamphlet, Gautama Buddha left his footprints on the cliff by the Wuding River. In the Tang dynasty, a monk from Chang’an (today’s Xi’an) saw the Buddha’s image on the cliff. He therefore carved the image out of the cliff and built a temple to honor the Buddha, which was then called the Stone Buddha. The official pamphlet emphasizes how over the past thousand years the residents have protected the Stone Buddha from the ravages of fire, war, and looting, not merely as a religious object but because it is a precious cultural symbol that defines the local and national identity of the townspeople. During the Ming, for example, Mongol forces seized Boluo several times in their advance southward. The history of Boluo, therefore, was also the history of how the people rallied to support the Ming army and defend the town. In 1509, 1554, and 1610, the temple was looted and destroyed at least three times. On each occasion, after the Mongols were driven back north of the Wuding River, local people donated money and labor to rebuild the temple. In the interval between the Ming and Qing, the people of Boluo erected a stone stele to celebrate the great victories of Li Zicheng (1606–1645), a native of Hengshan county, 30 kilometers southeast of Boluo, and the famous leader of the peasant rebellions that overthrew the Ming dynasty. In the subsequent Qing conquest, Li’s local followers used the strategic advantage of Boluo in bloody battles with Qing troops. After their tragic defeat, the temple was ruined and the stele was destroyed. The pamphlet also notes that during the early twentieth century, following the Boxer Uprising and the humiliating national defeat, British, French,

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and Spanish missionaries penetrated into the region and discovered the Stone Buddha. “They intended to steal it away, but ignited public rage, and people rose up to fight.” In the end the Stone Buddha remained intact, but the angry foreigners fled after they “had destroyed the temple gate and the flagpole.” The temple suffered severe damage during the Civil War (1945– 1949) and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), but since 1984 has received substantial government funding for renovation. It is now one of the major sites on the cultural preservation list of the Yulin regional government, and cultural festivals and rural market exchanges are regularly held both inside and outside the temple. Reflecting the current priorities of the government, the pamphlet eulogizes the recent renovation of the temple as a sign of rural China’s prosperity under the reform policy and a significant effort on the part of the local government to restore Chinese cultural tradition. The site of the temple testifies to the eminence of the Stone Buddha. The major part of the temple, the hall that houses the original Tang image of the Buddha, is situated on the top of the hill. The image is more than 13 feet high, but its features are barely recognizable due to erosion by centuries of wind and rain (figure 5.3). The eight Diamond Kings are located on the two sides of the image, a common layout in many Buddhist temples. While seven of the kings are fearful-looking beings wearing weapons and military armor, the last one on the left side is distinguished as a middle-aged scholar in a traditional-style civilian robe and cap (figure 5.4). This image of a Diamond King is unique, and rather contrary to what is normally seen in Buddhist texts and temples. According to my local informants, this is the huxian, the fox deity. In other words, here at Boluo the fox spirit is presented in the form of a man, and by taking the position of a Diamond King, he joins the retinue of Buddha. Several red banners were hanging at the entrance of the hall. Most of them read something like: “Our gratitude to the deity’s benevolence,” and one of them specifies: “The Boluo huxian is truly efficacious.” My informants explained: “All these banners are dedicated to the huxian by people who came to fulfill their vows.” Outside the hall stands a temple stele that was erected by local donors in 1991, and the inscription gives a story about the fox deity that is not recounted in the aforementioned official pamphlet: The Old Master of Golden Chan is a great arhat from the Western Extreme Happy and Pure Land. Over the past fifteen thousand years he was a human for twenty-one lives and a fox in his last life. Falling into an alien species, he deeply regretted the suffering of reincarnation and developed benevolent

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Figure 5.3 The Stone Buddha, with its vague features, in the Jieyin temple, Boluo, Shaanxi province, October 1997. Photo by author

thoughts to observe the precepts of meditation and wisdom. He left Kukeenmahar in Inner Mongolia and chose the Bell and Drum Hill of Boluo to practice self-cultivation. Time passed and dynasties changed. Around 1931 he was disturbed by soldiers and could not avoid them even though he had moved three times. Therefore he played a little trick and cleverly punished the cavalry at Gao Family’s Oil Mill. He won the hearts of both officers and soldiers, who promised to renovate the Jieyin temple. At this time the Old Master had just accomplished his cultivation but still needed three thousand meritorious deeds. He therefore chose a medium to speak on his behalf and to spread his benevolence broadly by curing illnesses. He cultivated himself with effort and practiced [the Way] to benefit the world. He looked for those in suffering and saved them indiscriminately. He toiled for more than ten years and achieved the Dao of the Great Trancendance. He went to preside over the Golden Palace of the Five Dragons in White Clouds. Two years later he came back

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Figure 5.4 The fox as a Diamond King beside Buddha in the Jieyin temple, Boluo, Shaanxi province, October 1997. Photo by author

and assumed the post of a Diamond King serving the Buddha of the Jieyin temple. Gradually his Way spread, and his influence increased in the north. Men and women believers and gentry elite prayed and made offerings to him, and [these ritual activities] were not sufficiently recorded. The fame [of the Old Master] spread to many provinces, and the temple has been renovated to propagate his great cause. The beauty of expanding and continuing his cause was recorded to show later generations, to make everyone know the importance of filial piety and brotherly love, to guide ordinary people to devote themselves to Buddha wholeheartedly. All these deeds were indeed good and great! Now the Buddhist cultivation of the Old Master is profound, and his merits are complete. He has achieved the true realm, attained to the fruit of arhat; therefore he was entrusted the Western Territories and became a vajra messenger of the Buddha. He will enjoy worship and offerings for a thousand years, will leave his immortal traces temporarily at the Jieyin temple, and will demonstrate his golden body in the great palace of the Buddha. [People are] able to observe his saintly features and fill their hearts with his thousands of

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virtues. All men have innate Buddha nature, and they should meditate on their karma of good deeds in order to avoid falling into the sea of bitterness. Only Buddhism embraces widely and is deeply rooted in the Pure Land. Even though thousands of species have different shapes, how could [we think] that these shapes are permanent?

A few steps down from the main hall there is a much smaller but exquisitely decorated building. Unlike the main hall, this building is locked. It is a tiny hexagonal room, about 9 feet high but only about one square yard in area, allowing a maximum of three people to kneel down to pray. A simple tablet dedicated to “the Great Transcendent of the Western World,” an incense burner, and a wooden board that reads “Gratitude to the deity’s benevolence” are laid out on a table. The yin-yang pattern is displayed in the center of the ceiling. On the hexagonal walls are murals featuring Tripitaka and his three disciples, from the famous popular novel Journey to the West. My informants explained: “This is the fox shrine, and we don’t usually open it to public worship.” There is nothing in the room, however, to indicate that it is a fox shrine: the fox’s name is not written on the tablet, and his image does not appear in the shrine or on the murals. For an outsider, it is hard to tell what the room is for or to which deity it is dedicated. There are other things about the fox that a passerby in Boluo would not notice unless aided by local residents. Coming down from the temple, walking several hundred yards along the highway, and turning uphill again for another 100 yards, one arrives at the home of the fox’s medium, Lei Wu, whose initiation story was introduced in the previous chapter. His residence was comprised of a row of beautifully built brick houses where his widow, his 6 sons, and their families still lived. When I entered his widow’s house, the furniture and electronic appurtenances reveal that the family was quite well off. Home, however, was not where the medium carried on his practice. About 50 yards farther up on the hill was a cave of three rooms. I was told that the cave had been closed since the death of the medium. It was about 15 square feet, two thirds of which was the kang. At the entrance was a stove, above which were two old folk prints featuring a story from a local opera. Above one of these was a new color print, featuring Guanyin and her retinue. When patients came, the fox medium would sit on the kang, pray to Guanyin, enter into trance, and perform services. In contrast to the wellbuilt, richly decorated, and easily accessible Stone Buddha temple, the cave of the medium was shabby, simple, and remote.

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The People and Their Stories While I was in the city of Yulin, I met Li, a 37-year-old accountant with a 3-year college degree, who was highly educated by local standards. Her husband’s prominent position as general manager of a government-sponsored investment company also granted her substantial social prestige. Li introduced me to two other women: Ling, a 36-year-old junior high graduate and the wife of a restaurant owner; and Ying, a 53-year-old housewife who was widowed at a young age with 3 children and had minimal education. I rented a car, and together we traveled from Yulin to the town of Boluo. There 3 local men joined us: Yang, 67, an illiterate, retired ceramist; Lei Shu, 47, a peasant with a primary school education; and Fu, 45, a carpenter who lost his eyesight in 1986 because he could not come up with 1,000 yuan (about $200) for the operation that would have saved it. All of them knew the fox medium to varying extents. Li had once consulted the medium about her mother’s health. Ling was a one-time patient of the medium, while Fu was a neighbor, and became a caretaker of the temple after going blind. Ying and Yang had been close friends of the medium for many years. Lei Shu was the medium’s second son. Each of the last 4 was actively involved in temple affairs. Fu was enthusiastic about the historical importance of the temple. He told me that during the Tang, when Xuanzang (602–640) made his pilgrimage to India, he and his followers passed Boluo and stayed one night in the temple. This probably explains why the murals in the fox shrine feature the Tripitaka and his three disciples from the novel Journey to the West. In the local lore of Boluo, history mixes with fiction; the fact that the village is some 450 kilometers north of the Tang capital city of Chang’an and therefore way off the pilgrimage route is simply ignored. The pride of the people of Boluo in the Stone Buddha is also expressed in temple festivals. Major festivals are held twice a year. The first is on the eighth day of the fourth month, which is believed to be the birthday of Buddha, and the second is on the first day of the tenth month, an occasion to fulfill one’s vows to Buddha. On both days, Qinqiang, a popular form of Shaanxi local opera, is performed. Markets are held outside of the temple, along the highway. The festivals have a long tradition in the region. They were suppressed during the Cultural Revolution, but have been revived since the 1980s. The temple also serves as a headquarters under which seven branch associations (hui) are organized among the local people from nearby counties,

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villages, and the city of Yulin. They include people from all walks of life: peasants, workers, government employees, business owners, housewives, and even some local cadres. Lei Shu, Yang, and Ying each head one association. The title notwithstanding, these associations do not have regular members or meet regularly, but depend on loosely organized volunteers. Most of the time, the head of each association acts alone. The main purpose is to provide services and donations during the festivals and on an everyday basis in order to “serve Buddha.” Yang, for example, is responsible for collecting donations and handling the finances of the temple. Lei Shu manages and maintains temple properties, while Yang runs errands. When they need help, they ask people they already know well: family members, relatives, friends, or other devotees of the Buddha from the area. There were no written testimonies about the power of the fox in the temple of the Stone Buddha. Nonetheless, his miracles were widely circulated in the Yulin region by word of mouth, and visitors flocked to his door from near and far. According to my informants, the Buddha’s immense benevolence lay in his power to heal, and the fox earned Buddha’s mandate to carry out this mission. The fox’s birthday is celebrated on the same day as that of the Buddha, and he is addressed as the “Old Buddha” (lao foye). Fu explained the relationship in fashionable corporate terms: “Buddha is the CEO (chief executive officer, zong jingli), and the fox is the executive assistant (zong jingli zhuli).” Admitting that he did not know much about the fox’s former lives, Fu assured me that the fox was an ethnic Mongolian who came to Boluo in the late nineteenth century from Wushen, a place in today’s Inner Mongolia, across the desert north of Boluo. When he arrived, he jumped into the temple and injured his left leg. He immediately knelt down in front of the Buddha, who received him as a disciple. He cultivated himself and later became the Old Master of the Golden Chan. Lei Shu and Yang further indicated that as soon as the fox became the Old Master of the Golden Chan, he chose a local man to serve him as a medium. Some years after this man’s death in the late 1940s, the fox chose another man to continue the service—Lei Shu’s father, Lei Wu. In the late 1940s and early 1950s Lei Wu conducted healing practices on behalf of the fox and attracted many local visitors. The practice, however, was halted in 1959, when the Socialist Education Campaign was mobilized nationwide. Lei Wu was arrested and sentenced to seven years in prison. Three years later, he was released, partly because the local government had nothing to feed prisoners due to the famine that struck the whole country. Lei Wu did not dare to practice openly anymore, but throughout the 1960s and 1970s local people

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still secretly visited him for cures. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, his service became public again and attracted patients from the entire Yulin region, sometimes from as far away as Inner Mongolia. I did not get to meet any patients other than the informants mentioned above, but according to the medium’s son and close friends Ying and Yang, peasants, workers, housewives, merchants, government employees, and even high-level cadres from the regional government were among the medium’s patients. The informants told me many miraculous stories about the fox. One of my urban informants, Li, recounted that her mother was once paralyzed and lost consciousness for two days. Li came from Yulin to ask for help from the huxian. The fox medium received her at the cave, burned incense, drank some liquor, and subsequently went into a trance at 1:30 p.m. When Li returned to Yulin city two hours later, she found that her mother had regained consciousness exactly around 1:30 p.m.! Another informant from Yulin, Ling, suffered severe breast pain after she gave birth to her son. The antibiotic pills given her by the doctors in Yulin City Hospital did not help. She then visited the medium, who, in a trance, gave her several pieces of yellow paper and told her to place them on her breast. A few days later, the pain was gone. Ying’s daughter could not speak by age seven, and Ying consulted the medium. Also in a trance, the medium put some soybeans on a piece of yellow paper, which was in turn placed on top of two sticks of incense and heated by the stove fire from below. The cooked soybeans were then miraculously made into pills, and after taking these pills the girl finally gained the ability to speak. A Yulin man working in Beijing was told by the doctor that he only had three days to live, and he wanted to return home to die. His family members, before leaving for Beijing to fetch him, visited the fox. The fox gave them a bottle of water over which the medium recited incantations. Drinking from that bottle, the man not only survived the seven-day trip from Beijing to Yulin but also lived for another few months. “The specialty of the fox is that he can cure what the hospitals cannot,” I was repeatedly told by all of my informants. “But if the fox is so powerful in healing, why did he die of cancer himself?” I secretly asked Ying, who replied, “Oh, he died at the will of Buddha. He was too greedy. He charged too much for his services, so the Buddha decided not to grant him long life.” When I pressed for details on how much the medium charged, the answer varied. Some paid in kind, including wine, fruit, meat, grain, or cigarettes; some paid in cash, ranging from one to twenty-some yuan, depending on the varied financial situations and the severity of illnesses of the individual patrons. No matter how much they

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paid, Ying’s accusation of greed as well as my personal observation of Lei Wu’s house pointed to the fact that Wu’s career as a medium had been very profitable.

Official and Local Interpretations Written texts are an efficient means to achieve hegemonic control. The local people took great pride in the long history and the unique magnificence of the Stone Buddha that made the town so famous in the Yulin region. They repeated the same information contained in the government pamphlet, which was meant to establish the official status of the temple and to publicize the cultural value of the Stone Buddha beyond the regional level. Famous episodes in national history, such as Ming resistance to Mongol incursions, Li Zicheng’s resistance to Qing conquests, and cultural penetrations by Western missionaries following the Boxer Uprising, all loomed large in local history to highlight Boluo’s uniqueness. It is also significant that while the locals knew well of the connection between the Stone Buddha and the fox spirit, the pamphlet contained not a single word about the famous fox. According to my informants, it was a subject too “insignificant” to be included in a formal document promoting official cultural projects. In the more locally produced temple stele, the fox did come into public view. Nonetheless, the stele emphasized only his Buddhist connection and even gave him a Buddhist name, “The Old Master of Golden Chan.” The fox’s real activities through the medium were rather obscured, and spiritual healing was interpreted as a Buddhist effort to show benevolence and compassion in oral transmission. The spatial arrangement of the Buddha, the fox deity, and the medium in and near the temple also reflects a clear hierarchical structure conforming to official order. Just as their physical locations ranged from the prominent to the shadowy and from public to private, the religious practices they inspired varied, from officially sponsored public festivals celebrating Buddha’s birthday to politically suspicious medium activities based on personal favor and financial gain. Furthermore, in each individual setting there was a deliberate arrangement designed to conform to official and public symbols. While the main hall of the Stone Buddha was open to public worship, the small hexagonal room housing the fox shrine was kept locked and available only for private prayers. Within the hexagonal room, the fox’s physical image remained unseen, but motifs from Journey to the West rendered themes familiar to a much larger population, beyond the local level. In ad-

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dition, as the local lore claims that the temple served as a site for the four famous pilgrims to pass the night, the motifs add historical significance to the shrine. Even in the cave where the medium practiced spiritual healing, efforts were made to identify the fox’s power with officially sanctioned religious symbols: a well-preserved picture of Guanyin—the Buddhist goddess of benevolence and fertility—was hanging in the most prominent place on the wall. Such a layout is familiar, because we saw the same setting in the previous chapter, in the fox shrine set up by the female medium Liang whom Pu Songling and his literati friends visited in Shandong about three hundred years ago. Both the temple stele and oral transmissions hailed the official order as well. The Boluo fox was perceived as marginal in people’s everyday lives. He was a new immigrant trying to settle down in the local community and bring in additional power from outside. His power, however efficacious, was generally thought to be secondary to that of the prominent Stone Buddha. The local cadres in Yulin city whom I interviewed laughed at my interest in the fox spirit because for them, however long it had existed in the local tradition, the fox did not fit into the idealized picture of Yulin’s history and culture and was not something publicly commendable. In fact, the cadres mentioned more than once that the fox spirit was favored only by “peasants,” those who were generally imagined as backward, poorly educated, and ignorant. As my informants, especially those from the city, reiterated, they resorted to the fox only when modern medicine had failed them. Rural informants said the same and denounced spirit mediumship in public. Lei Shu, for example, while taking pride in his father’s achievement in saving many lives, emphasized his father’s unwillingness throughout his life to be a medium. In recounting the miracles performed by the fox, all my informants were well aware of the connection between the medium’s service and “feudal superstition,” a common official accusation against popular cults under both the Nationalist and the Communist regimes. They constantly reminded me in our conversations that, just as the temple stele had articulated, the fox and his medium acted only on behalf of the Buddha. They attributed the fox’s efficacy to the Buddha and claimed to be pious Buddhists. It is precisely in the reinforcement of the official order, however, that signs of divergence from it appear. The physical layout of the temple remained stable, but it also contained mobile and silent elements that constantly brought to the fore alternative interpretations of the Buddha and the fox. At the same time as the local people offered incense to the Buddha,

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they brought commemorating flags dedicated to the fox. The phrases of gratitude on the flags were often vague enough for outside observers to presume that they were directed to the Buddha. In contrast to the Stone Buddha, which formed the center of official attention and public celebrations, the fox shrine in the small, locked hexagonal room appeared sacred yet secluded and mysterious. In official documents and as it seemed to outsiders, the Stone Buddha’s cultural and historical value gave the temple its fame. For the local people, however, the fox’s power was unspoken, unspecified, but all the more self-evident. The temple had personal meanings for them: the fox was an alternative source of power that could positively affect their health, career, or family well-being. By maintaining a tacit knowledge of the fox and restricting it to an inner circle, the local people kept the fox medium cult alive among themselves, on the margins of the official symbol of the Stone Buddha. While loyalty and national esteem were promoted in the name of the Buddha through formal channels such as publications, opera performances, and public festivals, the fox’s magic power was advanced through informal means such as personal connections and casual discussion among friends and relatives. The personal, local, and practical features of the Boluo fox shrine are also demonstrated in the fact that the fox, acting as the Buddha’s guardian, does not interact with temple worshippers directly. Such communication between the fox and local supplicants take place outside the temple, in a cave. Off the highway and up the hill, the cave has little exposure to the outside world. Only through the guidance of the members of the inner circle, like Lei Shu, Yang, Fu, or Ying, would people from outside Boluo, such as Li, Ling, or me, be able to find this place. Also, since the fox is famous primarily for his healing power, the individual identity of the man who actually carried out the healing services, Lei Wu, was little known outside of Boluo. He remained an ordinary peasant throughout his life and never enjoyed any public attention except being a target of the Socialist Education Campaign in the late 1950s. Even Li and Ling, who had visited him in person from Yulin, could not remember his name. People used huxian to address both the fox and the medium. The inherent vagueness of the term allowed people to promote the status of the fox out of respect at certain times, and to despise and criticize the medium at others. In addition, the reciprocal relationship between the fox medium and his clientele was a much more practical one than that between the Buddha and the temple worshippers. Patients who came to the cave expected immediate and effectual responses from the fox, and in return they paid the medium the exact amount of money he

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requested. Here a pure financial transaction without serious devotion sufficed. The medium, therefore, may appear to be set apart from the official discourse about the Stone Buddha temple, but by most efficiently serving the practical needs of local supplicants, he made the fox in the temple more relevant to them. Religious associations organized around the worship of the Stone Buddha are also a potential challenge to official control. In term of their organizational scale and their commitment to a fixed set of doctrines, the religious associations in Boluo are poor cousins of religious sects elsewhere in China. They do, however, provide a community in which some conventional social barriers have broken down: peasants mingle with city dwellers, rich with poor, employed with unemployed, and officials with ordinary citizens. Since the stated purpose of these associations is to take care of temple affairs and to worship Buddha, the leadership has been in the hands of devout Buddhists without normal jobs and with free time to spend on temple affairs. They come from marginalized social categories, such as peasants (Lei Shu), retired workers (Yang), the disabled (Fu), and housewives (Ying). While it is hard to imagine such organizations posing a direct threat to state control at any level, they have opened up a new social space that allows some “insignificant” groups to play important roles otherwise unavailable in the officially designed social structure.

~! Local cults like that of the fox were generally labeled “illicit cults” in traditional China and “feudal superstition” in modern China, and they have suffered official suppression throughout Chinese history. Nonetheless, they have obstinately survived and even flourished to the present day. Although the time and social settings are different, many elements of the modern fox cult could be seen in late imperial China. First, the lack of mention in official documents does not necessarily mean that it never existed. Rather, the practices revolving around illicit cults and activities of spirit mediums in the past can be detected in informal and anecdotal writings derived from oral traditions. Second, settling a cult with improper content in temples dedicated to officially sanctioned gods exemplifies how people negotiated power within the official order. That such cults always physically occupied less important locations suggests that the design of Chinese temples mirrored the official structure of power. This was not prescribed or administered by state authorities and elite leadership, but by public ways of thinking. It was cre-

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ated and maintained by human actions: to whom among the diff erent idols displayed in a temple people dedicated their incense and offerings, and in which ways they made their supplications heard, generated both compliance with and resistance to the official structure. Third, the diverse relationships between the fox spirits and local cults reveal the extremely active role the Chinese people played, using gender terms, familial codes, bureaucratic order, and even corporate relations, in manipulating the power of the fox for different purposes. People conformed to the official order by deploying powers of gods with bureaucratic status to control the unruly fox; but they also accommodated the illicit qualities of the cult and pursued personal interests by linking foxes to prominent female cults and Buddhist deities beyond the control of the celestial bureaucracy. The changes of the illicit cults in relation to prominent gods and goddesses may therefore be taken as indicators of the changing perceptions of cultural boundaries between the private and public realms and between official ideology and unofficial practices. Through these changes, the cults generated powers of both political conformity and resistance.

6 Fox Spirits and Officials

“In order to govern the local people, one has to first govern their gods and spirits.” So claimed the retired Ming scholar-official Kang Hai (1475–1570) when compiling the local history of his native county, Wugong in northern Shaanxi. This belief was widely shared by rulers and local administrators in late imperial times. As the state attempted to monopolize the channels for communication with spirits and deities, it engaged in combat with and proscription of local cults to strengthen its link with the divine world, reinforce its legitimacy, and consolidate its control of society. But recent studies of Chinese history and religion reveal that state efforts to control local cults not only met the obstinate resistance of local people but also were influenced by the diverse personal agendas of officials. Acclaimed victories of the state in these campaigns might have been only temporary moments captured by written sources, while local cult practices silently prevailed. Ming-Qing anecdotal texts show that the fox’s multifarious presence in daily life attracted substantial attention from officials. This chapter explores how these texts, complemented by ethnographic records, highlight interactions among fox spirits, local people, and officials and reveal the changing perceptions of power at the local level. Officials reacted to fox spirits and cult practices in many different ways besides suppression and proscription.

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At certain times they allied themselves with local people, either seeking similar kinds of divine help from the foxes or supporting people’s fights against them. At other times the officials stood against the locals, restraining the fox’s power in an attempt to control unrest and remove possible threats to their office. Added to this complex picture was the active role of the people: they willingly resorted to official power to ward off evil spirits, but they also relied on the divine force of the fox to resist control and to circumscribe the abuse of official power.

Foxes as Social Threats Foxes as Courtesans, Prostitutes, and Entertainers The early association of the fox with the danger of uncontrolled female sexuality persisted into the Ming and Qing. Many stories reiterate that the innate connection between foxes and prostitutes was based on the negative connotation of yin as lechery or lewdness and was established not only metaphorically but also in a very real sense. An eighteenth-century story talks about a spiritual journey of a prostitute in a Datong (Shanxi) brothel, during which she witnessed prostitutes and procurers being punished in hell for lechery and greed, respectively. Another story interprets sexual intercourse between man and woman as a battle, and states that two prostitutes were so good at it that they killed a Daoist priest, who was said to be a master as well. Both the prostitutes and the priest were in fact foxes. Some Qing authors asserted that foxes and prostitutes were karmic reincarnations of each other. Pu Songling’s claim that “all prostitutes are foxes” was echoed by a late Qing author: “Lecherous humans are prostitutes, and lecherous nonhumans are foxes.” The link became so pervasive in popular perception that the term “nine-tailed fox” became the nickname of the main character in a vernacular novel about Shanghai courtesans and prostitutes.  Some unlicensed prostitutes even claimed that they were foxes so that they could swindle their customers out of huge amounts of money; they would then disappear overnight. According to Ji Yun, this practice was very common, at least in the capital. Fascination with as well as fear of the floating class of popular entertainers, who were often conflated with prostitutes and courtesans in public opinion, made Ming-Qing people link them to foxes as well. An eighteenthcentury story from Shandong recounts that a profligate son of a rich family spent his leisure time in brothels. One day he saw two young singing girls,

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led by an old woman, performing in the market. The girls appeared to him as rare beauties with astounding voices. He immediately became infatuated with them, only to find out later that all three women were foxes who had been roaming eastern Shandong, earning a living from singing. In another story, a fox, an old, gray-haired man, arranged for his six beautiful daughters to stage an opera performance for three consecutive days during the intermission of a flood prevention project in Lanyi, Henan. He even invited an official who supervised the project to watch. Many entertainers during the Ming and Qing made their living by touring villages and towns, performing local operas, martial arts, and acrobatics. These men and women constituted an indispensable part of village life, but were always marginal: they lacked solid community ties and were despised and suspected by the law. Qing law strictly prohibited popular drama that could promote illicit content and banditry. Plays performed at religious festivals were also forbidden. Entertainers, including traveling acrobats and martial arts performers, were proscribed and persecuted. Local officials often issued proclamations forbidding theatrical performances within their jurisdictions. In their eyes, some of the entertainers were masters of magical arts and therefore either joined or led heterodox sects and even rebellions. The 1774 Wang Lun rebellion, for example, attracted many traveling actresses. Wang Lun’s mistress and active supporter, Wu Sanniang, was said to be skilled at boxing, tightrope walking, and acrobatics and traveled extensively in Shandong, Henan, and Hubei as a street performer. Such an image was associated with fox women. According to a Ming account from Linqing, Shandong, a young man met a strange woman and saved her from a dog’s attack. The woman followed him home and offered herself to him. Several months later she left him, saying that she was in fact a fox. One day the next year, the man saw this woman again, performing tightrope walking in a market in Linqing. She greeted him, gave him some money, and departed forever. Popular entertainers, prostitutes, and brothel owners in north China and Manchuria also routinely set up special altars to foxes in secret rooms and worshipped them as patron deities. Such fox shrines featured either a picture of the fox couple, Grandpa and Granny Hu the Third, or a simple tablet with their names written on it. The prostitutes secretly prayed to the foxes at night, asking for enchanting sexual arts to attract customers. When they had gained a customer, they would make offerings to the shrine the next day. During the New Year celebration and on the first and fifteenth of every month, these women would rush to local temples of the god of wealth and offer large bundles of incense.

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Foxes as Wanderers Compared to the Jiangnan region, north China was poor and commercially underdeveloped. The area was vulnerable to natural disasters due to its harsh climate, vast, flat topography, and lack of irrigation systems. Most peasants were landless and worked as hired laborers who usually migrated from one place to another looking for employment. Famines, floods, droughts, bandit ravages, or simply the harshness of the physical environment frequently drove poor families out of their home villages, and to survive they took to the road to beg. Migration and mobility became one of the most important social issues in north China, particularly in Hebei and Shandong. Wanderers, including beggars, hired laborers, popular entertainment troupes, and people of obscure origins and without ties to land, family, or community, were perceived as a source of social disturbance. They appeared hard to control and easily became objects of suspicion in times of political unrest and collective panic. Foxes assume the role of wanderer in many Ming-Qing stories. A local man of Linqing, Shandong, for example, met a stranger one late afternoon. The stranger claimed that he was a hired laborer and was looking for work. Only when he followed the man home and became drunk did the local man find out that he was in fact a fox. A widow in Cangzhou, Hebei, felt sympathy for two famine refugees, a father and his little daughter. They looked so hungry and exhausted that they could barely walk. She accepted the father’s request and bought the girl to be her child daughter-in-law. Years later, when the woman was on her deathbed, the daughter confessed to her, “I am a fox. Because you have always been a virtuous woman, I came to your family to seek refuge from my predestined punishment of thunderbolts.” Foxes appeared as migrants in the eyes of locals. One fox in Beijing told his neighbor that he was originally from Yunnan. Another fox who had just moved to Xinchang, Zhejiang said her hometown was Henan. In many Qing stories, foxes claimed that they had come from Shanxi and Shaanxi. A local man of Boxing, Shandong, for example, began a secret affair with a “girl who ran away from home.” Later the girl told him that she was a fox from central Shaanxi. A male fox named Sichao came to a family in Dongguang, Hebei and asked the family head to let him make a home in the haystack in the backyard. He said that his family had been living in Shaanxi for generations, but now he had to flee from the war and chaos there. Another fox came to settle in Wei county, Shandong, and explained: “I can no longer live in central Shaanxi, because it will soon fall into turmoil.” Rebellions

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and wars frequently struck Shaanxi during the late Ming and early Qing. Refugees who flooded eastward became strangers in the local communities of Shandong and Hebei, where fox worship and fox lore thrived, and they might have sometimes been seen as fox spirits.

Foxes as Outlaws Foxes troubled officials because they were associated with lawbreaking. Known for their magical abilities to make objects mysteriously disappear and to transport things from one household to another, foxes were often accused of theft, a petty crime common in the countryside. In one Qing story, an old guard captured a fox and asked it to bring him wealth. Initially the fox refused, on the grounds that the old man was fated to have no wealth. But the old man threatened to kill it, so the fox agreed to get him a fur coat as requested, but warned him that he would later be punished for the coat and then rewarded with some money. Next day the old man indeed received a fur coat and gladly wore it, but soon yamen constables came to arrest him. It turned out that on the very same day, a fur coat was lost at the county magistrate’s home. The old man was flogged. He pleaded innocence, telling the fox story to the magistrate. Since the lock on the chest that had contained the coat and other precious stuff within remained intact, the magistrate was convinced that the fox was the actual thief. He released the man and compensated him with 10,000 qian, which was the exact amount of money the fox had predicted. Concubines and maids who illegally ran away from their husbands and masters would sometimes be viewed as foxes too. One story tells that a young woman came to a village and asked to stay for one night at the house of an old woman, who declined her request for fear of harboring a runaway. The young woman identified herself as a certain Liu’s daughter-in-law from a neighboring village, and she was finally permitted to stay. But when the old woman went to borrow matches from a neighbor, she returned to find that the young woman had disappeared. On the same day in another village, a young woman made the same request of another old woman and her son, and also identified herself as Liu’s daughter-in-law. Instead of housing her, the old woman and the son escorted her home. But days later, they found out from Liu that his daughter-in-law had never left home that day. People concluded that the woman might be a fox trying to bewitch a man, but she was not given an opportunity.

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Foxes were also associated with other social problems that jangled officials’ nerves. In one story a fox visited a family and helped the husband repay his gambling debts. Another story recounts that a fox used his magic to convey wealth to help a couple who loved gambling. At one point, the fox even gambled for them. Like some villagers who joined long-standing fights with neighboring villages, foxes engaged in bloody family feuds. Ji Yun once recorded that a servant witnessed a fight between two fox families, one from his own village and the other from the “North Village.” Bows, arrows, and axes were used, and each family had captured a woman from the other as a hostage. Another anecdote by Pu Songling reveals how connections were drawn between foxes and bandits, who were both rampant in Shandong: During the Shunzhi reign (1644–1661), in the counties of Teng and Yi, seven out of every ten people were bandits, and the officials did not dare arrest them all. Later, when they surrendered to the government, the magistrates classified them separately as “bandit households (daohu).” Whenever there was a conflict between these households and the good local people, the magistrates used to slant their decisions in favor of the rebels, fearing that otherwise they might rebel again. So it came about that litigants would falsely claim to be “bandit households,” and their opponents would struggle to prove the claim invalid: both claims would have to be laid out, and before one could decide the rights and wrongs of the case, one had to decide if the claim to be a bandit was true or false; back and forth went the arguments and counterarguments, and much time was spent checking out the registries. It happened that in one of the magistrate’s yamens there were a great many fox spirits, and since they bewitched the magistrate’s daughter, he sent for a man of arts (shushi). The latter, by means of a spell, trapped the fox spirits in a bottle, which he was about to throw into the fire. At that point one of the foxes in the bottle shouted out: “But I am from a bandit household.” None of those who heard this could hold back his laughter.

The social threat of the foxes also lay in their close connection with religious specialists, including spirit mediums, local or itinerant ritual masters, and professional Daoist and Buddhist priests. These people claimed exorcistic power and competed with state agents in communicating with the divine world. They were known for their powers to foretell the future, to convey things through space, and most of all, to command life forces with magic, and therefore in the popular mind they were easily associated with

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what Philip Kuhn has termed “sorcerers.” And foxes were conventionally considered sorcerers’ accomplices and were blamed for causing collective fear via sorcery as early as the Six Dynasties (chapter 1). Similar incidents happened during the Ming and Qing. In 1512, for instance, flying objects in the shape of foxes were reported to enter houses in Hebei and Shanxi. They used their needle-like paws to scratch people, especially children. In 1557, fox demons were said to haunt people in the Jiangsu area in similar ways: they attacked after sunset, suffocating them or scratching their faces. Panics occurred again in the same region in 1572, 1597, 1657, and at least once during Emperor Kangxi’s reign (1662–1722). As one source on the 1557 case reveals, traveling Daoists in southern Jiangsu performed rites and recited incantations to animate paper manikins of foxes, along with other objects. They released them in the night and summoned them back before dawn. Flying foxes manipulated by exorcists appeared to be threats to local communities and sparked collective fears of losing souls and lives. More important, as both ter Haar and Kuhn have shown, they would alert the state apparatus at every level, from the county yamen to the imperial palace, to the social disorder and to the more serious sedition they could induce. Ming and Qing law reveals that the state feared the power of religious specialists to invoke heterodox gods and form sects (chapter 4). The fox’s magic power was often associated with heterodox practices and rebellions. Zhu Ermei (?–1682), for example, was a Daoist priest who had won extreme prestige and imperial favors for his magic and fortune-telling techniques during Emperor Kangxi’s reign (1662–1722). In 1682, however, when some officials at court indicted him on the grounds that he preached heresy and recruited members to organize heterodox groups, he was executed. Several later Qing sources elaborated that his magic powers in fact came from his wife, who was said to be a fox. In 1622, a so-called White Lotus uprising by a millenarian sect broke out in Shandong. Three local religious preachers, Wang Sen, his son Wang Haoxian, and his disciple Xu Hongru, were prosecuted. Official summaries of Wang Sen’s confessions in 1595, when he was arrested for organizing heterodox groups, attributed his initial success to a fox spirit, who first taught him the magical arts of obtaining riches. Later Wang used the fragrance emitted from the fox’s tail to spread his teachings. Those who smelled the fragrance became intoxicated and joined his sect, which was thus called the Teaching of Smelling the Fragrance (wenxiang jiao) or the Teaching of Burning Incense (fenxiang jiao). It spread to Beijing, Hebei, Shandong, Henan, Shanxi, Shaanxi, and Sichuan and attracted more than two million

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followers. Barend ter Haar has compared several versions of the offi cial records and found that in later versions the original elements of Wang Sen’s teaching, such as incense burning and transmitting, a legitimizing process of religious proselytizing, were completely removed. Instead, the role of the fox was featured in order to emphasize the magic, therefore the heterodox, nature of the sect. This emphasis persisted in literati records throughout late imperial times. Many stories picture the fox, in the form of religious specialist, as an instigator of rebellions. A young scholar Li from Caozhou, Shandong, for example, killed a family of foxes who rented a house from him. Later he met a fortune-teller, who predicted that he would be the next emperor. Li believed him and soon led an uprising, which ended with the execution of his whole family. Before his death he realized that the fortune-teller was in fact an old fox seeking revenge. In 1805, another man named Gao from Ganquan, Shaanxi ruthlessly killed dozens of foxes in a hunt. Soon after, two beautiful women approached him, saying that they were celestial maidens sent by the Supreme Emperor to help him obtain the throne. Convinced by their magic of “turning beans into soldiers and touching stones into gold,” Gao made the two women his “imperial” concubines and rebelled. He was immediately captured by the magistrate. The two women, who were believed to be avenging foxes, disappeared.

Controlling Foxes, Controlling Local Society For officials, controlling foxes was inseparable from controlling all different kinds of local forces. The rivalry between officials and unruly spirits represented contending powers at the local level. An eighteenth-century story illustrates this point well: at the wedding of the daughter of the Jin family, two brides appeared, looking exactly the same. Even the parents could not distinguish which was the real one. They were then brought to the judgment of Magistrate Liu, who investigated both girls and found no inconsistency in their testimonies. Later he summoned the girls again, telling them, “I am going to build a marriage bridge here. The one who can cross it will be allowed to get married, and the one who cannot will be ordered to leave.” He then made a bridge with a long piece of white cloth connecting the main gate of his office to the magistrate’s seat and asked the two girls to walk on it. One girl cried and said she was not able to, and the other happily crossed the bridge. Liu immediately called the second girl in front of him, knocked her over with the official seal, and captured her in a net. Only a fox could

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walk on something as light as a piece of cloth. The case was closed and Liu was promoted. Later on, a tea merchant claimed that he was followed by bandits and went to seek protection from two brothers, both military degree-holders. In the night the bandits indeed came; four were killed by the brothers and three escaped. Next morning the brothers woke up the merchant and asked him to report to the county court. Soon after the merchant left, the constables came and arrested the two brothers. The merchant was actually in league with the bandits and accused the brothers of intending to kill him for his money. Liu interrogated the brothers, who requested him to release at least one of them on bail so that their family would be well protected. Liu did not grant their request. It was too late to release either of them when he found out later that the bandits had returned to the brothers’ home and killed all of their families. The magistrate was able to cleverly capture a fox spirit who stirred up a civil lawsuit, but when hearing the murder case, he fell into the trap of local bandits. It is no wonder then that he compared capricious foxes with unruly locals and deeply sighed: “Alas! It is easy to govern the demonic spirits, but it is difficult to govern the people!” County magistrates and prefects were representatives of the state at the local level, and they were supposed to be “officials in intimate contact with the people (qinmin zhiguan).” But throughout the Ming and Qing, official control of local society was rather limited. Powerful rulers were sometimes so concerned with the corruption and other forms of abuse of official power that they sought to significantly reduce the role of their local administrators. Ming Taizu (r. 1368–1398), for example, issued orders forbidding officials to leave their offices and go to villages to “vex the people.” Emperor Qianlong (r. 1736–1795), upon learning the news of Wang Lun’s rebellion, first investigated whether the district magistrate’s greed, cruelty, or inability to handle public business had instigated it. The “law of avoidance” prohibited officials from serving in their home provinces, and no one was permitted to occupy the same post longer than three years. Officials, therefore, were always strangers in their jurisdictions; oftentimes they did not even understand the local dialect. In governing, they had to reply on the cooperation of many different local forces, and from time to time, as state and local or public and private interests clashed, they ran into conflicts with elites, village bullies, yamen runners and clerks, impoverished and rough-tempered peasants, transients and migrants, sectarians, and bandits. To combat unlawful conduct, if they were willing to do so at all, they sometimes had to risk

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their careers and lives. Every single aspect of governing, such as collecting taxes, administering litigation, and rectifying moral and religious customs, required not only discipline and integrity but also courage, wisdom, and skill in negotiation. Stories about relationships between fox spirits and officials reveal the cooperation, conflicts, and compromises between officials and local society.

Secrecy and Promptness: Ming- Qing Official Exorcism and Its Limits Officials often acquired expertise in exorcistic rites and invoked the powers of celestial bureaucrats for help. One sixteenth-century story from Shandong reports that a fox sexually possessed the wife of a commoner, who tried in vain to drive the evil spirit out of the household and appealed to the magistrate for justice. The magistrate filed a complaint with the City God on the husband’s behalf. In order to avoid being dragged into a lawsuit, the fox left the woman. Another Ming story describes a “demonic fox” dwelling in a frontier county of northern Hebei. It “raped women, stole property, and harassed yamen offices.” Daoist exorcists could not control it. The newly arrived military commander organized soldiers to hunt the fox, but to no avail. He then filed complaints at both the temple of Zhenwu and the temple of Guandi. Official warnings were posted on the doors of the families whose women were afflicted by the fox: “If you [the fox] do not leave the area at once and continue to commit crimes, I will track you down to your lair and burn all your family to death. Any god who accepts our offerings but fails to assist me will also be sued in front of the Supreme Emperor (the god Zhenwu) for delinquency on duty.” The fox finally left the area. In these cases foxes were connected with adultery, outlaws, theft, and other forms of disturbance that challenged the normal order in local society. Ordinary people might have fallen victim to abuses by powerful local elites or bullies as well as by the evil foxes, and officials remained as a counterbalancing authority they could resort to. Despite deployment of different kinds of exorcism in countless MingQing records, official power seems to have been weak. The achievements of Wang Sizong and Hu Yan’gao in Song and Jin times (chapter 1) were eulogized in various Ming-Qing sources, ranging from encyclopedic collections to local histories, but they were rare cases, and official campaigns as shattering as Wang’s and Hu’s hardly ever surfaced during the Ming and Qing. In very few Qing cases did people voluntarily call for officials to save them

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as in the above two Ming stories, and even then, the power of office usually provided very little, if any, help. A village family in Yucheng county (in eastern Henan), for example, was afflicted with a fox. Having failed to exorcise it, they resorted to the county magistrate Zhou, who subsequently filed a complaint with the City God on their behalf. But the haunting only intensified, and they heard the fox shout to them from the air: “The City God can do nothing to me!” Zhou felt helpless and gave up: “Even the City God cannot subdue the fox, let alone me.” It was not until later, when a personal friend of Zhou instructed the family to follow the exorcism measure used by a local gentry family, that the fox finally disappeared. A scholar family in Tai’an, Shandong was also haunted by two foxes. One of them even forced a homosexual relationship upon the young son. The family asked the City God and Guandi for help, but to no avail. They then appealed to the county magistrate, who decided to exercise the law. But just as he had gathered all yamen runners in front of the office to open the trial, a rock was thrown from the air and hit his head. The trial was aborted. But the story does not end there. One day the young son accidentally learned from the drunken fox that it was most afraid to be thrown in prison. He secretly passed the message to his father, who then tied him up (the haunting fox presumably possessed the body of the son) and sent him to prison. The fox no longer came. The recorder of the story concluded: “The prison guards are so powerful that even someone as demonic as the fox has to flee from them.” In both cases above, the power of the county magistrate was easily crushed by insolent foxes, and the power of local gentry and ferocious yamen prison guards prevailed instead. Even when officials claimed victory over fox demons, the exorcising power was rarely derived from the office alone, but depended more on individual character. For example, an old village woman in Feicheng (Shandong) worshipped a fox and hung a picture of an old gray-haired man on the domestic shrine. When the son of the county magistrate fell ill, the magistrate’s wife sought a cure from the fox. The fox wrote down the prescription with confidence, but after taking his pills, the son died. The enraged magistrate arrested the woman and ordered her thrown in jail. “The fox fled, and the old woman soon died.” The failure of a fox medium to perform cures, instead of the illicit nature of the fox cult itself, triggered the offi cial’s anger and his suppression of the cult. Wisdom, strategy, and solid local support were more important factors than official power when officials confronted fox demons. An eighteenthcentury anecdote illustrates this well. A gentry family Lu in Wenshang

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county, Shandong was haunted by a fox. Lu was told that only by establishing a shrine, making daily offerings of chicken and wine, and marrying his daughter to the fox could he stop the haunting. Lu did not obey and went directly to sue at the temple of the City God. That night the City God did come, but he turned out to be a fake, impersonated by the very fox that haunted them. Lu’s daughter was possessed and became seriously ill. The next day the exhausted Lu went to a routine gentry meeting hosted by the magistrate and told the host what had happened. The magistrate pretended to be really angry with him: “How dare you fight with the Great Xian? What is wrong with the Great Xian wanting to marry your daughter? Too bad that she is now ill and cannot consummate the marriage in these two days. Go home quickly, clean an upper-floor room, establish a tablet for the Great Xian, and make your offerings of wine and meat every day! When your daughter is recovered, choose a lucky day to marry her out!” He then winked at Lu and lowered his voice: “Trust me. I am not a fool.” Lu returned home and did as the magistrate said. The fox was very happy. The magistrate cleaned himself and fasted that night. He closed the yamen office the next morning and kept secret what he did the whole day. In the evening he called upon the constables, saying they must go to the west village to capture bandits. On their way, they stopped at the City God temple. He took out a complaint and burned it in front of the god. Then, without telling the constables where he was going, he immediately headed to Lu’s house. He rushed to the fox shrine as soon as he got in, threw the tablet on the floor, and beat the tablet harshly with a staff. He then announced: “I arrest the fox by the power of the [City] God.” The tablet was burned and smelled of fox fur. The magistrate returned to the temple to thank the City God, and swore before the god that “all foxes in the county will be expelled in three months so that the whole county will be in peace.” Lu and other gentry families in his jurisdiction flocked to the yamen to congratulate and thank him. By suing the fox at the temple of the City God, Lu tried to deploy official power in a normal fashion. However, his failure and the magistrate’s initial accommodation of the fox suggest that such power, in both this and the other world, was weak against the reckless fox. The magistrate seemed to understand his limits from the outset, and in subduing the fox he did not openly mobilize his resources. It is no coincidence that Lu’s story is an interesting parallel to Huang Liuhong’s experience capturing a well-connected bandit leader in Tancheng county. Huang served as magistrate in Tancheng in the late seventeenth century. When recording his career achievements later in his life, he re-

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vealed that his success in this particular effort was due to two magic words: secrecy and promptness. In launching the chase, he had to summon the victims and a particular constable, whom he believed to be the only trustworthy member of the yamen staff, during the night when nobody else was in the office. They carefully designed a plan and kept it secret from all the other yamen staff and the garrison commander, who was reportedly a close friend of the bandit leader. The magistrate then acted promptly, leading in person the constables and garrison soldiers to the bandit’s lair without letting them know where they were heading and therefore leaving no time for any of them to inform the bandit in advance. The bandits were attacked by surprise, and the leader was finally captured. While Huang took great pride in his strategies to gain victory, his success shows clearly how little a magistrate could rely on the formal official structure to exercise his rightful power. Even within the magistrate’s office, he was usually surrounded by people whose interests and loyalty were so closely tied up in local networks that they were more his enemies than his assistants. We see striking similarities in the strategies that both magistrates shrewdly employed and the responses they received from the locals. “Secrecy and promptness,” the two magic words that contributed to Huang Liuhong’s victory over bandits, also were essential in the Wenshang county magistrate’s exorcism of fox demons. Official power did sometimes drive foxes away, but either without the officials’ knowledge or against their wishes. Foxes took the initiative to flee from high secular authorities, especially when those authorities had intended to seek help from the spirits. During the Shunzhi (1664–1661) reign, for example, a medium famous for fortune-telling failed when an Attendant Censor visited him. He explained that his patron deity, the fox, suddenly fled when the man came, because the official had great potential to be a Grand Councilor in the future. An armored deity was protecting the official and the fox did not dare to see him. Two Qing stories collected by Li Weitsu further illustrate how ordinary people imagined the power relationship between fox spirits and officials. In one story a high-ranking official learned about the reputation of a spirit and made a special trip to its shrine, hoping to pray for a cure for his sick mother. When he arrived, he was wearing his official uniform and rode in a sedan chair—a symbol of his official status. Before he could make his obeisance to the spirit, a wind blew over the altar table and collapsed the incense burner and candlesticks, and an animal rushed out. In the second story, a village medium became very famous for his fox deity’s efficacy and attracted people from near and far. But when an

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imperial prince heard of it and traveled from Beijing to pay his visit, the fox ran away from the medium’s house and never came back. The high-ranking official and the imperial prince approached fox shrines out of personal concerns, but in the eyes of the villagers among whom these stories were circulated, the fox deity was a type of divine power serving only the lower classes. In recognizing the fox’s limitations against secular authorities, people identified its power with their own. They accepted the established social order and acknowledged their humble status in it. However, by refusing to serve higher authorities, the fox also represented power beyond the control of the state. Official exorcism here may be taken as a sign of passive resistance by the fox spirits as well as by the people who were “eligible” to receive their services.

Foxes in and out of Yamen Offices Foxes in Yamen Offices: Enemy or Friend The yamen at the county and prefectural levels was the administrative center of local society. It was a huge compound, comprised of many separate quarters. In addition to the offices reserved for presiding officials and their assistants and clerks, it included a granary, a shrine to the earth god, a prison, guest houses, kitchens, storage rooms, archive rooms, and the private living quarters of the official’s family, private secretaries, and servants as well as of the runners, clerks, and jail wardens. Official buildings, especially the yamen, seem to have been favorite places for foxes either to burrow homes or to haunt. The voluminous Ming-Qing anecdotal writings frequently contain stories opening with the following lines: During the early Kangxi reign (1662–1722), foxes haunted the yamen offices held by prefect Guo Yanzuo. Mr. Qiu from Zhucheng (in Shandong) assumed the office of Zunhua (Hebei) circuit, and foxes had populated the yamen for years. The offices and living quarters of assistant prefect Zhu in Fenzhou (in Shanxi) had many foxes. Foxes and ghosts thrived in the yamen of Zhending prefecture (Hebei).

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Foxes populated the censorate offices of Runing prefecture (Henan). Every year when the offices were renovated, the foxes would go out to haunt the residents of the city. After the renovation was done, they would come back. Visiting educational officials [who came to stay in the official residences] were often disturbed. Three rooms in the back of the yamen in Jizhou prefecture (Hebei, near Beijing) are always sealed. It is said that the rooms are called “Xian’s Halls (xianren tang)” and occupied by foxes. The Wanquan county (northern Hebei) yamen also housed foxes. The Yijun county yamen in Shaanxi provinces had always had foxes.

Extensive invasions by foxes of yamen compounds mirrored real and perceived local threats to the presiding official’s power. Some foxes simply threw rocks and besmirched furniture and utensils, causing annoyance and minor damage to yamen properties. Others challenged official power more directly and seriously. A regional inspector, for example, came to Anqing (Anhui) to inspect local affairs. Soon after he arrived, a beautiful young woman claiming to be his close relative visited him. The inspector dallied with the woman day after day without doing any official business and would not listen to the prefect’s repeated warning about a fox spirit that had been living in the office compound. The prefect then sent a petition to the Celestial Master asking for help, but the petition was lost in transit and later appeared at the inspector’s office instead. Worse than that, the prefect soon found that his official seal, an important symbol of his office, had been stolen. Not until he pleaded to make peace with the fox was it returned. The loss of the seal shows that the prefect’s power was seriously circumscribed and even endangered when the local fox colluded with a superior official under the pretext of a nepotistic relationship. Officials had to concede some space within the yamen quarters to the foxes, and separate rooms were usually sealed and reserved for them. Breaking into the sacred space without paying due respect to the resident foxes would make the officials intruders on the spirits’ terrain and cause endless trouble. A dauntless assistant prefect once ventured to convert such a sealed room into part of his residence. Disturbances immediately followed. First, 2,000 qian of silver money that he had saved mysteriously disappeared. Then a huge rock dropped into his bedroom while his wife was sitting next

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to the window, but the window frame and the screen remained intact. Several days later, a haystack in his backyard caught fire, and soon the whole yard was burned. Next, when all his family members gathered for dinner, bedrooms caught fire too. The assistant prefect finally moved his family out of the room, prepared offerings, and worshipped the foxes. Peace soon returned. Theft, harassment, and arson in residences troubled local security, and these were common tricks played by foxes. They would not cost the officials’ life or office, but might symbolize their uneasiness in assuming authority in a new environment. Boltz provides a Song example, in which an official who refused to pay respects at a local shrine saw both his prefectural headquarters and his home burned down in a few days. It was said that the fires were expressions of the spirit’s anger. As Boltz concludes, the official “paid dearly for his arrogance, but he was the victim of human, not holy wrath.” Just as they treated foxes within the yamen carefully, officials perhaps had to cultivate delicate relationships with clerks, runners, and other menials whose local connections could critically affect their well-being and even their careers. To different extents, they might also need to give way to various groups of local elite, bullies, and other unruly forces. Crossing their subordinates and offending these local groups, like violating the sealed space of the foxes, might put their lives and careers at great risk. Many stories warned officials of the danger of killing foxes and destroying fox shrines in yamen offices. Pu Songling recorded a Qing campaign against foxes similar to that launched by Wang Sizong during the early Song, but with the opposite ending. Mr. Qiu, the new prefect of Zunhua, was greatly offended when he found that foxes made homes within his yamen and received offerings from his predecessors. Although the foxes had decided to concede to his anger and informed him that they would move out within three days, Mr. Qiu called in soldiers and bombarded their residence anyway. As the building collapsed and blood and flesh splattered all over the place, a column of white smoke flew to the sky, and people exclaimed, “One fox got away!” The yamen offices regained peace. Two years later, Mr. Qiu, seeking opportunities for promotion, sent one of his henchmen to the capital with a certain amount of silver money. The man did not obtain the promotion and hid the money under the house of a yamen runner. Soon an old man appealed to Qiu’s superiors, accusing Qiu of having wrongfully killed his wife and embezzled military salaries to use as a bribe for his own promotion. He led the investigators to the yamen runner’s house to excavate the silver money, which all bore the mark of an official seal. Qiu was

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arrested, and the old man vanished. People concluded that the old man was in fact the surviving fox. In refusing to make compromises with resident foxes, some officials might suffer more serious consequences than simply having their careers terminated. One story records that at midnight on the fifth day of the third month in 1870, a man sneaked into the residence of Yan Sizhong, the magistrate of Sheng county of Zhejiang province, and brutally murdered Yan and several of his family members. With knife in hand and blood all over his clothes, the murderer wandered the streets and continued to attack anyone who came his way. When arrested and interrogated, however, the man appeared to have had lost his mind and knew nothing about what he had done. He was finally put to death. The murder of the magistrate was interpreted as overdue revenge by foxes whom Yan’s father had killed at his post in Boshan county of Shandong years before. Back then, some foxes frequently visited certain empty rooms in his compound, and Yan’s father secretly ordered servants and hunters to trace the foxes to their den and planned to eliminate them all at once. An old man appeared to Yan’s mother in a dream and warned her of the disastrous consequences of her husband’s intentions. Despite her persistent objections, Yan’s father blew up the den and killed dozens of foxes. According to the people in Sheng county, the foxes, through the madman, finally took their revenge upon his son, who was also a magistrate. Resident foxes sometimes punished officials who violated local customs or performed illegal acts. According to the time-honored custom of Mengyin county in Shandong, for example, every magistrate was supposed to publicly announce the exact beginning and ending dates of the hunting season, so that “the foxes would have time to hide themselves and leave the old, the sick, and those who had committed capital crimes among them to be hunted.” This way the annual supply of fox furs could support the hunters’ livelihood without allowing them to glean excessive profits. When a magistrate known for his craving for fur assumed office, he accepted bribes from the greedy hunters and intentionally postponed the announcement. As a result, foxes of all ages and fur types became easy prey, and both the hunters and the magistrate reaped staggering profits. Before the magistrate had time to fully enjoy his gains, however, an old gray-haired man visited him, saying, “I am the patriarch of foxes. A magistrate should follow the old rules. How dare you bend the law and connive with the hunters to serve your private interests? Many of my descendants have died because of you, and I will make you pay the price!” Several days later the magistrate’s son

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died; this was followed by the death of the magistrate’s father, which forced the official to leave his post for three years of mourning service. Some said that the patriarch of foxes lived in the yamen, and he was often spotted in the form of an ordinary and simple countryman. Given the danger of destroying fox shrines, foxes disturbing yamen offices needed to be propitiated with great care. Many officials, upon taking office, chose to make offerings to foxes in exchange for future peace rather than drive the foxes away with force. Early and mid-Qing sources often link fox shrines set up by officials to the actual presence of biological foxes in the yamen, and most of these shrines appeared in Hebei and Shandong, where local fox worship flourished. In addition, the shrines were erected sporadically and mainly as an expedient gesture to propitiate foxes already causing disturbances. Pu Songling once reported that swarms of foxes wandered the yamen of Zunhua prefecture (northern Hebei) and took up residence in one of the rear buildings. They frequently sneaked out to haunt people, and ran even wilder when being exorcised. “Those who take up office here cannot but make sacrifices and pray to the foxes, and no one dares to offend them.” In some places, sporadic worship grew into customary observances. In Runing prefecture (Hebei), foxes created immense trouble for the educational officials who stayed in the official residence. “They were appeased only after a presiding official had made offerings to them.” Thereafter, it became customary for new officials to do the same. In the magistrate office of Yijun county, Shaanxi, a wooden tablet was erected for the resident foxes, and “whenever a new magistrate arrives, he must follow the rule and pay due respect to the tablet.” Foxes were also recorded to have long taken over the upper floor of an office building in central Hebei and performed magical arts during Emperor Qianlong’s reign (1736–1795). Every single official who visited the building had to make a sacrifice to the foxes. Even then the spirits were not satisfied. When He Yucheng, a river patrol censor, toured there, the foxes threw rocks at the visitors and asked He to commission pictures of them to be placed in the shrines: female foxes were painted as Tang maidens and male foxes as celestial bureaucrats. Officials could benefit by befriending the resident foxes. Some Six Dynasties stories show that foxes used their divine foresight to help officials render wise judgments on difficult legal cases and administer local affairs. In Ming-Qing stories too, officials tried to form alliances with fox spirits. They deployed the foxes’ magic powers to serve both official and personal purposes. The prefect of Jizhou, Zeng, set up a separate room for a fox and

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carefully maintained it. Every night he went into the room to talk to the fox, who took the form of an old, gray-haired man, and from time to time the fox visited his bedroom as well. Through these night talks, the fox revealed to Zeng many hidden crimes and problems in his jurisdiction, and Zeng earned a good reputation for insightful judgment. An assistant prefect in Zhangde, Henan paid regular respects to a fox in his yamen quarters. Again, the fox revealed himself as an old man. Whenever the assistant prefect was troubled by difficult legal cases, he would pray to the fox. “Each time, the fox’s words would turn out to be exactly right.” A regional inspector touring Shandong used a female fox’s divine vision to evaluate the performance of local officials fairly and wisely. In these cases, foxes served as useful informants for the newly commissioned officials to penetrate deep into local society and to make fully informed decisions about local affairs. More often than not, however, officials looked for personal gain from alliances with fox spirits. In the above two stories, Zeng relied on the fox’s magic to ship 1,000 dan of rice that he had accumulated during his term in Jizhou prefecture (in Hebei) to his home in Beijing. Upon his retirement, the Shandong inspector brought the female fox with him to his hometown in Fujian and made her his concubine. Other stories also portrayed fox spirits satisfying officials’ personal needs rather than enhancing their official power. A magistrate in Weixian (Hebei) befriended a fox only to drink and talk about historical beauties every night. Assistant prefect Zhu in Fenzhou (Shanxi) took full advantage of the resident foxes in his yamen quarters: not only did he carry on a secret affair with a beautiful fox woman, but he also relied on her divine foresight to gain advance notice of both his career promotions and family tragedies. Sometimes an official’s loyalty to friendships with foxes might lend him additional power to counter scrutiny and punishment by his superiors. In a nineteenth-century story, an old man visited the temporary residence of a Shanxi county magistrate when the city walls and battlements were undergoing renovation. The old man said, “To tell you the truth, I am not a human. I am a fox, and I have been living under the city walls. I would like to borrow a place to stay in your residence and will leave upon the completion of the renovation.” Before the magistrate granted the request, the old man already had his family members moved. News soon spread, and the magistrate was summoned by the angry provincial governor: “You have committed an illegal act by giving shelter to demons and stirring up popular sentiments. Go back and burn them all at once!” The magistrate found himself in a quandary, for if he followed the provincial governor’s

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order, he would betray his fox friend, and if he remained loyal to his friend, he would be punished by the governor. When he returned to his residence, however, the old man seemed to already know his dilemma. “I am really sorry for dragging you into trouble,” the old man apologized, “but I will bring vengeance on the ruthless provincial governor. I know that he has been extorting money since he took office here. Also, his concubine had an affair with his doorman, and he secretly killed the doorman. You will announce the provincial governor’s crimes for me.” He [magically] wiped the magistrate’s face with his sleeves, and the magistrate immediately lost his mind and crazily ran around, telling everybody the governor’s secretly committed crimes. Soon the regional inspector learned of the matter and impeached the provincial governor, who was then arrested and decapitated in the capital. County magistrates in late imperial China constantly faced dilemmas in serving local interests and fulfilling prescribed official duties at the same time. The story expresses their conflicting sentiments. In treating the fox with respect, accepting the fox family into his own residence (however reluctantly), and being unwilling to kill them despite orders from above, the magistrate understood the need to make peace with an unpredictable yet potentially harmful local force. Familiar elements of popular beliefs in fox spirits, such as the fox’s divine insight and capability of possession, became useful tools for the magistrate to use in protecting himself against his superiors. With the backing of the fox, he might gain a source of local support. In the state of insanity, presumably caused by the fox’s magic, the magistrate avoided the danger he might get into by pursuing a normal impeachment while successfully accusing his superior of unlawful acts and saving himself from potential trouble. Despite the government’s suspicion and disdain of spirit mediums, officials in fact often consulted them on personal matters, especially in times of family crisis. In chapter 4 I discussed how a Ming vice-commissioner, faced with the impending death of his wife, resorted to a fox medium against his own will but was soon fully convinced by the unusual efficacy of the fox’s magic power. Henry Doré recorded a similar incident that occurred five hundred years later, in 1907. A young man in a market town of Hezhou (in Anhui) was suddenly possessed by a female fox spirit, whom he called “Fairy of the Golden Blossom (Jinhua xianzi).” People throughout the area flocked to the man’s home asking for healing advice. Among them was the prefect of Hezhou, who sent his sedan chair, invited the “Fairy” to his official residence, and pleaded with her to cure his son’s acute attack of fever.

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Foxes as the “Third Eye” Virtue was considered a means of exorcism, and foxes were often used to test whether an official was virtuous. Liu Shoumei (fl. 1800), for example, used the occasion of a fox haunting to eulogize his father’s moral achievement as an official. Upon assuming office in Kunshan county, Liu’s father was told that a backyard building was off limits, since foxes had made it their residence. Confident in his moral power, he laughed at the natives’ warnings and ventured to stay in the building. In the night he indeed heard strange noises, and the bedcurtain was mysteriously lifted several times. Instead of being scared away, Liu’s father gave the foxes a long lesson: “How dare you harass me, the official who governs this place? If you are willing to improve yourselves and become human beings, you should not disturb people. But now you take over human residences and frighten people, and you act like bandits and commit more serious crimes than bandits. You should repent your crimes at once, or you will always remain an inferior species and never be able to become real humans!” Soon after he finished speaking, everything was silent, and presumably, the foxes left. For Liu, this triumph over the foxes’ disturbances marked his father’s extraordinary virtue more than the official power he held. Officials’ failure to expel offensive fox spirits was often taken as a sign of moral deficiency. Ji Yun records that a man’s house in his hometown of Cangzhou was once haunted by an invisible fox, and the presiding prefect, Dong Siren, who was then reputed to be a good official, volunteered to exorcise it. He rushed to the victim’s home and, much like Liu Shoumei’s father, launched into a lengthy, didactic speech. But the fox interrupted him, saying, “As an official you are indeed benevolent, and you do not take bribes, so I do not attack you. But in being benevolent you aim to gain fame, and you refuse bribes simply for fear of inducing trouble, so I do not need to hide from you. Please leave right away and say no more to embarrass yourself.” Dong, ashamed, returned to his office. As Ji Yun repeated in many of his anecdotes, “the demonic cannot overcome the virtuous (yao bu sheng de).” In fighting offensive demons and destroying illicit cults, officials “rarely win if their own moral cultivation is not sufficient.” The foxes, therefore, often functioned as a “third eye.” With divine insight they supervised officials’ moral behavior and circumscribed abuses of power. The magistrate in Xian county (Hebei), Ming Cheng, for example, once planned to redress a formerly misjudged case, but he was afraid that his superiors would not grant permission and hesitated to begin. A fox,

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through the medium of a local man, came to repudiate him: “[In judging legal cases] you are people’s parents. You should be concerned only with right and wrong, and never swayed by your superiors’ opinions. Don’t you remember the words of Governor-General Li?” Ming was astonished, since he recalled a private conversation with Mr. Li in which Li recounted that when he was young, a Daoist master saved his life and expounded to him Confucian principles on serving in office. He then promised the master that he would learn from the examples of loyal Confucian subjects in history and serve the emperor “earnestly and wholeheartedly until the day he dies.” In reminding Ming Cheng of Mr. Li’s words, the fox disciplined the magistrate with Confucian ideals and a reminder of his responsibility to the public. Outside the yamen offices, fox spirits who took part in society and befriended local men and women dared to ridicule officials, a bold step that perhaps local people themselves did not undertake openly in real life. Such foxes figure in one of Pu Songling’s stories, in which an old man suddenly visited a certain Mr. Li of Wei county, near Pu’s hometown. He wanted to rent a vacant house owned by the Lis, and before Li even granted his request, he took out 50 taels of silver to cover a whole year’s rent. Then he had his whole family move in. He turned out to be a rich neighbor, showering the Lis with luxurious gifts and extravagant banquets. Shocked by the old man’s wealth, Li suspected that he was a high-ranking official. To show his amicability, the man told Li that he was in fact a fox. Even more shocked, Li made the news well known in the whole county. Therefore, every day local gentry members came to visit to the fox and expressed their wishes to make friends with him. The fox received all of them with respect. Soon even the prefectural officials joined the fox’s social circle. Only the county magistrate was rejected whenever he asked to see the fox. The magistrate then asked Li to convey his willingness to visit the fox in person, and his request was rejected again. Bewildered, Li asked the fox for an explanation. The fox left the gathering and told him in private, “You don’t know. He was in fact a donkey in his previous life. Even though now he sits above people, he . . . is still of inferior strain, and I am ashamed to be near him.” Li went back to the magistrate and tactfully told him that because of the spiritual power he embodied [as an official], the fox did not dare to see him. The magistrate believed Li and no longer bothered the fox.

Another nineteenth-century story made similar sarcastic marks about a greedy and corrupt magistrate:

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A certain Yu from Changshu, Jiangsu was posted as magistrate in Zhili. He was greedy, mean, and stingy. . . . To save a few coins, he once got into a fistfight with people in the market. . . . His wife Tian was a good-looking woman and was bewitched by a fox. Yu was often bullied by the fox and finally decided to ask for charms from the Celestial Master. The fox knew his intention and told his wife, “Your husband loves money. I will give him money for wine every day, and you tell him not to do things that harm me.” Next morning Yu indeed found 300 qian of silver money under his seat. He was so happy that immediately he withdrew from the bedchamber, let the fox do as he would, and never bothered to ask about anything again. A year later, the fox wanted to leave. Yu learned of it and urged his wife: “The fox is your lover and my best friend. You have to grab his sleeves and persuade him to stay, and just tell him, ‘I would rather be drunk forever than waking up!’” The wife forwarded the message to the fox, and the fox said, “I am not concerned with my petty expenses, and I am truly fond of you, but my fellow friends of the Western Mountain summoned me, so I cannot indulge myself anymore. I will leave your husband a meager remuneration to repay his kind offer of his wife in the past year.” The fox departed and never returned. The next day in the old place Yu found a package wrapped with green cloth, with a bundle of silver inside and a piece of red paper attached outside, which read: “A shameful offer (saojing).”

Not only did foxes deride unwelcome officials, they also helped the weak win legal battles against local bullies over property. A house in the hometown of Xu Kun was sold to different buyers many times, but each time a powerful local bully, who had established firm connections with officials, would seize it by cheating and by force. Xu’s friends, the Wang brothers, had paid a thousand jin and moved in after making the necessary sacrifices to all deities and spirits of the house. Then the younger Wang began a love affair with a fox girl and gradually became a loyal friend of the whole fox family, who had been living in the house for years. Soon the bully seized the house by force again. The Wangs filed a lawsuit in the county court, but they did not hear anything from the magistrate and were sued by the well-connected bully instead! In despair, the brothers were about to give up the house, but the county magistrate suddenly summoned the bully, condemned all the crimes he had committed, and ordered him to withdraw his case and apologize to the Wangs. With the Wang brothers’ unexpected victory, the case was closed. It was not until much later, after the Wangs had secured their ownership of the house, that they found out they had in fact been saved by the foxes: the fox woman acted on the magistrate’s behalf.

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The supplementing role of foxes was especially conspicuous during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time when the imperial state lost its symbolic and real control of society. A spirit notorious for pilfering activities, the fox was now sometimes pictured in popular lore as an enemy of thieves and protector of official interests: Three thieves robbed the imperial temple at Mukden (today’s Shenyang, Liaoning) of the sacred vessels of precious metal. As they climbed the wall to escape with their plunder, an old man with a white beard, sitting on the roof of the temple, stopped them with a gesture of his hand, and they were forced to remain sitting on the wall, where they were discovered and arrested the following morning. The matter having been reported to Peking (Beijing), the government decreed that a cult was to be established in honor of the fox god Hu—for he had been the venerable old man.

I have not been able to locate the government decree regarding this matter, but there was indeed a famous fox temple in the city of Shenyang. While sojourning in this northern capital, the Empress Dowager even paid a special visit to the temple, which suggests that it might have enjoyed some kind of imperial patronage. In addition to answering personal and practical pleas, the fox assumed public duties at this time. In one story, a group of rebels invaded the county seat of Songjiang in the summer of 1860 and slept in the examination halls. Every night they heard the sound of fighting and woke up to see torches on the city walls brightening the sky. Suspecting that the government troops had already besieged them, the rebels fled in panic. But soon all was quiet, and nothing happened. After several such sleepless nights, the exhausted rebels finally abandoned the town. According to the local people, “it must have been the fox deity living upstairs in the examination halls that helped drive away the rebels.” Judging from the timing and the location of the event, “rebels” may refer to the followers of the Taiping Rebellion (1853– 1861). Clearly, the fox was perceived as a divine force supporting the Qing state and the general public. The local lore of Mukden recounts that during the late Qing, foxes dressed as armored soldiers patrolled the city at night in order to “fulfill their duties [to the emperor].” In the aftermath of the Boxer Uprising in 1900, Russian troops broke into Mukden, looted the former Manchu imperial palace, damaged the ancestral temples and tombs of the imperial family, and openly abused Chinese prisoners. In the middle of the celebration banquet

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held at the imperial palace, however, a man descended from the air and slapped the face of the presiding Russian officer. The officer crashed to the floor. After regaining consciousness, he immediately moved his troops out of the palace. “Some say that the man was a fox.” When the state power failed against foreign forces, in the popular imagination the fox became an auxiliary official power to rescue the imperial house and the nation from further humiliation, although with very limited capacity and effect.

Foxes as the “ Great Guardians of the Official Seal” The perceived powers of fox spirits, wielded both inside and outside yamen offices, rivaled the official power embodied by imperial bureaucrats. During the late Qing, the worship of foxes was widely adopted as a familiar strategy for officials to pacify disturbances. We have seen above how an official, Mr. Qiu, appeased foxes in the yamen offices of Zunhua prefecture in the seventeenth century. A scholar-official who came to serve in Zunhua prefecture in the nineteenth century, however, still found foxes a regular presence. In Ruizhou prefecture, Jiangxi, foxes enjoyed offerings from prefect Fu. After Fu died, however, his successor considered the yamen offices polluted by the foxes and moved out. No longer able to gain offerings in the empty yamen, the foxes migrated to the military compound and continued to harass the residents there. The officials had to present wine and meat to the foxes in exchange for peace. By the nineteenth century, official worship of foxes had extended to places where both biological foxes and local fox worship were less prominent, and foxes were reported to be a regular presence in the following yamen offices of south China: Mr. Li Guoji of Taihu came to Zhejiang to inspect the educational system. . . . The offices of the educational officials were comprised of three buildings . . . and on the upper floor of the buildings lived huxian. The supervising official of the provincial examination in the Jiangnan area was Shen Wenzhong. . . . The first time he entered the examination offices, he saw three empty rooms securely locked. The yamen clerk told him that [the rooms were occupied by] huxian. He did not believe it and ordered the clerk to open the doors. The rooms were spotless, and two old men came out to greet him, saying, “We are huxian.”

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The yamen quarters of the provincial governor of Hubei always has many foxes. Nobody dare to live in the five buildings situated in the back. Behind the yamen is a temple where monks and nuns live, and it is also occupied by foxes. Yan Bingjie was the county magistrate of Luqin county, Yunnan. In the eastern part of the yamen offices were three tightly sealed rooms. It was said that huxian lived there. As for the governor general’s office compound in the capital city of Fujian, foxes occupied a separate building, which was called the xian’s building. There is a building for xian in the garden of the governor general of Fujian and Zhejiang. The xian is efficacious and responsive. The yamen compound in Guilin (Guangxi) was haunted: bricks and tiles were frequently dropped, knives automatically flew to beams, and excrement mysteriously appeared in wine cups. Lao Lianfang [the presiding prefect] suspected that these things were done by foxes, and he worshipped them piously, but the haunting continued. There is a small room behind the yamen office in the Circuit of Ningbo and Shaoxing, where a god of wealth was worshipped. By the side [of the god of wealth] were three seated statues, with gray hair and beards. I asked some old yamen runners, who told me that these were foxes.

More notably in this period, the fox was given the title of the “Great Guardian of the Official Seal.” It was venerated in the yamen offices to control the most important symbol of power, the official seal, and to protect the government treasury and documents. This function of the fox seems to have been especially important in peripheral areas where local control tended to be more difficult for both civil and military officials. A certain scholar Zhang from Zhejiang, a story recounts, was hired as a personal secretary by a county magistrate in late Qing Taiwan. When he first arrived at the yamen, he saw three tightly locked buildings and learned that a fox was worshipped there. Nobody dared to go in without the fox’s authorization. Zhang soon became good friends with the fox, who allowed Zhang to visit his sacred residence every night and shared his interest in pursuing immortality. With the fox’s help, Zhang was able to survive a pirate at-

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tack and safely return to the mainland. When asked why he chose to live in Taiwan, the fox answered, “I have seen the time of Emperor Gaozong (1127–1162) and lived for more than 500 years. After I obtained the Dao in Tiantai Mountain (in Zhejiang), the celestial fox sent me to this county to guard the official seal.” Another late Qing anecdote vividly describes the process during which a newly commissioned official placated a malicious spirit haunting the yamen, converting it into a protective deity of his own family and the local community. Above all, it shows that the veneration of the fox as the “Great Guardian of the Official Seal” might have been derived from officials’ original fear of the spirit’s impish character and especially its infamous habit of stealing official seals: Lan Renqiu’s name is Gai, and he was a native of Qionglai, Sichuan. In 1891 he was posted as inspecting official in Sansha of Xiapu county, Fujian. The office had been haunted by strange beings, who threw rocks, scattered sands, and made all kinds of ferocious faces to scare people. Clothes were stolen from chests, and silk bolts were either cut into pieces or soiled. Whenever an extravagant banquet was held, people would find excrement mixed in with their food. . . . All his predecessors were deeply tormented, and all exorcistic means to which they resorted had no effect. Lan was told about all these when he first took up the office, but he did not believe them to be true. Right after he received the official seal and before the ceremony was over, the seal suddenly disappeared. In panic he heard a rock roll from the beam to the eaves, but it did not drop, and the sound was repeated three times. Lan therefore yelled: “I am in a humble position, but still I am commissioned by the court to govern the land and people here. So far I have not done anything offensive to the deities and spirits above and below in the county, yet you great xian are obviously disturbing my offices and have taken away my seal. You are making me offend the court. Have you come to guard the seal for me? If so, I will establish a shrine for you in my yamen and make offerings to you. Have you come to seek bloody sacrifices? If so, I will build a temple for you beside the yamen. If you agree with the first, please roll the rock like before once; if you agree with the second, please roll it twice; and if you want both, please roll it three times.” Just as he expected, the rock rolled three times. Lan then said, “I have received the great xian’s instructions, and I will do as you ask. Please return the seal to me.” The seal was immediately dropped from the beam. Lan therefore set up a shrine within his office to venerate the spirit, and a temple besides the yamen. . . . The xian was addressed as “Divine Aunt.” People from

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near and far packed the road and came one after another to offer incense. Strange things no longer occurred in the yamen offices.

The story goes on to say that the “Aunt” gave much special care to Lan’s young son, and she also forwarded messages to Yang’s family in Sichuan. Here the loss of the official seal meant the loss of the official’s power and subsequently of his career, for the seal by itself symbolized the emperor’s commission and the legitimacy of his position. Officials judged cases and issued documents with the seal, and none of the yamen functionaries could be paid without its authorization. As Boltz has illuminated with a similar Song anecdote from the Yijianzhi, the loss of the seal as a result of the official’s offense to mischievous spirits serves to emphasize the difficulties of newly commissioned officeholders in gaining acceptance in local society. In the Song story, the recovery of the seal “by no means signaled the submission of the resident phantom,” for the official still died a week later, and his death was linked to the haunting of his residence and the local opposition to him that went beyond his control. In the above late Qing case, however, Lan survived, since he was much more willing to make compromises with the resident phantom and to submit himself to its autonomous power than his predecessors. Lan did not use official rhetoric to fight the illicit cult. Rather, by putting the spirit in shrines both inside and outside his yamen offices and entrusting her with his seal, he willingly yielded to local autonomy and found his governing peaceful thereafter. The fox, as the “Great Guardian of the Official Seal,” might symbolize the triumph of local power in resisting state control. Foreigners around the turn of the century observed that the worship of the fox as the “Guardian of the Official Seal” was very common among late Qing officials of all levels. Takizawa found that fox shrines were established in many county yamen offices in Manchuria. Both Doolittle and Watters note that the official seal was generally kept in an upper room reserved especially for foxes, who were responsible for taking special care of it. Doolittle watched ritual performances by the governor-general stationed in Fuzhou, Fujian: The mandarins, on arriving at their official residences from Peking, or from their previous homes—from the viceroy (governor-general) down to the county magistrate—(as some Chinese assert)—are required by custom, if not by law, to perform three superstitious ceremonies. They first worship their seals of office, they then offer sacrifices to the god of the gate or door; finally, they wor-

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ship the fox. After these acts, they may proceed to perform official business with the hope of success. [Doolittle’s emphases]

He continues in the next paragraph, saying that in the two-storied building in which the fox was worshipped by the officials, There is no image or picture of a fox to be worshipped, but simply an imaginary fox somewhere. Incense candles and wine are placed upon a table in the room of the second story of this building, and before this table the mandarin kneels down and bows his head in the customary manner, as an act of reverence to Reynard, the keeper of his seals of office. This sacrifice, it is affirmed, is never performed by deputy. The Chinese believe the official seal of the mandarin, after he has arrived at his yamun (yamen), to be in the keeping of the fox. They assert, with great earnestness and apparent sincerity, that if the mandarin did not worship the fox on his arrival at his residence, his seal of office would shortly disappear in some inexplicable way, or some singular and strange calamity would certainly befall him or his yamun (yamen).

Watters supplements Doolittle’s reports by pointing out that in the governor-general’s yamen in Fuzhou, there was at least one clay image of the fox as “a venerable old man seated in a chair.” The worship ritual, in addition to being performed upon the official’s arrival, was held regularly on the first and fifteenth days of every month. Officials were obliged to carry it out carefully and earnestly, and those who neglected to do so would be resented by the local people. The worship of the fox as the “Great Guardian of the Official Seal” was not prescribed by the imperial law, but “it has all the power of law.” This shows that the imperial state, embodied by officeholders of all levels, now had to compromise with a popular cult of “demonic” and “illicit” origins. Moreover, the regime had to rely on the cult to secure its own rule. It is no wonder that toward the end of the Qing, a shrine dedicated to the fox as the “Great Guardian of the Official Seal” was found in the Forbidden City, the center of the crumbling Chinese empire.

~! The confrontation between guan (officials) and shen (spirits) has been a familiar theme in Chinese anecdotal literature for centuries. Judith Boltz has used many Song examples to show that power struggles between officials and spirits are often “a recasting of the endless tug of war between the gov-

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erned and the government.” As the opening line of this chapter reminds us, state agents like Kang Hai placed the control of local gods and spirits as the top priority in governing local society. Ming-Qing anecdotal writings on fox spirits demonstrate much more complex relationships between officials and local society than Kang Hai and like-minded scholar-officials had envisioned. The fox, as both an indigenous animal and a spirit being active in the daily life of north China, not only encroached on the physical space of the yamen offices but also took on various roles normally played by officials and the elite. As an alternative source of power at the disposal of different social groups, it could be invoked to either challenge or secure the local order. The seal of office did not protect officials from injuries and fatalities caused by unruly spirits; nor did it empower them to follow historical exemplars and enforce the imperial law against “illicit” cults without any reservations. On the contrary, many of them, like their constituents, turned out to worship fox spirits, and they had to entrust their careers and personal welfare to the foxes during their tenure. The worship of foxes was derived from fear, and it symbolized compromises and conformities officials had to make in alien territories. Not only were officials unable to govern local gods and spirits, but their power was also gradually subsumed by these gods and spirits as well as by what they represented. As the fox evolved from an intruder in yamen offices into the “Great Guardian of the Official Seal,” officeholders bowed to not only a formerly illegitimate shrine but also the local forces that stood behind it. Beneath the changing perceptions of fox spirits by those in positions of authority, we may feel the weakening pulse of the entire empire.

Conclusion

The fox has been a multivocal symbol in Chinese culture. During late imperial and modern times, records of fox spirits proliferated on an unprecedented level. Fox cult practices flourished in north China and Manchuria and spread to many other parts of China. Fox spirits assumed many different divine roles: gods of wealth; patron deities of individuals, families, spirit mediums, and sectarian activities; protectors of prostitutes and entertainers; guardians of the official seal; and sometime subordinates and sometime surrogates of the prominent goddess Bixia Yuanjun. Fox shrines were established in countless locations—inner chambers, backyards, ancestral shrines, roadsides, temples, offices, and even imperial palaces—and they attracted people from all walks of life. Crossing multiple cultural boundaries, fox spirits signified outsiders who were usually perceived as dangerous yet desirable, and whose characteristics subverted dominant cultural norms yet remained indispensable for the practical needs of everyday life. They were therefore identified with a variety of marginal social groups, such as courtesans, concubines, young wives or daughters-in-law, spirit mediums, bandits, and immigrants, and brought to the fore socially suppressed voices, culturally repressed desires, and politically proscribed forces in Chinese society.

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Fox Spirits and Chinese Religion The case of the fox points to large phenomena in Chinese religion and culture. Ghostly characteristics appear to be commonplace among Chinese gods and goddesses. Most celebrated gods endowed with bureaucratic positions, such as the Stove God and the Jade Emperor, have defective characters, sexual connotations, or ghostly origins. In this regard, they differ little from the capricious fox. It was also common for people to shelter illicit cults under official cover. Michael Szonyi shows how the local cult of the Five Emperors in Fujian was actively worshipped under the rubric of the state-sanctioned gods Wuxian and Guandi. Qitao Guo demonstrates that another set of five spirits, the Five Fury Spirits, was incorporated into the worship of authorized deities in Huizhou, Anhui. My study provides more examples. The City God, for instance, was thought to be the divine parallel of a county magistrate and his temple a symbol of the government yamen where official rituals were regularly performed. But anecdotal literature reveals that from time to time, illicit elements were added to the City God temples. In the county seat of Wanquan, Hebei, the City God temple looked grandiose on the outside. In the backyard, however, was a bedchamber in which dozens of female statues were posed as cooking, knitting, or doing other household work, and many were improperly dressed and even half naked. The City God of Deqing county, Zhejiang was said to have a principal wife and a concubine, both housed in the temple. Local people earnestly celebrated the concubine’s birthday without paying much attention to the wife. A cult of homosexuality also silently thrived in some temples. An idol of a yamen clerk in the City God temple of Xian county, Hebei was called “the deaf clerk (longli)” and was widely believed to be the tutelary deity of those who favored homosexual activities. The cult might have spread beyond the local level, since the same “deaf clerk” was also found in the City God temple of Chaozhou, Guangdong and performed the same functions. The appellants had to secretly pass their prayers to this particular clerk by whispering into his ear so that the City God would not hear the illicit content. The low status of yamen clerks and runners and their actual control of local powers were well known in Chinese politics (see chapter 6). Evidently, the strategy of sheltering “illicit” content within official cults allowed people to bypass the normal bureaucratic functions in order to satisfy demands that were sometimes publicly dishonorable. And in these cases a form of personal and informal communication superseded the petitions and formal rituals with which they approached the City God.

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The fox cult, therefore, must be understood in the context of the multifaceted Chinese gods and their general sheltering capacity in Chinese religion. It offers a unique prism through which to reevaluate the bureaucratic metaphor of Chinese religion and the issue of Chinese cultural diversity. In their important introduction to the volume Unruly Gods: Divinity and Society in China, Meir Shahar and Robert Weller rightly state that while the Chinese heavens resemble the earthly bureaucracy in many ways, “the bureaucratic image applies only to some Chinese deities, and then often only partially.” Studies of a variety of female, eccentric, demonic, and martial deities in recent years, many by authors included in Shahar and Weller’s volume, all testify to the limits of the bureaucratic metaphor in explaining the Chinese religious world. In his recent book on Daoist rituals and local cults sponsored by male elite members, Robert Hymes further argues that the Chinese formulate their relationships with the divine in two independent models: the bureaucratic and the personal. While in the former, gods are represented as officials in a bureaucratic hierarchy and approached through the mediation of religious professionals, in the latter, “dyadic (one-to-one)” and reciprocal connections are established between gods and humans. He contends that the two models of Chinese divinity are not anchored in particular social groups or status, but are a rich source of interpretations for all cultural actors in Chinese society. The case of the fox cult significantly broadens the above arguments. It shows that while a burgeoning market economy and weakening state control may have contributed to the successes of Richard von Glahn’s Wutong god and Robert Weller’s matricidal magistrates and gambling gods, illicit cults in general could enjoy continuous success in times of both economic stability and insecurity, and in both political peripheries and cores, including the imperial capital of Beijing. The vitality of the illicit cults, and by extension the common illicit side of Chinese gods, lies in the personal nature of popular religious practices and the direct and efficacious responses people could expect from these deities. As discussed in preceding chapters, the fox spirits were highly individualized in many different ways, from assuming personal names and identities along with their human patrons to forming exclusive spiritual links with individuals and families. The maintenance of the fox cult was a highly personal matter too, as each spirit medium was normally initiated by a different fox, and either acted alone or placed herself along with other spirit mediums in a hierarchical family of master and disciples. The transmission of the cult was similarly personal, as it relied heavily on oral storytelling among friends, families, and relatives.

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More important, the fox cult practices exemplify people’s most private and personal demands from extraordinary powers in everyday life. The diabolical attributes of fox spirits spoke for a wide range of common human weaknesses, vices, and physical and social predicaments, including greed, lust, jealousy, illness, theft, poverty, and insecurity. Many of these problems were daily nuisances for individuals and their immediate families and were expressed through the bond between fox spirits and their human hosts—the possessed family members or mediums. Fox shrines and tablets erected by these human hosts tended to be out of the public eye, in private backyards, inner chambers, secret rooms, or nameless side altars in major temples, and rendered the cult personal, ephemeral, and therefore fragile. They were small and simple, so they could be easily destroyed by involuntary worshippers like Sifter Zhang (chapter 3) or local tyrants, as in Little Three’s story (chapter 4), or could simply fall into neglect by local gazetteers and official histories. As a discursive practice, the fox cult hardly posed any serious threat to the moral and political well-being of Chinese society. But precisely because they were small, simple, and open to discursive elaboration, the fox shrines succeeded in occupying the most private quarters of everyday life and became accessible and affordable to members of every social stratum. The humble and fragile features of the fox cult and the common foibles of gods in Chinese religion reflect people’s confidence in negotiating with deities on an equal footing and manipulating them for their own benefit. Unlike temple gods, fox spirits dwelled in or visited people’s houses like kinsmen or neighbors would and shared drinks, exchanged favors, and formed liaisons or friendships. They were physically close to people, so they were more inclined to listen to them and help them. To cite again the farmers from the 1940s Beijing suburbs, only the animal spirits were really efficacious, while the printed image of Guandi or any other temple idol remained “merely a sheet of paper.” The personal nature of the cult made fox spirits available to assume numerous identities and open to countless interpretations in response to social, economic, and political changes. They embodied the collective mentalities of their worshippers and narrators. For the Tang literati, for example, foxes symbolized the “barbarians” who insinuated themselves into Chinese life and threatened the literati’s conceptions of themselves. For late imperial officials posted in unfamiliar territories, foxes were venerated as the “Great Guardians of the Official Seal” for the officials to assume authority and secure their careers. Toward the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when national social and political tensions intensified, records of the

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“Great Guardian of the Official Seal” multiplied, and the fox cult extended to other parts of China. The contemporary fox cult in the town of Boluo in northern Shaanxi also responds to social changes. After its suppression by the Socialist Education Campaign in the 1950s, the fox medium could only receive customers secretly, but as Communist ideology lost its totalitarian control in post-Mao times, the fox cult went semipublic and was able to affect people’s personal careers, family fortunes, and futures. The tenacity of illicit cults, therefore, lay precisely in their vulnerability, flexibility, and, fundamentally, their personal nature. Illicit content made the fox cult an easy target of elite criticism and official suppression; however, its egotistic and personal appeals also won elite appreciation to a certain extent and made it hard for any institutional force to eliminate the cult from people’s everyday lives. These characteristics give the cult practices tremendous strength to flourish in multiple locations, with infinite names and interpretations, and across vast spans of time and space. The case of the fox cult also supports and raises questions about Robert Hymes’s new paradigm of Chinese religion in terms of illicit cults and the role gender played in them. As I have shown throughout this book, there is no doubt that the fox cult was open to interpretations in multiple languages, sometimes bureaucratic and sometimes personal. The two mentalities intertwined and competed with each other in actual cult practices and offered powerful explanations of the simultaneous worship and exorcism of foxes among both elite and popular members. Most notably, people routinely addressed the same deity with two different titles, one bureaucratic and one personal, depending on the ritual context, such as the Daoist title of Bixia Yuanjun (The Perfected of the Azure Clouds) versus Taishan niangnang (Mother Taishan) and the official title of “Holy Mother” versus “Wang Sannainai (Granny Wang the Third).” Or they would use a title ambiguous enough to encompass both the bureaucratic and the personal sides of the spirit, such as “Hu Santaiye,” which could be rendered either as “Grandpa Hu the Third” or “Hu the Third Master” and would be dressed in mandarin uniform (these are the same taiye with which people address community seniors or even county magistrates; see chapter 3). It is also important to note that Hymes identifies the Daoist clergy as the major promoters of the bureaucratic model and patronage of the Three Immortals in Fuzhou as a result of the elite choosing the personal model over the bureaucratic one. Examples from this study, especially from chapters 5 and 6, show an opposite tendency in the working of the two models. Bureaucratic powers of prominent gods were routinely invoked by all sorts of

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people, with or without the mediation of religious professionals, to tame the demonic potential of foxes. They were available for ordinary people to use in seeking personal fortune, restoring family order, and ridiculing and resisting elite and state control. Daoist and sometimes Buddhist clergy were hired, but local spirit mediums and Confucian moralists both played a much larger role in using the bureaucratic model either to promote or to control the fox cult. For them as for all worshippers, that model, a source of legitimacy, remained indispensable for the survival and popularity of these cults. The structure of Buddhist and Daoist temples accommodated fox shrines in their side altars, backyards, and upper-floor rooms. Most ironically, the exorcistic power of state bureaucrats appeared rather weak in countless Ming-Qing stories, and they often failed to invoke the power of celestial bureaucrats and had to entrust the unruly foxes to secure the official seal, the symbol of their own power. The case of the fox also goes beyond the framework of bureaucratic and personal models. If, as Hymes puts it, “in representing gods, the Chinese drew on all the authoritarian human relationships known to them from social life, rather than only on relationships within the state or between the state and its subjects,” we may wonder how other types of social relations, such as ethnic and racial (the fox and the barbarian in the Tang), cultural (Confucian moralizers versus corrupted officials), urban and rural (hospitals versus spirit healers in contemporary Yulin), or corporate business (Buddha versus the fox, also in Yulin), can be fully integrated into the two models. This issue is especially acute in the increasingly pluralized contemporary Chinese society, when the power structure of the communist state has to compete with, or risk being displaced by, many new forms of social dominance, such as family enterprises, the capitalist market, or jointventure corporate hierarchies. China’s role in the international community has also entered people’s awareness of power relations through not only government-controlled media but also the Internet and satellite dishes. Will the bureaucratic model, for example, remain valid for the Chinese to interpret gods and new social forces behind them? Or will new models emerge to replace or compete with both the bureaucratic model and the personal model for people to articulate the world and their relations with the divine? To come back to the fox, we need to look at how the two models can be applied to the gendered representations of power in the illicit cults. Female deities in Chinese religion are commonly seen as serving primarily personal interests and defying celestial bureaucracy, but the fox cult suggests a more

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complicated picture, as the fox’s power crossed gender lines in both domestic and public settings. The fox defied bureaucratic authorities in a variety of roles, as ancestral patriarch or matriarch, learned divine transcendent, spiritual healer, lustful demon, enchanting temptress, or guardian of the official seal. In all these roles, its relationships with humans were largely personal—as parent-child, master-disciple, friend-friend, or lover-lover—but the powers it represented greatly differed as the settings of the cult changed. In the domestic arena, adulterous sex between young female family members and a male fox became an important source of family fortune, and the destructive power of female sexuality was transformed into fertility through the worship of male foxes. Female foxes, on the other hand, appeared at the two extremes of the Confucian moral spectrum, either as virtuous wives or as ghostly temptresses. They played mediating roles in family life, but their virtue or sexual potential challenged male authority, thus preventing them from gaining a permanent place either as a regular family member or as an object of piety in domestic shrines. As foxes moved from family altars to community shrines administered by spirit mediums, the sexual overtone of the cult was played down. Foxes endowed with extraordinary powers of healing and fortune-telling often appeared as sexually inactive old men and women. They remained outside the celestial bureaucracy but became heads of the family hierarchy and represented orthodox power. The sexuality of young female foxes was tamed as they were made into wives of the earth god or the God of the Eastern Peak, and the male fox adulterers became easy targets of exorcism by celestial bureaucrats. Young female foxes did appear in local administrative offices, but far less often. The “Guardians of the Official Seal” who encroached on space and power within the yamen offices were in fact worshipped as senior male foxes who mirrored Daoist divine transcendents and celestial bureaucrats. Throughout this study, we have seen that the more private its setting was, the more personal and amoral interests the cult could harbor. Conversely, the more public the cult became, the more it needed to accommodate the official order. The real danger of the illicit cults, then, lay not in their personal and amoral nature per se, but in the extent to which they and the power they represented infringed upon the real and imagined official order and public interests. Hierarchies of gender and age, couched in personal and familial terms, were sometimes combined with bureaucratic status to defend official order, public interests, and Confucian morality. But the same hierarchies could also generate personal, informal, and amoral powers, and thereby significantly challenge everything official, public, and bureaucratic.

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Young female foxes were prone to wreak havoc but always appeared tamable in gender and familial terms, because their roles and personal appeal complemented bureaucratic deities. Male foxes could also be tamed as subordinates of prominent nonbureaucratic deities. When assuming the images of family patriarchs or Daoist transcendents, however, they appeared as rivals of the bureaucratic gods and posed more serious challenges to the official order than their female counterparts. The gendered representations of fox spirits cut across personal and bureaucratic boundaries, allowing people of late imperial and modern China to negotiate power in both private and public arenas. In sum, the history of the fox cult in China demonstrates that popular cults of demonic origins had great appeal to people of all social backgrounds precisely because they provided opportunities to pursue amoral, personal, and local interests free from official discourses of power and morality. People used the marginal powers of the fox to cope with physical and mental illnesses, financial difficulties, family discord, gender tensions, moral dilemmas, and political pressures in everyday life and to come to grips with larger social and political changes. Cultural differences were not associated with different social groups, and the state, the clergy, and the elite could not impose a unified interpretation of the fox. Rather, multivalent, ambiguous, and often contradictory images emerged from the complex and contextual interrelationships among different individuals and social groups. The fox cult thrived on the practices of worshipping, exorcising, narrating, and recording fox spirits at local, regional, and national levels by the elite, officials, religious specialists, and common people. Paradoxically respected and detested, fox spirits in Chinese culture embodied tensions between what Bourdieu defines as “official” order and “unofficial” practices—tensions at multiple levels, among different social groups, and in diverse cultural settings. As the Chinese learned to maximize the fox’s magic power and at the same time control its vices, they constructed and subverted official order and public morality according to their sundry needs.

Fox Spirits in Comparative Perspective Fox worship and fox stories are found not only in China but also in Japan, Korea, and other cultures in northeast Asia and Siberia. The fox is also a prominent figure in folklore in many European, Middle Eastern, and Central Asian countries, and its slyness and associations with fire, fertility, and the netherworld are commonly recognized in many cultures. Karen Smy-

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ers’s anthropological study of Japanese Inari worship offers abundant information and a theoretical basis with which to place the Chinese fox tradition into comparative perspective. Inari (the god of harvests), as the name suggests, was originally an agricultural deity in charge of the harvests of the five grains. Ever since medieval times, it has been widely worshipped in Japan. Besides being associated with rice, Inari is also honored as the god of wealth and promises household harmony and prosperity. Some worship the deity as female, while others imagine it as an old man. Inari may also enter the bodies of humans. In exchange for shamans’ assistance, Inari offers offer divine foresight and healing. Smyers summarizes the immense richness of Inari worship in contemporary Japanese society: Inari appeals to all classes, spans institutional boundaries, and is found throughout Japan. The deity’s powers are not limited to a certain specialization but include a range from agriculture to business, from childbirth to fishing, from stopping coughs to passing exams. Inari is worshiped in many manifestations—as a kami, in Buddhist forms, and in countless individualized versions.

Under the same name, Inari worship varies both regionally and individually, “to the degree that Inari is worshiped under thousands of unique names chosen by individual devotees.” It generates numerous interpretations, and no institution, social group, or scripture can claim authority to standardize Inari beliefs and practices. The fox is an important symbol of Inari. Fox statues stand at entrances to Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples; by the sides of roads, tombs, rice paddies, hills, and farmhouses; and wherever else people pay homage to Inari. The Buddhist form of the deity features a female bodhisattva astride a white fox. While priests insist that the fox is the spirit messenger of Inari, Japanese worshippers in both Buddhist and Shinto settings generally worship the fox as Inari itself. Smyers argues that Inari worship represents a high degree of personalization, and the fox becomes a metaphor for individuality. Even a quick glance at Smyers’s descriptions of Inari beliefs and practices shows striking similarities between Chinese and Japanese fox worship. As Japanese scholars have long acknowledged, Chinese influence may have shaped the development of Inari worship. We may also find common roots of fox worship in Buddhist, especially esoteric Buddhist, scriptures (see chapter 1). Yet, as with many things in Japan, foreign elements are quickly

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modified, and Inari worship remains a Japanese cultural tradition. Along with many similarities to fox worship, such as connections with shamans, the function as the god of wealth and fertility, affiliation with a female goddess, and the high degree of personalization, there are clear differences. While Inari shrines and temples are widespread all over Japan, in China fox worship remains largely regional, a phenomenon of the north, and its presence in the south was sporadic even during late Qing and early Republican times. Moreover, it is almost impossible to find images of actual foxes in Chinese fox shrines and temples, where the deities either appear in human form or simply have their names written on wooden tablets. Japanese Inari foxes, in contrast, are generally given physical expression. Pairs of fox statues stand in public spaces and serious religious settings as hallmarks of Inari worship. Fox shrines in China were subject to political campaigns and elite criticism, whereas those in Japan have encountered little official suppression or criticism. Furthermore, while Chinese fox spirits never entered Buddhist and Daoist pantheons and rarely surfaced in formal documents, Japanese Inari foxes enjoy legitimate positions in Buddhist, Shinto, and folk customs. Among written records devoted to Inari worship, a number are formal texts, such as temple records and Buddhist scriptures. In interpreting the multiplicity of the fox, Smyers shows that two tendencies, toward a shared system and toward private particularity, characterized Inari worship. By “shared system” or “shared meanings,” she means the general or “centripetal” uses of language that attempt to create order and allow the Japanese to conform to surface appearances. “Private particularity” or “private meanings,” on the other hand, are “centrifugal.” They may belong to one individual or group and are often expressed in private settings. They are “particular, messy, idiosyncratic, and often contradict or decenter the elegant but simplistic shared meanings that describe the system.” Balancing between “shared” and “private” meanings, the Japanese construct their identities against the “other” on both institutional and individual levels. At the “shared” level, they conceal their individuality and embrace authority, thus maintaining an appearance of homogeneity. But under the surface, society is highly diverse and heterogeneous, for by resorting to “private meanings” the Japanese are able to hold different views, safeguard personal concerns, organize smaller groups within the same religious sect, or form factions within one political party or neighborhood association. An in-depth comparative study of Chinese and Japanese fox worship is far beyond the task of this book, but the similarities and dissimilarities summarized above suggest that future research may help us understand

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how certain symbols can be used in different cultures to construct identity and to embody power relations. Symbolic representation is a central function of human consciousness and basic to our understanding of all human life. Through examining representations of the fox (as well as other marginal entities) in an international framework, we may be able to pursue traces of cultural transmission and transformation among different peoples in history and contemporary times. We may also gain a vantage point from which to observe how different peoples produce cultural uniformity and diversity across racial and geographical boundaries. The fox, traditionally a topic of Chinese literati’s “petty talk” and an object of illicit worship, reveals weighty matters in the lives of past and present people and facilitates our further exploration of the religion and culture of China and beyond.

Notes

Introduction 1. YWCT, 216. The YWCT includes five collections: Luanyang xiaoxialu, finished in 1789; Rushi wowen, 1791; Huaixi zazhi, 1792; Guwang tingzhi, 1793; and Luanyang xulu, 1798. They were published together in 1800. 2. On modern zoological findings, see Gao et. al., Zhongguo dongwu zhi, 8.52–64. Tao Hongjing (456–536) observed that foxes lived in north China and Sichuan but not in the Jiangdong area (south of the Yangzi River). Cited in TSJC, 520.51b. 3. TPGJ, 455.362, “Cangzhu min” (Beimeng suoyan). As a rule, TPGJ lists its original source at the end of each account. Since most of the original collections mentioned by the TPGJ were lost after the Song, I give the original source of each cited story in parentheses. 4. On literary studies of Chinese foxes, among others, see Nishioka Haruoka, “Jinshi to Einei no aida: koyō imēji no henyō”; Tominaga Kazuho, “Ko Setsuwa no tenkai”; Fatima Wu, “Foxes in Chinese Supernatural Tales”; Monschein, Der Zauber de Fuchsfee; Hammond, “Vulpine Alchemy”; Kow Mei-kao, Ghosts and Foxes; Chan, Discourse on Foxes and Ghosts; Li Jianguo, Zhongguo huwenhua; Huntington, Alien Kind. 5. In recent years Chinese scholars have studied fox worship and fox literature from ancient times to the present day. See Shan Min, Huli xinyang zhimi; Li Shouju, Huxian xinyang yu hulijing gushi. Li Jianguo combines popular tradition with literary creations. Steven Heine’s book, Shifting Shape, Shaping Text, examines the liminality of the shape-shifting fox in the kōan tradition of early Chan Buddhism. Huntington has one chapter on the relationship between the fox cult and literati writings. Hammond discusses the connection between female foxes and Daoist Interior Alchemy.

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6. Yin has been translated as “excessive,” “licentious,” “lewd,” profane,” “profligate,” “improper,” and “illicit.” For a summary of different translations of the term yin or yinci, see Katz, Marshal Wen, 28–29 n. 49; Schneewind, “Competing Institutions,” 90 and n. 20. Katz chooses the term “illicit” because “most scholar-officials who used the word yin in describing local cults were usually less concerned with their moral aspects than with the fact that they had not been approved by the government.” Schneewind uses “improper,” for in the Ming, “yinci” referred to a variety of cults that were not officially sanctioned or not efficacious, or to deities who answered wrong prayers or were worshipped by wrong people. I use “illicit” in this book for consistency, but recognize that the fox cult was viewed as immoral, unauthorized, and improper in different contexts. 7. On the Wutong, see von Glahn, “Enchantment of Wealth”; Cedzich, “Cult of the Wu-t’ung/Wu-hsien.” 8. On the cult of Bixia Yuanjun, see Pomeranz, “Power, Gender, and Pluralism.” 9. The cult of the Wudajia, which in most cases includes the fox, weasel, snake, hedgehog, and rat, will be discussed in chapter 2. It is interesting to note that cults with names including the number five are found in many parts of China. In addition to Wudajia and the Wutong, which was also called Wusheng (Five Saints), Wuxian (Five Manifestations), and Wulu caishen (Gods of the Five Paths to Wealth) in the Jiangnan area, there were also Wudao (Five Ways) in north China and Manchuria, Wuchang (Five Fiery Spirits) in Anhui, and Wudi (Five Emperors) in Fujian. Some of these groups of five were also connected with plague gods, such as Wuwen shizhe (The Five Commissioners of Epidemics). See Katz, Marshal Wen, 50–58; Szonyi, “Illusion of Standardizing the Gods,” 116–26; Guo, Exorcism and Money. 10. For an overview of these studies, see Bell, “Religion and Chinese Culture,” 35–57. For representative studies, see Johnson, Nathan, and Rawski, eds., Popular Culture; James Watson and Rawski, eds., Death Ritual. For the role of religious symbols in shaping Chinese cultural unity, see, for example, James Watson, “Standardizing the Gods,” 292–324; Duara, “Superscribing Symbols,” 778–95; Dean, Taoist Ritual and Popular Cults. 11. Hymes, Way and Byway, 5. For other representative studies of Chinese religions and cultural diversity, see Weller, Unity and Diversity and Resistance, Chaos, and Control; Sangren, History of Magical Power; Feuchtwang, Imperial Metaphor; Katz, Marshal Wen and Images of the Immortal; Sutton, Steps of Perfection. 12. Weller, Resistance, Chaos, and Control, 4. 13. Douglas, Purity and Danger, particularly 29–40, 94–113. 14. Turner, “Encounter with Freud,” 23. 15. Turner, Ritual Process, 94. 16. Ibid., 94, 108–11. See also Turner, “Betwixt and Between,” 234–43. 17. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 92. 18. Ibid., 96. 19. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 38–43 and 72–95, quotes from 40. 20. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” 42.

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21. Ming-Qing works of vernacular fiction also preserve fox stories, including the fourteenth-century edition of Wuwang fazhou pinghua (Story of King Wu’s Attack on Zhou); the sixteenth-century novel Fengshen yanyi (Enfeoffment of the Gods); Feng Menglong (1574–1646)’s Pingyao zhuan (Quelling the Demons); the seventeenth-century Xingshi yinyuanzhuan (A Marriage to Awaken the World); Yaohua zhuan (The Tale of Yaohua), published in 1803; Yaohu yanshi (The Voluptuous History of Fox Demons), published in the Qing (uncertain date); and Huli yuan (The Destiny of a Fox), published in 1888. For a complete list, see Huntington, Alien Kind, 31–33. 22. Campany, Strange Writing. 23. Davis, Society and the Supernatural, 19. Other studies of Chinese history and religion using the zhiguai anecdotes include Glen Dudbridge’s Religious Experience and Lay Society and Valerie Hansen’s Changing Gods, although Davis criticizes Hansen’s view of zhiguai anecdotes as folktales. 24. Hymes, “Truth and Falsity.” 25. This feature is discussed in Chan, Discourse on Foxes and Ghosts, 39–76. 26. Lu Xun, Zhonguo xiaoshuo shilue, 178–88; Chan, Discourse on Foxes and Ghosts, 5–6. Huntington (Alien Kind, 22–23, 26–30) discusses extensively the differences between Pu Songling and Ji Yun and their respective impact on later writers. For an English translation of some stories in the Liaozhai zhiyi, see Giles, Strange Stories and Mair and Mair, Strange Tales from Make-do Studio. I adopted most of Chan and Huntington’s translations of Ming and Qing book titles. 27. Chan, Discourse on Foxes and Ghosts, 230. 28. Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange, 1–2. 29. Wang Binling, Pu Songling yu minjian wenxue, 48–55; Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange, 1–5; Huntington, Alien Kind, 27. According to Wang, there are eighty-six stories in LZZY that have oral provenance, among which twelve are fox-related. 30. On how zhiguai writings serve different personal agendas, see Chan, Discourse on Foxes and Ghosts, 17–37, 45–55, 149–243. On differences between chuanqi and zhiguai, see Huntington, Alien Kind, 14–24. 31. Catherine Bell notes that scholars of Chinese religion have recognized that the division of “elite” and “popular” religion often expresses the indigenous point of view of educated Chinese, who saw themselves as different from the superstitious masses. See Bell, “Religion and Chinese Culture,” 54. 32. Skinner, “Regional Urbanization in Nineteenth-Century China,” 211–49.

. Foxes in Early Chinese Tradition 1. TPGJ, 447.316, “Hushen (Chaoye qianzai).” 2. SHJ, 6, 109, 256, 347. The quote is from 6. See Company, “Review,” for comments on and criticism of Anne Birrell’s English translation, Rémi Mathieu’s French translation, and Richard Fracasso’s Italian translation. For a book-length study of Shanhaijing, see Strassberg, Chinese Bestiary.

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3. Cited in TSJC, 520.52a, 56a. 4. Ban Gu, Baihutong, 144, 146. The translation is from Loewe, Ways to Paradise, 152 n. 144. 5. “Husi zheng qiu shou,” in Liji jishuo, tan’gong shang, 32. 6. Cited in TSJC, 520.53a. On the moral meanings of animals and their roles in constructing the sociopolitical ideal of sage rulers in early China, see Sterckx, Animal and Daemon, 123–64. 7. “Shang jiuweihu biao” (The Memorial on [the Event of Sending] the Nine-Tailed Fox) by Cao Zhi, quoted in Kaiyuan zhanjing, 116. See Yu Haoliang, “Sichuan chutu Han huaxiangzhuan zhaji,” 261. On the system of animal tributes as symbols of sage rulers’ political dominance over territories in early China, see Sterckx, Animal and Daemon, 93–122. 8. Wei Shou, Weishu, 112.2928. See also Shen Yue, Songshu, 28.803, under the furui (talismans and omens) section: “The white fox arrives when the ruler is humane and wise.” 9. TSJC, 520.55a. 10. Xu Shen, Shuowen jiezi, 206. On Han beliefs in ghosts as souls of the deceased and shamans’ role in summoning the soul, see Ying-Shih Yü, “‘O Soul, Come Back,’” especially 375. On Han shamanistic practices of trafficking with ghosts, curing illness, making divinations, and mastering the arts of the bedchamber and fertility, see Lin Fushi, Handai de wuzhe, 57–82. 11. Harper, Early Chinese Medical Literature, 72, 163, 261–62, 264. 12. TPGJ, 447.312, “Shuohu (Xuanzhong ji).” Translation is from de Groot, Religious System, 586, with slight changes. On the authorship of Xuanzhongji, see Huntington, Alien Kind, 1 n. 1. 13. Ge Hong, Baopuzi, neipian, duisu, 41–42. For an English translation, see Ware, Alchemy, Medicine, and Religion. On Ge Hong, see Campany, To Live. 14. TPGJ, “Liu Yuanding (Youyang zazu),” 454.354. 15. TPGJ, 451.339–40, “Seng Yantong (Jiyi ji).” 16. Thompson, “Death, Food, and Fertility,” 102–4. 17. Robinet, “Visualization and Ecstatic Flight,” 176–77. See also Schafer, Mao Shan in T’ang Times, 42–43. 18. Robinet, “Metamorphosis and Deliverance,” 39–46. Robinet distinguishes two levels of metamorphosis in early Chinese tradition. The metamorphosis of Daoist gods and saints is built on the idea of the Great Unity of yin and yang and follows the natural order. Magical metamorphosis accelerates, instead of simply following, the natural process of transformation. It has a superficial and destabilizing effect upon nature and thus is inferior to Daoist metamorphosis. See also Sterckx, Animal and Daemon, for various forms of animal metamorphosis and their cultural meanings in early China. 19. TPGJ, 453.350–51, “Pei Shaoyin (Xuanshi zhi)”; 453.337, “Wang An (Guangyi ji).” On exorcism, see Wang Tao (670–755), Waitai biyao, cited in Strickmann, Chinese Magical Medicine, 248–50.

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20. Kuhn, Soulstealers, 94–118. The magical fox and haircutting formed the main themes in the three major sorcery scares in 1557, 1768, and 1876. See also ter Haar, White Lotus Teachings, 173–95, 263–81. 21. Ying Shao, Fengsu tongyi, 353. See also SSJ, 205–6, story 398 for an example. 22. TPGJ, 447.314, “Sun Yan (Luoyang qielanji)”; TSJC, 520.57b. 23. Wei Shou, Weishu, 2923. Translation is from de Groot, Religious System, 598. Foxes cutting people’s hair and stealing souls are also found in the Northern Qi and the Tang. In the first month of the Wuping reign, fox demons were found in Yedu and Bingzhou. They “cut many people’s hair.” See Li Baiyao, Beiqi shu, 8.106. The passage hints at a connection between the haircutting and the abnormal rise in power of the empresses. A Tang story recounts how a local man familiar with the art of incantation ran into a woman who tried to cut his hair. The man killed her, and she turned into a dead vixen. The belief among the young men and women in this area that one could lose hair at midnight soon died out. See TPGJ, 450.332, “Jin Shouzhen (Jiwen).” 24. SSJ, 222–23, story 426. Also in TPGJ, 447.313, “Chen Xian.” The Wutong were also imagined as mountain spirits who changed themselves into various forms and bewitched humans. See Cedzich, “Cult of the Wu-t’ung/Wu-hsien,” 152–67; von Glahn, “Enchantment of Wealth,” 656–61. 25. Bai Juyi, Bai Juyi ji, 4.87–88; de Groot, Religious System, 589. 26. TPGJ, 452.340–45, “Renshi.” An English translation is in Ma and Lau, eds., Traditional Chinese Stories, 339–45. On the textual history of “Miss Ren,” see Huntington, Alien Kind, 225–28. 27. TPGJ, 454.353–54, “Ji Zhen (Xuanshi zhi).” 28. Yu Haoliang, “Jikuai huaxiang shi de shuoming,” 106–12. See also Konan Ichiro, Chūgoku no shinwa to monogatari, 46–84; Loewe, Ways to Paradise, 108–10; Shan Min, Huli xinyang zhimi, 123–42. 29. Dubs, “An Ancient Chinese Mystery Cult,” 221–39; Fracasso, “Holy Mother of Ancient China,” 15; Cahill, Transcendence and Divine Passion, 17, 23. 30. Loewe, Ways to Paradise, 87; Cahill, Transcendence and Divine Passion, 18, 32–65, 213–42. On Shangqing Daoism, see, among others, Strickmann, “Maoshan Revelations,” 1–64; Robinet, Taoist Meditation and Taoism; Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures, 6–8, 275–372. On the relationship between Daoism and popular religion in pre-Tang times, see Stein, “Religious Daoism,” 53–82; Schipper, “Taoist Ritual and Local Cults,” 101–15. On Guanyin and her relation to the Queen Mother, see Yü, Kuan-yin, especially 15–16, 337–38, 408–12, and 480–81. 31. Yilin, 213 and 179. Although the authorship of Yilin is ascribed to the Later Han scholar Jiao Yanshou, it has been proven to be a post-Han work. Huang Yunmei, Gujin weishukao buzheng, 13–18. 32. TPGJ, 56.279–78, “Xiwangmu (Jixian lu)”; Yunji qiqian (HY 1026), 100.681, 114.795 & 799. On the importance of fu, see Robinet, Taoist Meditation, 31–35. 33. Yufang bijue, cited in Ishinpo, 28.7a–b and Baptandier, “Lady Linshui,” 134. Its date should be set no later than the seventh century. See Akira Ishihara and Howard S. Levy, The Tao of Sex.

208 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45. 46.

47.

48.

49. 50. 51.

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TPGJ, “Liu Yuanding (Youyang zazu),” 454.354. Konan, Chūgoku no shinwa to monogatari, 67–68. TPGJ 447.326, “Li Yuangong” (Guangyi ji). Here I am inspired by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney’s study of the monkey as the Japanese self, in which she describes the image of the monkey as being “perceived at a higher level of abstraction than when one sees a reflective self,” and as embodying both positive and negative qualities that human agents see in themselves. OhnukiTierney, Monkey as Mirror, 133–34. See Johnson, Chinese Oligarchy, 9–11, 38, 136–37; Hartman, Han Yü, 121–22; Cheng and Dong, Tang diguo, 359–64; Ebrey, “Shifts in Marriage Finance,” 100–2. Turner, “Encounter with Freud,” 25. TPGJ, 450.333–34, “Xue Jiong” (Guangyi ji). Cheng and Dong, Tang diguo, 338–39. TPGJ, 487.550–55, “Huo Xiaoyu Zhuan.” Van Gulik, Sexual Life, 171–81; Cheng and Dong, Tang diguo, 338–39. Gulik raises the example of Yu Xuanji (844–71), a famous courtesan-poet who became a scholar’s concubine but was maltreated by his wife. In the end he left her, and she returned to her courtesan life in a Daoist monastery. She was later accused of a murder and executed. Frank Dikötter shows that the Di, a northern tribe, was associated with the dog. The characters of Man and Min referred to people from the south and shared radicals indicating reptiles. The name of the Qiang, a nomadic tribe in the northwest, was written with a sheep radical. The Rong, tribal peoples from the west in general, were described as “birds and beasts.” Dikötter, Discourse of Race, 1–20. Ding Shengshu, Gujin ziyin duizhao shouce, 74. JTS 104.3213, cited in Pulleyblank, An Lu-shan, 11. On the Tang use of hu to refer to non-Chinese, see Pulleyblank, An Lu-shan, 10–11. See also Hartman, Han Yü, 317 n. 11. On the extensive cultural exchanges between Tang China and the outside world, see Schafer, Golden Peaches of Samarkand. On the cultural distinction of hu (barbarian) and hua (Chinese) promoted by the scholars of the “old style” movement during the late Tang, see Hartman, Han Yü, 119–29, 158–59. Chen Yinque, “Huchou yu huchou,” 140–42. The connection between foxes and “barbarians” might be traced to earlier times. In a Six Dynasties story, a man surnamed Hu specialized in music and medicines. He “had body odor and always carried precious perfume to safeguard himself.” See TPGJ, 477.315 (Yiyuan), “Hu Daoqia.” For other Tang examples, see TPGJ, 448.320, “Yang Bocheng” (Guangyi ji); 449.326, “Li Yuangong” (Guangyi ji). TPGJ, 450.338–39, “Li Nün” (Guangyi ji). TPGJ, 450.330–31, “Tang canjun” (Guangyi ji). Xiang Da, “Tangdai Chang’an yu Xiyu wenming,” 13–15; Feng Chengjun and Xiang Jueming, “Guanyu Qiuci Baixing zhi taolun,” 1223–37.

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52. Beifang pishamen tianwang suijun hufa zhenyan, T. 1248, 226b. On Tantrism in the Tang, see Chou Yiliang, “Tantrism in China,” 245; Weinstein, Buddhism, 54–57. 53. T. 945, Shoulengyan jing, 19.133–35. On the identification of the fox with the Dakinis in eighth-century China, see Strickmann, Chinese Magical Medicine, 262–65. 54. Smyers, Fox and Jewel, 25; Strickmann, Chinese Magical Medicine, 264–65; Yoshino Hiroko, Kitsune, 99. They all point out Chinese influences in Japanese folklore, Tantric Buddhism, and Inari worship. Some Japanese texts maintain that Inari was brought to Japan from China during the Northern Wei. The Inari shrine was first established in 711 and was associated with the fox around the twelfth century. 55. Chou, “Tantrism in China,” 245; Weinstein, Buddhism, 54–57. 56. TPGJ, 454.352, “Zhang Jianqi”; 449.328, “Lin Jingxuan” (Xuanshi zhi); 453.346–47, “Wang Sheng” (Lingguai lu). 57. TPGJ, 448.321, “Ye Fashan” (Jiwen). For Daoist criticism of Buddhism of this period, see Zürcher, Buddhist Conquest of China, 305–7; Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures, 194–209. 58. Tang Hungluqing Yueguogong lingxu jianzu Ye Zhenren zhuan (HY 778), 6a. The dates of Ye Fashan vary according to source. Here I follow Kirkland and set his dates from 636 to 720. See Kirkland, “Tales of Thaumaturgy,” 50–51. 59. TPGJ , 26.139–42, “Ye Fashan.” TPGJ specifies that the story was from Jiyi ji and Xianzhuan shiyi. Kirkland shows that there is in fact very little evidence that Ye was an ordained Daoist committed to any Daoist thought or doctrines. But both official historians and later Daoist hagiographers commemorated him as a great master for political purposes. See Kirkland, “Tales of Thaumaturgy,” 85–86. 60. TPGJ, 449.327–28, “Wei mingfu” (Guangyi ji). 61. TPGJ, 447.317, “Da’an heshang” (Guangyi ji). I have modified the English translation from de Groot, Religious System, 591–92. 62. T. 2075, 184 a–b. 63. Faure, Rhetoric of Immediacy, 109. 64. Faure, Rhetoric of Immediacy. Heine shows that popular beliefs in foxes were integrated in Chan’s kōan tradition to elucidate philosophical meanings. Heine, Shifting Shape, Shaping Text. 65. Weinstein, Buddhism, 73–74; Teiser, Ghost Festival. 66. Barrett, Taoism Under the Tang, 19–20, 41–42; Guisso, Wu Tse-T’ien, 4–5, 35–45. 67. “Manifesto of the Expedition Against Wu Zhao,” in Duan Chengshi, Youyang zazu, qianji, 1. 9b; Guisso, “Reign of the Empress Wu,” 294–97, 303–4. The empress was challenged twice by rebellions in favor of the restoration of the Tang imperial house, in 684 and 690. Both gained limited public support and were quickly put down. 68. Guisso, Wu Tse-T’ien, 5. 69. Guisso, Wu Tse-T’ien, ii, 2; Twitchett, Official History, 142–43. Shen Jiji, who served at the History Office, was the first one to contend that the empress was a usurper and her reign illegitimate.

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70. TPGJ, 449.325, “Qianyang ling (Guangyi ji).” The story states that the locals in Silla founded a cult to the fox. This suggests the spread of the fox cult to Korea, but no conclusion can be drawn at this point. 71. TPGJ, “Jiao lianshi (Guangyi ji),” 449.326. 72. TPGJ, 451.336, “Zhangsun Jia (Guangyi ji).” 73. Hu Gangzi appears in several Tang and Song Daoist texts as a master of alchemy. See, for example, Huangdi jiuding shendan jingjue (HY 884), chapters 2 to 20. The text was compiled during the Tang, from 659 to 686; Zhang Xiansheng, Taigu tudui jing (HY 948), compiled sometime between 702 and 741; Dong Shiyuan, Longhu yuanzhi (HY 1075), allegedly revealed to a Daoist master in 789. Dadan ji (HY 898), undated, was compiled no later than the Song. On Hu Gangzi, see Chen Guofu, Daozang yuanliu xukao, 303–9. 74. On this feature of medieval Chinese religion, see Kleeman, “Expansion of the Wen-ch’ang Cult” and A God’s Own Tale. 75. Du Guangting (850–933), Daojiao lingyanji (HY 590), 10.6b–7a. 76. Li Jing was worshipped in some parts of China during the Song; see Hansen, Changing Gods, 112–13. 77. Wang Qinruo, Song Zhenzong yuzhi Yisheng baode zhenjun zhuan (HY 1275), zhong, 5a–6a. 78. Zhao Daoyi, Lishi zhenxiantidao tongjian (HY 296), 53.17b–18a. 79. Xu Song, Songhuiyao jigao, li 20, 14b–5a. 80. Both Hansen and von Glahn agree that “the intention of this edict apparently was not to eradicate popular objects of worship per se, but rather to strengthen state control over them.” Von Glahn, “Enchantment of Wealth,” 664. See also Hansen, Changing Gods, 85. On early Song reorganization of popular religion and the close relationship between clerical Daoism and the Song imperial court, see Hansen, Changing Gods, 79–104; Davis, Society and the Supernatural, 21–86; Hymes, Way and Byway, especially 147–205. 81. Li Jianguo mentions that the earliest surviving record of Daji as a fox spirit appears in a Japanese source, Gomeicho, dated to 1101. This means that by 1101 the connection between the two was already known in Japan. Daji as a fox spirit appears in the Yuan novel Wuwang faZhou pinghua and the Ming novel Fengshen yanyi. Li Jianguo, Zhongguo hu wenhua, 151–54; 170–75. Some scholars believe that Wuwang faZhou pinghua had its origins in the Song. See Luo Zongtao, “Yuan Jian’an Yushi xinke wuzhong pinghua shitan,” 409; Tan Zhengbi and Tan Xun, Guben xijian xiaoshuo huikao, 182. 82. Hong Mai, Yijianzhi, ding, 19.695, “Jiangnan muke.” 83. Kou Zongshi, Tujing yanyi bencao (HY 630), 29.4a; Su Song (1020–1101), cited in TSJC, 520.51b. 84. Yan Shou, Zongjing lu, T. 2016, 15.494b. See Cedzich, “Cult of Wu-t’ung/Wu-hsien,” 161. 85. Zhao Daoyi, Lishi zhenxiantidao tongjian (HY 296), 53.316c. On the Thunder Rites and their bureaucratic functions to fight with “perverse” practices, see Strickmann,

2. huxian and the spread of the fox cult

86. 87. 88.

89. 90. 91.

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“Sōdai no raigi,” 15–28; Boltz, “Not by the Seal of Office Alone,” 241–305; Saso, “Orthodox and Heterodox in Taoist Ritual,” 329–35. On Wang Wenqing and the Five Thunder Rites, see Hymes, Way and Byway, 147–70. SS, 66.1452. See also YJXZ, “Xuanhe guaishi,” 103, story 100, compiled in the Yuan. SS, 287.9650–51. Wang Pizhi, Mianshui yantanlu, 113; Lü Xizhe, Chuanjiang zaji, in TSJC, 520.55a. Wang Pizhi passed the jinshi exam in 1067 and served as a local official for some thirty years. Lü Xizhe’s grandfather Lü Yijian and father Lü Gongzhu both served as prime ministers at the Song court. Lü Xizhe himself befriended Wang Anshi and studied with prominent Neo-Confucian scholars like Cheng Yi, Cheng Hao, and Zhang Zai. Lü Xizhe, Chuanjiang zaji, in TSJC, 520.55a. Yuan Haowen, Xu Yijianzhi, 247. Ibid.; Lin Pu, Jimo xianzhi, 12.42a–b. Another version of the story, in TSJC, 71.55a, cites a Ming or earlier edition of Laiyang fuzhi. It recounts that the foxes headed northeast instead. Jimo was a county by the seashore to the southeast. To its northeast was Dengzhou, exactly where the following bewitching incident happened; therefore, the TSJC version makes more sense.

. Huxian and the Spread of the Fox Cult 1. Lang Ying, Qixiu leigao, 48.9b–11a. Lang was born into a family of antique dealers. Although he loved to read and enjoyed fame as an author and connoisseur of antiques, he left school at a young age and never took civil service examinations. See L. Goodrich and Fang, eds., Dictionary of Ming Biography, 791–93. 2. On zoological features of foxes, see Gao et al., Zhongguo dongwu zhi, 8.52–64. See also Smyers, Fox and Jewel, 87–89; Huntington, Alien Kind, 7–8. 3. Shen Defu, Wanli yehuobian, 28.31a. 4. Qian Xiyan, Kuaiyuan zhiyi, 14.14b. 5. LZZY, “Zhuohu,” 22. 6. Hong Mai’s Yijianzhi drew sources mainly from the Southern Song territories south of the Yangzi River. It contains thirteen tales about fox spirits: ten from his home region of Jiangxi, one from Hunan, one from Zhejiang, and one from Anhui, a town on the northern bank of the Yangzi River. YJXZ of the early Yuan (houji, 407–12) contains six fox stories, all set in south China, in Fujian, Zhejiang, Sichuan, and Jiangsu. 7. Shen Defu, Wanli yehuobian, 28.31a. 8. Xie Zhaozhe, Wu zazu, 9.13b–14a and 15.29a. For Lang Ying’s comments, see Qixiu leigao, 48.9b. 9. LZZY, 1417, “Wutong.” 10. In Wang Tonggui’s Ertan leizeng, a story about a Wutong spirit is listed under the category of “fox” that includes seventeen fox stories. Zhang Jingyun’s Qiuping

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11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

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xinyu (9.21a) recounts that an old man appeared when a young boy cried about the wrongful death of his grandparents at a Wutong shrine. The old man later identified himself: “I am not human. I am a fox.” Shen Defu, Wanli yehuobian, 28.31a. YWCT, 111. Hu Pu’an, Zhonghua quanguo fengsuzhi, xiabian, 5.12. Dongling xiaozhi, 5.16, in Li Shouju, Huxian xinyang yu hulijing gushi, 80. Wu Chichang, Kechuang xianhua, 2, chuji. 6b–8a, “Wuzhen sou.” Foxes and wild cats (li) are not indigenous animals in Taiwan. See Gao, Zhongguo dongwuzhi, 8.52; Li Shouju, Huxian xinyang yu hulijing gushi, 5. Li Xiangliu and Li Da, Fuzhou minsu, 291; Li Shouju, Huxian xinyang yu hulijing gushi, 85. Zhang Tao, Jinmen zaji, zhong. 20b; Xue Fucheng, Yong’an biji, 134; Owen, “Animal Worship,” 250; Nagao, Shina minzoku shi, 1:250; Ioka Soho, Chugoku kita shuzoku ko, 375; Li Wei-tsu, “Four Sacred Animals,” 1–2; Anne Goodrich, Peking Paper Gods, 75; Wang Jinglin and Xu Tao, Zhongguo minjian xinyang fengsu cidian, 369, 376. Li Qingchen, Zuicha zhiguai, 3.17a–b. Nagao, Shina minzoku shi, 2.10. Doré, Researches Into Chinese Superstitions, 696. Lu Lianyuan, Wanquan xianzhi, 9.46a–b. Song Dazhang, Zhuoxian zhi, babian, quan. 7b–8a. Zhang Ping, Cangxian zhi, 12.26a–b. Ding Shiliang and Zhao Fang, Zhongguo difangzhi minsu ziliao huibian, Dongbei juan. See also Pak Sang-gyu, Manju pungsok torok, 34, 80, 94, 95, 96, 104, 105, 145 for early twentieth-century photos of many fox shrines, temples, and tablets in Manchuria. Takizawa, Manshū no gaison shinkō, 220–42. Wang Jiegong, Andong xianzhi, 7.43b. Zhao Xingde, Yixian zhi, 9.45b. Chen Jiyan, Zhangbei xianzhi, 5.126a; Lu Lianyuan, Wanquan xianzhi, 9.36a–b; Cheng Qilu, Wu’an xianzhi, 9.10b; Ding and Zhao, Zhongguo difangzhi minsu ziliao huibian, Huabeijuan, 312; Zhang Guozeng, “Hebei Funingxian de zongjiao mixin,” 282; Nagao, Shina minzoku shi, 2.91–92, 107–12; Uchida, Chūgoku nōson no kazoku to,” 334. Hujing is used as a neutral term at least from the Yuan to the Ming. In the Yuan collection of YJXZ, two stories mention fox spirits as hujing: one refers to a bewitching woman and the other to an innocuous Daoist priest. See houji, 408–9 and 409–10, story 227, “Hujing jianü” and story 230, “Hujing meiren.” A Ming fox who cured illnesses (Lu Yanzhi, Shuoting shang. 6b; see chapter 4) was called “hujing,” even though no pejorative meanings were involved. Another Ming collection, Xu Changzuo’s Yanshan conglu, mentions twice that hujing was called “pi laohu” (fur tiger) in the vernacular languages of Shandong and “hei pizi” (black fur) in Hebei, implying that hujing might not be a completely colloquial term in Hebei and Shan-

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30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

37.

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dong (8.4b; 22.5b). The Ming scholar Feng Menglong notes that “[All stories in] this chapter are about hujing.” “Hujing” here is a neutral term referring to all different types of foxes in Tang stories. Taiping guangjichao, 77.2032–73. However, the word was no longer neutral in the nineteenth century. In one account of this time, a fox dwelled in a building in Peiyi, northern Jiangsu. If people called her xian, she would not do harm. But if they called her hujing, she would throw bricks and hurt people. See Xu Qiucha, Wenjian yici, 2.7a, “Hunü wangyue.” Robinet, Taoism, 49. See also Girardot, “Hsien,” 476; Seidel, “Chronicle of Taoist Studies,” 248. Campany, To Live, 4–5, quote from n. 4. Baopuzi, neipian, 2.19–20, quoted in Campany, To Live, 75. On becoming xian by means of shijie, see Robinet, “Metamorphosis and Deliverance from the Corpse”; Cedzich, “Corpse Deliverance”; Campany, To Live, 52–60, 75–80. Both Cedzich and Campany show that shijie is in fact a procedure during which a Chinese adept casts off his physical forms, like a cicada casts off its shell, in order to escape from the otherworld’s administrative system of death registration and thereby become a xian. Campany therefore proposes a more appropriate translation for shijie, “escape by means of a simulated corpse.” Li and Kan are two trigrams in the Book of Changes. Li is represented by a yin line between two yang lines and symbolizes the yang containing the yin. Kan is represented by a yang line between two yin lines and symbolizes the yin holding the yang. Li and Kan are the most favored in texts about Daoist alchemical purification. Dragon and Tiger are also symbols of yin and yang. The terms are frequently used in Daoist interior alchemy. See Robinet, Taoism, 235–37. The Unsullied Woman is a female master who teaches the art of sex as a way to gain transcendence in many sex manuals during and after the Han. The most famous manual is named after her, Sunü jing (The Classic of the Unsullied Woman). The name continued to be used as a symbol of sexual arts in later centuries. See van Gulik, Sexual Life, 74–76; Campany, To Live, 81 n. 221. On a critique of van Gulik’s view of female sexuality, see Charlotte Furth, “Rethinking Van Gulik,” 125–46. YWCT, 463–64. This case is also discussed in Huntington, Alien Kind, 300–1. For other similar comments on the fox’s pursuit of xian-hood, see YWCT, 54, 77. On the “dual cultivation,” see Needham, Science and Civilization, 5.239; Sivin, “The Theoretical Background of Elixir Alchemy,” 212; Despeux, Immortelles de la Chine Ancienne, 223–27. Harper, “The Sexual Arts of Ancient China,” 539–93; Despeux, Immortelles de la Chine Ancienne, 223–27; Wiles, Art of the Bedchamber, 26–28; Robinet, Taoism, 123, 227; Gulik, 70–90, 121–60, 192–207, 223–29, 253–25, 268–80, 285–87, 313–16. Gulik records two Qing incidents in Shandong in which male and female sect members, including gentry, were led by a Daoist priest and physically practiced “dual cultivation” for longevity. The government cracked down on them, for “they offended against good morals.” Gulik traced these practices to the Yellow Turban revolt during the Han.

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38. YWCT, 54. Later in the story, He used the fox to criticize Song Neo-Confucianism, a clear reflection of Qing evidential scholarship. See Huntington, Alien Kind, 292– 300 for a full translation and discussion of He Xiu’s stories. On Ji Yun and the evidential scholarship, see Chan, Discourse on Foxes and Ghosts, 113–30. 39. Li Wei-tsu, “Four Sacred Animals,” 4–5. 40. Ibid., 5. Li Wei-tsu translates “ju ze chengxing, san ze chengqi” as “to assume certain transitory shapes in gatherings and to give up this shape when the gathering is over,” and tiandao as the natural order. He also translates sazai as “to cause epidemic,” but as he himself points out, the zai has to be limited to only one member of the family and would not reach the scale of an epidemic. 41. Hong Mai, Yijianzhi, ding, 19.696. The same passage is also translated by Cedzich in “Cult of the Wu-t’ung/Wu-hsien,” 166. Cedzich renders xian as “immortal” in both cases. 42. Li Wei-tsu, 26. Such expressions were used in many places in China. See Potter, “Cantonese Shamanism.” 43. Nagao, Shina minzoku shi, 3.52. 44. LZZY, 691. For discussion of this story, see chapter 4, and Huntington, Alien Kind, 153–56. 45. Chen Yinque, “Du Yingying zhuan,” 107; Zhan Dan, “Xianji heliu de wenhua yiyun”; Schafer, Divine Woman, especially 165–85; Despeux, Immotelles de la Chine Ancienne. On Yu Xuanji, see also chapter 1 n. 43. For an English translation of “You xianku,” see Levy, Dwelling of Playful Goddesses. 46. Chang, Late Ming Poet, 42; Wai-yee Li, Enchantment and Disenchantment, 71, 90. 47. Yanyibian, 4.52–54, “Shaoshi xianshu”; 36.367, “Yan Lingjun”; 36.370, “Wang Tuan’er.” 48. Niu Sengru, Xuanguai lu, “Huashan ke,” 120–21. On Humei congtan, see below. 49. On shijie, see n. 32 above. 50. Zeng Zao, Leishuo, 11.16a–b. His other famous work was Daoshu (Pivot of the Dao). 51. Liu Shoumei, Chunquan wenjianlu, 10a; LZZY, 430, “Maohu.” See also Yangzhou meng, “Zhao Shijing,” in Lu Lin, Qingdai biji xiaoshuo leibian, jingguai juan, 53–55. 52. “Huixian ji” in Zhang Chao, Yuchu xinzhi, 14.ab–4b. See also Huntington for discussion of the meanings and various versions of this story, Alien Kind, 236–47. 53. Xu Dishan, Fuji mixin de yanjiu, 7–20; Jordan and Overmyer, Flying Phoenix, 36–39. For detailed discussion of Zigu, see chapter 4. 54. Chen Qiyuan, Yongxianzhai biji, 2.8b, “Mixin fuji shouhuo.” 55. Huntington, Alien Kind, 158 n. 69. 56. I am grateful for the suggestion of deliberate mystification by the anonymous reviewer. 57. Lu Yunzhong, Putonghua de qingsheng he erhua, 110–11; Li Sijing, Hanyu eryinshi yanjiu, 42. 58. On the reprint of the TPGJ boosting Ming literati interest in foxes, see Huntington, Alien Kind, 25.

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59. Qian Xiyan, Kuaiyuan, 14.8a; Shen Defu, Wanli yehuobian, 28.31a–b. Menstrual blood was considered an important ingredient in the Daoist practice for prolonging life, especially for female practitioners. On the use of menstrual blood in Chinese tradition, see Despeux, Immortelles de la Chine Ancienne, 215–19; Furth, Flourishing Yin, 74–77, 92–93, 214–16, 292–93; Cohen, History in Three Keys, 130 n. 54, 141, 143. 60. Little is known about the author, Mochizi. The book is mentioned in only one Qing bibliography, Qianqingtang shumu, with no information beyond its title and length. It contains five juan and is organized in chronological order according to the internal dates of the stories, including pre-Tang history and literature, Tang, Song, Yuan, and early Ming stories. The last story has an internal date of early Zhengde (1506–1520) reign and also appears in Lu Yanzhi’s Shuoting, which has a 1535 preface. All these suggest that the book was produced no earlier than the Zhengde reign but prior to the late Wanli (1573–1619), and it might have remained little known during the Ming and Qing. 61. Feng Menglong, Taiping guangjichao, 1–2. On Feng Menglong, see Lu Shulun, Feng Menglong yanjiu, especially 19–30; on works of Feng Menglong, see Yang Shuhui, Appropriation and Representation. On Pingyao zhuan, see Hanan, “Composition of the P’ing-yao chuan,” 201–19. 62. On the timing and the author, and for an English summary of Xingshi yinyuanzhuan, see Xu Beiwen, “Xingshi yinyuanzhuan jianlun,” 2–10; Plaks, “After the Fall,” 543–80; Dudbridge, “Women Pilgrims to T’ai-shan,” 39 and “A Pilgrim in Seventeenth-Century Fiction,” 230–32. 63. The use of hujing is passim in Xizhousheng, Xingshi yinyuanzhuan; see, for example, 12–13, 72–73, 186, 212, 214, 252, 393. In two places the fox is also referred as pihu, the local term for fox; see 1213, 1245. 64. Xizhousheng, Xingshi yinyuanzhuan, 212–14, 1314, 1319. 65. Zhang Chao, Yuchu xinzhi, 14.2b–4b. 66. Zhang Jingyun, Qiuping xinyu, “Laoxian shaoxian,” 12.19b. 67. For “huxian,” see YWCT, 77, 464; “xianjia,” 110, 420; “hushen,” 79, 194. 68. He Bang’e, Yetan suilu, 8. 69. Xu Kun, Liuya waibian, preface and 10.28a–b, “Yinjiu laoren”; Changbai haogezi, Yingchuang yicao, chubian, 3.64, “Yinzhen”; 3.76, “Qingmei”; erbian, 1.117, “Ruocui.” 70. Their works include He Bang’e, Yetan suilu; Zhang Jingyun, Qiuping xinyu; Xu Kun, Liuya waibian; Changbai haogezi, Yingchuang yicao; Liu Shoumei, Chunquan wenjianlu; and Zeng Yandong, Xiaodoupeng. Chunquan wenjianlu’s author, Liu Shoumei, lived in Beijing, and most of his stories were collected from the Beijing area. Xiaodoupeng’s author, Zeng Yandong, was from Shandong. Zeng had a whole section of fox stories, which he named “xianhu,” but the word xian was rarely used in the stories. He used xian in only two places, once for a haunting spirit and once for an old lady, both related to spirit activities. See 173, “Liu jijiu,” and 273, “Li Yinan.”

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71. Chan, Discourse on Foxes and Ghosts, 55–75; He Bang’e, Yetan suilu, “Zaji wuze,” 83–89. For a discussion of He Bang’e tales and his social circles, see Huntington, Alien Kind, 34–59. 72. Rawski, Education and Popular Literacy, 115–18. She points out that it was not until the late nineteenth century that book traders from north China began to play an important role in the printing market. 73. Chan, Discourse on Foxes and Ghosts, 11–17; the quote is from 15. 74. Huntington, Alien Kind, 30–31. 75. See for example, “Huxian zhenglun” and 5.7a, “Huxian junei,” in Yuan Mei’s Xu Zibuyu, 5.4b. They are originally in YWCT, 6–7 and 82. In the preface to Zibuyu, Yuan says that he gathered the stories purely for fun, and “not because I was moved by something.” Zeitlin argues that by saying so, Yuan was “deliberately reacting against the extravagant eighteenth-century claim for Liaozhai as a product of selfexpression.” See Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange, 29 and 230 n. 54. 76. Deng’s collection has fourteen sections, covering a wide range of topics on spirits, gods, ghosts, monks and priests, murders, divine punishment by thunder, trips to the underworld, retribution, and fate. 77. Zhao Yi, Yanpu zaji, 2.39. 78. Huang Kaijun, Yishui zayan, 5.19a, “Huxian zhenjie.” 79. Yue Jun, Ershi lu, 3.327–28. 80. Yuan Mei, Xu Zibuyu, 9.4b–5a, “Lanzhushan beilai daxian.” 81. Qian Yong, Lüyuan conghua, 16.6b–7a, “Guanku huxian.” 82. Li Qingchen, Zuicha zhiguai, 1.7–9, “Wang Jianping”; 4.39a, “Bai furen.” See also 1.31a–34a, “Liu’er.” 83. Xue Fucheng, Yong’an biji, “Huxian tan lidai liren,” 178–84 and “Beiqi shougong laohu,” 169–77. The second story was later published in Shenbao, a periodical popular in Shanghai. Similar stories are also found in other collections, such as Xu Feng’en, Licheng, 81, 94, 132; Yang Fenghui, Nan’gao biji, 18, “Huxian”; 27, “Hu ligu.” Wang Tao (1828–1897), a native of Suzhou, wrote extensively on his life in Shanghai, where he frequented pleasure quarters. He denounced all stories about fox magic and fox transformation, but imitated Pu Songling’s LZZY. Many pleasure and fantasy women in Wang’s works were named “xian.” See his preface to Songyin manlu and 2.49–53, “He Huixian”; 59–63, “Zheng Zhixian”; 4.163–67, “Hu Qionghua”; Songbin suohua, 1.15b, “Ni Yourong”; 2.1a, “Wei Yuebo.” 84. Li Wei-tsu, “Four Sacred Animals,” 2.

. Foxes and Domestic Worship 1. Da Ming huidian, 81.1265. Cited in Overmyer, “Attitudes Toward Popular Religion,” 205. 2. Wolf, “Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors,” 131–82; Ahern, Cult of Dead, 91–93, 116, 127; Feuchtwang, “Domestic and Communal Worship,” 106–7, 123–29. Scholars of China have challenged the Stove God’s bureaucratic functions and discussed its

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7. 8. 9.

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11. 12. 13. 14.

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many “unofficial” features. Nonetheless, they all agree that the god is an outsider who supervises the family on behalf of society at large and represents either official or public power when it is perceived in relation to ancestors and ghosts. See Chard, “Folktales” and “Rituals and Scriptures”; Hymes, Way and Byway, 258–60. For the broad meanings of gui, see Yu, “Ghosts in Fiction,” 398–99. LZZY, 158, “Yingning”; 260, “Qiaoniang”; YWCT, 161. Jordan, Gods, Ghosts and Ancestors, 136, 138–71; Huntington, Alien Kind, 120–23. Zeitlin, “Embodying the Disembodied,” 245. Huntington (Alien Kind, 97) rightly points out that in English “haunting” is associated with horror, but the Chinese concept of zuosui is “making trouble.” YWCT, 449. On the fox’s art of caibu, see Hammond, “Vulpine Alchemy.” This type of story is discussed in Hanan, Chinese Vernacular Story, 44–49; Yu, “Ghost in Fiction,” 427; and especially, Huntington, Alien Kind, 171–204. “Ghost marriages” and pacification of ghosts have been amply documented by anthropologists and can be traced to earlier traditions; see Teiser, Ghost Festival; Jordan, Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors, 140–55, 161; Wolf, “Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors,” 148–52, 172–73; Potter, “Cantonese Shamanism,” 216; Harrell, “When a Ghost Becomes a God,” 193–206; Weller, Unities and Diversities, 60–65; Resistance and Rebellion,113–68; and “Matricidal Magistrates and Gambling Gods,” 250–68; Zeitlin, “Embodying the Disembodied,” 249. Ming-Qing law prescribed ghost pacification rituals to be held by all levels of society and performed by officials. Overmyer, “Attitudes Toward Popular Religion,” 209–11. See, for example, YWCT, 21, 542; Zeng Yandong, Xiaodoupeng, 14.271–74, “Li Yinan”; LZZY, 133–36, “Dongsheng.” Huntington discusses mei as an expression of sexual parasitism in Alien Kind, 172–83. YWCT, 349; see also 28, 372, 449, 476. YWCT, 90. The same idea is expressed in YWCT, 216, and Zhang Jingyun, Qiuping xinyu, 11.23b, “Fangjiayuan hu.” Xu Kun, Liuya wanbian, 3.4a–5b, “Cuifang.” LZZY, 220–21. Similar stories include “Wenyu” in Changbai haogezi, Yingchuang yicao, 39–43 and “Li Yinan” in Zeng Yandong, Xiaodoupeng, 271–74. For discussion of this story, see also Li Wai-yee, Enchantment and Disenchantment, 122–36; Zeitlin, “Embodying the Disembodied,” 244–47; Huntington, Alien Kind, 262– 64. LZZY, 225; Zeitlin, “Embodying the Disembodied,” 245. I use Zeitlin’s translation with minor changes. Zeitlin, “Embodying the Disembodied,” 245–46. Lu Yanzhi, Shuoting, shang. 6a. Ahern, Cult of the Dead, 91; Thompson, “Death, Food, and Fertility,” 87. Lu Yanzhi, Shuoting, shang. 6a. Rawski, “Economic and Social Foundations,” 9–11; Berling, “Religions and Popular Culture,” 188–218, especially 202–12; Brokaw, Ledgers of Merit and Demerit; Sakai Tadao, “Confucianism,” 331–66.

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21. Dongxuan zhuren, Shuyiji, zhong, 11b–12a. Arthur Wolf discussed this aspect of ancestor worship in “Gods, Ghosts and Ancestors,” 161. 22. LZZY, 1210, “Xiaomei.” 23. LZZY, 104–11, “Wang Cheng.” 24. Zhu Yiqing, Maiyouji, 7, 120–21, “Zhao Sunyi.” 25. The conflation of the fox’s roles as mother and as shaman had its roots in popular tradition. Foxes were close companions of shamans and mediums through whose spiritual assistance the living made journeys into the other world. In many parts of China people make village shamans and mediums “fictive mothers” of their children in order to ward off evil afflictions upon them. Potter, “Cantonese Shamanism,” 207, 222–24; Li Shouju, Huxian xinyang yu hulijing gushi, 94–95. 26. Ahern, Cult of the Dead, 176; on concubines during the Ming and Qing, see Mann, Precious Records, 250 n. 84; Rubie S. Watson, “Wives, Concubines, and Maids,” 231–55; Bray, Technology and Gender, 353. Bray distinguishes the different roles of wives and concubines and their access to family resources both before and after their death. Concubines would have a place on the ancestral altar after giving birth to a son. See also Ebrey, Inner Quarters, 227–31 on the marginal position of concubines in families during the Song. 27. Hong Mai, Yijianzhi, dingzhi, 19.699, “Chenshi qi.” 28. Xue Fucheng, Yong’an biji, 134. 29. Rev. G. Owen, “Animal Worship,” 249. 30. Li Wei-tsu, “Four Sacred Animals,” 8–11; Nagao, Shina minzoku shi, 2.10, 97, 107–12 and 3.52; Fan Dirui, “Liuxing Ludong nongcun zhong de mixin jinji,” 265. 31. Xu Changzuo, Yanshan conglu, 8.4a. 32. Ibid. 33. Von Glahn, “Enchantment of Wealth”; Weller, Resistance, Chaos, and Control,113– 53; “Matricidal Magistrates and Gambling Gods,” 257–66. 34. Skinner, “Regional Urbanization,” 211–49 and “Cities and the Hierarchy,” 275–351; Huang, Peasant Economy, 69–71. 35. On Neo-Confucian revision of kinship ideas, see Waltner, Getting an Heir, 17, 22; Bray, Technology and Gender, 283–85; on the practice of family division (fenjia) in north China, see Huang, Peasant Economy, 69–121; on the cult of female chastity, see T’ien Ju-k’ang, Male Anxiety and Female Chastity; Elvin, “Female Virtue and the State,” 111–52; Carlitz, “Social Uses of Female Virtue,” 117–52. Von Glahn shows that the sex-for-wealth deal in the Wutong cult happened exactly at a time when the cult of female chastity grew to a remarkable level in Chinese society. Von Glahn, “Enchantment of Wealth,” 685. 36. Von Glahn, “Enchantment of Wealth,” 694. 37. Von Glahn, “Enchantment of Wealth,” 698–701. The most representative study on the sociological significance of spirit possession is I. M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion. Lewis argues that “peripheral cults” are generally considered amoral and that through possession they provide protection and opportunities for protest for

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38. 39.

40. 41.

42. 43.

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45. 46.

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48.

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marginal groups, such as women in a male-dominated society and men of low social position. Wang Tonggui, Xinke ertan, 14.16b–17a, “Hushu nü bian nanzi.” The same story is also in Zhao Jishi, Jiyuan jisuoji, 5.9b. YWCT, 422. Another contemporary story recounts that in a gentry family, a young maid stole some money to help her beggar mother, but was caught by the master and severely beaten. A fox, who had been living in the house for years and never did any harm, now came out crying: “She is only ten years old, yet for serving her mother she has to endure such a harsh punishment.” The master felt greatly ashamed and stopped beating her. Deng Xuan,Yitan kexinlu, 22.9a, “Loushang ku.” YWCT, 37, 528, 356, 509. Gates, “The Commoditization of Chinese Women,” 813–19 (the quote is from 816); Gronewold, Beautiful Merchandise, 34–50; Mann, Precious Records, 41–44; Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society, 243–47, 282–87. Sommer discusses many relevant legal cases from Shuntian prefecture in Hebei. Turner, “Encounter with Freud,” 25. Also quoted in chapter 1. The Wutong shrines in Jiangnan were also small. They “could be found in nearly every courtyard, usually inside the gate leading to the street.” See von Glahn, “Enchantment of Wealth,” 678–79. For examples, see “Tie gongji,” in He Bang’e, Yetan suilu, 246–48; Zhang Jingyun, Qiuping xinyu, 8.23b, “Zhaiyi”; 9.7a–8b, “Zhou Xiaolian.” In north China, wheat was the staple of the urban and upper classes, and sorghum, maize, and sweet potatoes were the staples of the lower classes by the eighteenth century; the poor rarely consumed fruit or meat. See Simoons, Food in China, 193, 298; Huang, Peasant Economy, 10. Eggs and chickens were commonly used in rituals of betrothal, weddings, and childbirth and on the nuptial eve all over China as symbols of fertility. See Eberhard, Local Cultures, 419–21. Wang Jian, Qiudeng conghua, 9, 22b–24a. These thirty stories are “Jiaonuo,” 57–65; “Qingfeng,”112–18; “Yingning,” 147–59; “Hu Sijie,” 201–4; “Lianxiang,” 220–32; “Qiaoniang,” 256–64; “Hongyu,” 276–83; “Quandeng,” 406–7; “Huqie,” 409–13; “A Xia,” 422–25; “Maohu,” 429–31; “Qingmei,” 444–53; “Xin shisi niang,” 535–47; “Shuangdeng,” 550–51; “Yatou,” 600–6; “Feng Sanniang,” 610–17; “Humeng,” 618–22; “Wu xiaolian,” 642–45; “Hehua sanniangzi,” 682–86; “Guo Sheng,” 696–98; “Yun Cuixian,” 748–54; “Zhen hou,” 981–84; “A Xiu,” 991–98; “Xiao Cui,” 1000–8; “Chang’e,” 1071–79; “Huo nu,” 1090–97; “Chou hu,” 1107–9; “Fengxian,” 1177–84; “Xiaomei,” 1210–16; “Heng niang,” 1431–35. Barr, “Disarming Intruders,” 501–17. See also Wai-yee Li, Enchantment and Disenchantment, 108–10, 126–27, 128–36; Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange, 174–81; Huntington, Alien Kind, 224–89, especially 227–29. Both Li and Huntington agree that romance with fox women was a process in which Qing literati writers tamed the strange and brought it into the existing social order. Xu Kun, Liuya waibian, 4.1a–2a, “Xiaonian.”

220 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

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YWCT, 89–90. Barr, “Disarming Intruders,” 517. Rubie Watson, “Afterword,” 348. See LZZY, 217–18, “Jiu you” and Fang Yuankun, Liangpeng yehua, 1.16b–18a, “Gulou hu,” respectively. Nagao, Shina minzoku shi, vol. 1, 131; Owen, “Animal Worship,” 254. Owen notes that these gods “are always represented as grave-looking Chinese mandarins with red, blue and white buttons.” See also Takizawa, Manshū no gaison shinkō, 211; Anne Goodrich, Peking Paper Gods, 100. In Anhui and northern Jiangsu, foxes were seen as three sisters, Dagu (eldest aunt), Ergu (second aunt), and Sangu (third aunt). They were collectively addressed as Xiangu laotai, which was rendered by Doré as “Venerable Fairy Damsels.” Doré, Researches Into Chinese Superstitions, 695–96. Doré also includes a popular print of the three fox sisters between pages 552 and 553. In the Beijing area, “fox spirits were known as Sanku (the Three Aunts or Aunt the Third), sometimes as Xiangu (divine aunt) or Xiangulaotai (divine granny).” Anne Goodrich, Peking Temple, 193. Wang Shuncun includes a popular print of a female fox deity in Paper Joss, 56. Other titles include Hu Taiye (Grandpa Hu), Hu Ertaiye (Grandpa Hu the Second), and Hu Taitai (Ms. Hu). See Li Wei-tsu, “Four Sacred Animals,” 3; Nagao, Shina minzoku shi, 2.10, 91; 3.52; Takizawa, Manshū no gaison shinkō, 208–12, 217–19, 220–42; Fan Dirui, “Liuxing Ludong nongcun zhong de mixin jinji,” 265; Zhang Guozeng, “Hebei Funingxian de zongjiao mixin,” 282; Uchida, Chūgoku nōson no kazoku to shinkō, 323–40; Ioka Soho, Chūgoku kita shuzoku ko, 372. Nagao, Shina minzoku shi, 2.91; Takizawa, Manshū no gaison shinkō, 225, 228, 240. Owen, “Animal Worship,” 254; Li Wei-tsu, “Four Sacred Animals,” 2. Li Wei-tsu, “Four Sacred Animals,” 8–12. The quote is from 11. Zhang Tao, Jinmen zaji, zhong. 20. Huntington, Alien Kind, 151. Sangren, “Female Gender,” 11, 14.

. Foxes and Spirit Mediums 1. Many scholars have reached the consensus that the degree-holding gentry elite was relatively weak in rural north China. For a summary, see Esherick and Rankin, Chinese Local Elites, 21–22. Duara shows that in the early twentieth century, the elite in north China established their moral and political leadership in local communities through patronage of popular religious cults. Duara, Culture, Power, and the State, 118–57. 2. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion, 59–113. 3. The male fox medium I found in Shaanxi belonged to the same category (see below and chapter 5). The personalities of fox mediums Dubois found in contemporary Cang county include both men and women. Dorfman’s informants in contempo-

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

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rary Hebei identified themselves as nongming, peasants, and believed themselves powerless in relation to the party state. Another telling example is Lady Linshui, a spirit with sexual connotations similar to that of the fox in some ways. Male mediums assume women’s roles in shamanistic rituals of Lady Linshui’s cult. See Dubois, “Spirits, Sectarians and Xiangtou”; Dorfman, “Spirits of Reform”; Baptandier, “Lady Linshui,” 116. Li Wei-tsu, “Four Sacred Animals,” 26. Lu Yanzhi, Shuoting, shang. 6b. Doré, Researches Into Chinese Superstitions, 548. Li Wei-tsu, “Four Sacred Animals,” 76. Baptandier, “Lady Linshui,” 133. Li Wei-tsu, “Four Sacred Animals,” 26–27. I have changed Li’s translation of shenxian from “fairy” to “spirit xian” and his use of “ghost” to “spirit.” See, for example, Lewis, Ecstatic Religion, 37–99; Eliade, Shamanism, 33–144; Li Wei-tsu, “Four Sacred Animals,” 25–29; Potter, “Cantonese Shamanism,” 207–31; Jordan, Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors, 67–84. Li Wei-tsu, “Four Sacred Animals,” 30. The names of all my informants in this and next chapter are disguised. Doré, Researches Into Chinese Superstitions, 550. Li Wei-tsu, “Four Sacred Animals,” 29–45. See, for example, Overmyer, Folk Buddhist Religion, 162–204; Naquin, “Transmission of White Lotus Sectarianism”; Dean, Lord of the Three in One, 96–136. Doré, Researches Into Chinese Superstitions, 551–54; Li Wei-tsu, “Four Sacred Animals,” 27; Dubois, “Spirits, Sectarians, and Xiangtou.” Dubois shows that in contemporary Cangzhou, the first form is common, and the second form is rare. Zhang Jingyun, Qiuping xinyu, 12.19b. Li Jinghan, Dingxian shehui diaocha, 398–99. Li Wei-tsu, “Four Sacred Animals,” 72. Ibid., 71–72. The term “tankou” refers to the shrine of a “tanxian,” a spirit medium. Li Wei-tsu uses “magician” here to refer to spirit mediums. LZZY, 788–90. Huntington also discusses fox haunting and fox lodgers in terms of domestic chaos and order; Alien Kind, 96–123. In Chinese families, parents and children tended to develop a type of contract relationship. The economic evaluation of daughters was reflected by the fact that the female infanticide rate was high because raising a girl was regarded as a drain of family resources. Young girls were naturally taken as family properties that could be exchanged for the wife of a son, or sold as a concubine, slave, or prostitute. Gates, “The Commoditization of Chinese Women,” 814–16; Gronewold, Beautiful Merchandise, 34–50; Cohen, House United, 72–73. Gates, “The Commoditization of Chinese Women,” 813; Barr, “Disarming Intruders,” 517. For literary images of unruly wives and daughters-in-law, see Dudbridge, “Women Pilgrims to T’ai Shan,” 39–64; Wu, Chinese Virago and Lioness Roars;

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25. 26.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35.

36.

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McMahon, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists. For anthropological studies of the marginal position of daughters-in-law in traditional Chinese families, see Cohen, House United, 196–98; Ahern, “Power and Pollution,” 199–201; Judd, “Niangjia,” 525–44. Ahern, “Power and Pollution,” 199–200. Davis, Society and the Supernatural, 87–170. On the complementary role of Daoist fashi and spirit mediums in exorcistic rituals, see also Schipper, Taoist Body, 44–54; Lagerwey, Taoist Ritual, 216–17. The most popular story describes Zigu as a scholar-official’s concubine during the Tang who suffered maltreatment by the wife and was murdered by her in the latrine. Another version tells that she was a favorite concubine of Emperor Gaozu (206–195 b.c.) of the Han dynasty. After the emperor’s death, she was killed in the latrine by order of the jealous Empress Lü. According to Nagao, Zigu was worshipped on the same day of the year in similar ways but under different names all over China. The manikins were made with a variety of materials, such as straw, basting spoons, baskets, sifters, or calabashes used to draw water. Jordan and Overmyer maintain that from the Song on, the automatic writings featuring the Zigu spirit were favored by male literati, but Nagao shows that girls and women were still heavily involved in the ritual of “inviting Zigu.” See Ye Dehui et al., Sanjiao yuanliu soushen daquan, 163; Nagao, Shina minzoku shi, 2.519–40; Xu Dishan, Fuji mixin de yanjiu, 10–18; Jordan and Overmyer, Flying Phoenix, 38–39. Fengshen yanyi, ascribed to Xu Zhonglin and written between 1567 and 1619, 1007– 8. Xu Dishan, Fuji mixin de yanjiu, 10–18. Shan Min, Huli xinyang zhimi, 33. Meir Shahar, inspired by Bakhtin’s theory on the European medieval carnival as ritual inversions of dominant social codes of life, argues that in Ming-Qing vernacular fiction Chinese deities, especially female, martial, and eccentric deities, had the same carnival effect that subverted Confucian ethos. Shahar, Crazy Ji, 16–17. DaMing lü, 473a. DaQing huidian shili, 766.7–8. This is a Ming statute revised in 1727. The above translation is from Esherick, Boxer Uprising, 41. On Ming-Qing regulations on heterodox religious practices, see ter Haar, White Lotus Teachings, passim, especially 129–292. Sutton, “From Credulity to Scorn,” quotes from 25–26. On this sect, see ter Haar, White Lotus Teaching, 227–38. See also chapter 6 for more details. Tan Qian, Beiyou lu, 7.41b–42a. Tan quotes this paragraph from the anthology by Kang Hai (1475–1570), a Shaanxi scholar who probably recorded this sect in his home area. But I did not find this passage in Kang’s surviving anthology. On elite views of marginal women, see Furth, A Flourishing Yin, 268–72; Cass, Dangerous Women, 47–64; Mann, Precious Records, 143–77; Bray, Technology and Gender, 237–72. While the marginal women were despised, educated women who

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37. 38. 39.

40.

41. 42.

43.

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45.

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crossed family boundaries as itinerant teachers for young girls were considered respectable by Ming-Qing literati. They significantly enlarged women’s social space on the one hand, and reinforced the separated spheres of men and women on the other. See Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, 115–42. Zhang Tao, Jinmen zaji, zhong. 17b–18a. See also the translation and discussion of this piece in Huntington, Alien Kind, 166. YWCT, 79. See also the translation and discussion of this story in Huntington, Alien Kind, 160–62. For another story featuring foxes punishing greedy mediums, see YWCT, 194. On the moral agenda of Ji Yun’s fox stories, see Chan, Discourse on Foxes and Ghosts, especially 187–243; Huntington, Alien Kind, 59–68, 73–86, 111–13, and chapter 7. The connection between illnesses and moral failure is fully discussed in I. W. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion, 114–59. Dubois finds that in contemporary Cangzhou there are a wide range of mediums, from the most generous and kind to the most greedy and tough. He also distinguishes two kinds of illness among Cangzhou people, shi and xu. Only in the case of the latter, which is caused by general weakness of body, do they go to see mediums. This, however, was not the case in Li Wei-tsu’s research, and might not have been true in earlier times in general, when modern medical technology and Western-style doctors were not available. Dorfman shows that spiritual healers in contemporary north China “must be moral, compassionate, and benevolent.” They do not ask for gifts or money but do expect to receive something. Some healers, in order to show their virtue, denied monetary payments. Li Wei-tsu, “Four Sacred Animals,” 80–81; Doré, Researches Into Chinese Superstitions, 560–62; Dorfman, “Spirits of Reform,” 264–66; Dubois, “Spirits, Sectarians and Xiangtou.” YWCT, 297. YWCT, 193. For other accounts see YWCT, 226, 487, and Tang Yongzhong, Yijiong baibian, 5.42b, “Shanyang hu,” in which a man who bullied his elder brother and his sister-in-law was punished by a fox. YWCT, 240. See also the story on 396. Other examples reiterating the importance of virtue can be found on 211, 298, and 487. Other scholars express similar ideas. One of the commentators of LZZY, Dan Minglun (1795–1853), concludes that “Ghosts and foxes fear not men of high rank (guiren), but they fear only righteous men (zhengren).” LZZY, 56. Also LZZY, 747, “Hejian sheng,” recounts that a young man, after realizing that foxes were afraid of righteous men, soon terminated his friendship with a fox. YWCT, 313. Ji Yun’s father, Rongshu (1686–1764), served in several posts in the central government and as a prefect in Yunnan. He also wrote several books. For a biography of Ji Rongshu, see Xu Shichang, Daqing jifu xianzhezhuan, 20.24a– 26b. YWCT, 330. Intellectually Ji Yun shared beliefs with the “evidential group” and was strongly against Song Neo-Confucian thought. Chan, Discourse on Foxes and Ghosts, 115 n. 4.

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46. Zhang Jingyun, Qiuping xinyu, 9.7a–8b. For another translation of this story and a similar line of argument, see Huntington, Alien Kind, 162–65. 47. Ho, Ladders of Success, 26–27. Ho shows that the advance to juren would dramatically change one’s social and economic status. 48. Doré, Researches Into Chinese Superstition, 548–50 and 554. The quote is from 549. 49. Li Wei-tsu, “Four Sacred Animals,” 76–77. 50. For the ambiguous attitude of Qing elite toward the services of spirit mediums, see Richard J. Smith, Fortune-Tellers and Philosophers, 221–33. 51. Lu Yanzhi, Shuoting, shang. 6b. 52. LZZY, 691. Huntington (Alien Kind, 153–56) also translates and discusses this story at full length and in particular, notes Pu’s playful tone. 53. Gao’s preface, LZZY, 3; Lü Zhan’en’s annotations, LZZY, 691; Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange, 224 n. 7. On the Ming cult of qing, see Wai-Yee Li, Enchantment and Disenchantment, especially 47–88. 54. Huntington, Alien Kind, 155. 55. LZZY, 5.693, “Hou Jingshan.” 56. On the nature of these female deities, see Sangren, History and Magical Power, 150–52; Pomeranz, “Power, Gender, and Pluralism,” 182–206; Yü, Kuan-yin.

. Foxes and Local Cults 1. For a summary of the bureaucratic metaphor and its limits in Chinese religion, see Weller and Shahar, “Introduction,” 4–8. On the two models of communication, bureaucratic and personal, with Chinese gods, see Hymes, Way and Byway. 2. Lu Yanzhi, Shuoting, shang. 5b–6a. For other examples see Xu Changzuo, Yanshan conglu, 8.1b; Zhang Jingyun, Qiuping xinyu, 5.26a, “Hu bu ruyu”; Wang Jian, Qiudeng conghua, 1.8b. 3. YWCT, 284. Deng Xuan’s Yitan kexinlu copied this story in 2.29b–30b under the title of “husong.” 4. YWCT, 344–45. Changbai haogezi records another case in which the bewitching fox was judged at a City God temple by a subordinate of the City God, who, interestingly enough, was also a fox. See Yingchuang yicao sanbian, 4.302–3. Other accounts include one in Xu Changzuo, Yanshan conglu, 8.5a; Xu Kun, Liuya waibian, 5.29a, “Gu Wuling”; Deng Xuan, Yitan kexinlu, 3.12b, “xinjing zhuhu.” 5. LZZY, 135, 1333. Pu Songling mentions that a Daoist priest had a book on exorcising foxes. Feng Zhenluan’s nineteenth-century comments refer to a Quhujing (Scripture of Exorcising Foxes). 6. Changbai haogezi, Yingchuang yicao, 365–66. 7. YWCT, 419–20. The art of “commanding foxes” has long been labeled as sorcery in Daoist texts. In Xuantian shangdi qishenglu, an undated Daoist text that recorded many Tang and Song miracle stories of Zhenwu, a Tang military official won Empress Wu’s favor by having mastered the “heterodox art of fox woman.” He

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8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

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trained five hundred young children to fly on clouds and make storms to strike people. A young exorcist claiming to be a reincarnation of the God Zhenwu and destroyed this art by spraying water on the children and gathered them all into his sword sheath. Later he spared the life of the official but burned all 500 children with his Daoist pure fire. YWCT, 7, 125–26. Li Wei-tsu, “Four Sacred Animals,” 8. He Bang’e, Yetan suilu, 187. Gao Chengxun, Songyunge chaoyi, 9.48a. Qingliang daoren, Tingyuxuan biji, 1.9b–12a recounts that a fox family had to leave their old residence when a man exercised the Five Thunder Rites upon them. Deng Xuan, Yitan kexinlu, 10.25a. Yuan Mei, Xu Zibuyu, 6.8b–9a. Zhu’s actual name is Fangdan. See Wang Yingkui, Liunan suibi, 3.47; Wu Boya, “Zhu Fangdan,” 369–73. The distinction between orthodox and popular ritual specialists may not be always clear-cut; for instance, in one story a Daoist stated that “those who have mastered the Five Thunders Magic can command foxes,” and could order them to steal, to bewitch, or to provide sexual services as fox girls (YWCT, 361). Here the Daoist who had mastered the Five Thunder Rites differed little from the popular ritual exorcist Li Chengyao discussed in the previous chapter. Yuan Mei, Zibuyu, 7.9a–b, “Huzushi.” On the God Zhenwu, see Grootaers, “Hagiography of the Chinese God Chenwu,” 131–65, 147; Seaman, Journey to the North; Lagerwey, “Pilgrimage to Wu-tang Shan,” 293–95; Shin-yi Chao, “Zhenwu Cult.” Changbai haogezi, Yingchuang yicao, 234, “Tanyi hu.” He Bang’e, Yetan suilu, 88, “Zaji wuze.” Other examples include Zeng Yandong, Xiaodoupeng, 257, “Huo Jingyan,” YWCT, 217; Qian Yong, Lüyuan conghua, 16.5b– 6a, “Hu laoxiansheng.” For Ming-Qing pictures of these gods, see Ma Shutian, Huaxia zhushen, 15, 18, 305. Yuan Mei, Zibuyu, 22.14b, “Hu Daoxue.” Qingliang daoren, Tingyuxuan biji, 1, zaji. 9b–12a. See also Qian Xiyan, Kuaiyuan, 14.12b. The story features an “old man of gray hairs” who was extremely knowledgeable and read cryptic texts that no one else understood. A fortune-teller identified him as a “celestial fox.” A similar story is in Gao Chengxun, Songyunge chaoyi, 10.11b, “Liangjian laosou.” Dongxuan zhuren, Shuyiji, shang. 4a–b. Wu Chichang, Kechuang xianhua, 2, chuji. 6b–8b. YWCT, 295. Yuan Mei, Zibuyu, 2.7a–b, “Guanshen duanyu.” Li Wei-tsu, “Four Sacred Animals,” 9, 24–25. The quote is from 24. Fang Yuankun, Liangpeng yehua, xubian, shang. 21b–22a, “Tushen miao.” Hansen, Changing Gods, 60–61.

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28. Schneewind, “Competing Institutions,” 97–98. 29. Temples of the earth god are generally small in size, and sometimes are only roadside shrines. See Kanai, “Shashin to Dōkyō,” 182–89, 197; Takizawa, Manshū no gaison shinkō, 9–15, 177–80; Naoe, Zhongguo minsu wenhua, 101–5. 30. Wang Tonggui, Xinke Ertan, 14.9a–10a, “Dongyue xinggong furen.” The same story is also in Wang’s Ertan leizeng, 47.8a–b and Gao Chengxun’s Songyunge chaoyi, 8.32b. 31. On Taishan and the god of Taishan, see Chavannes, Le T’ai Chan; Liu Hui, Taishan zongjiao yanjiu. 32. See below on “Lady Taishan.” See also Baptandier, “Lady Linshui.” 33. Bixia Yuanjun huguo bimin puji baosheng miaojing, HY 1433. 34. On the Bixia cult, see Luo Xianglin, “Miaofengshan yu Bixia Yuanjun,” 1–58; Rong Geng, “Bixia Yuanjun miao kao,” 119–30; Naquin, “Peking Pilgrimages”; Pomeranz, “Power, Gender, and Pluralism.” Rong Geng mentions that in Beijing alone there were at least seven Bixia temples that were recorded in a Qing local gazetteer. Pomeranz shows that the Bixia cult gained little elite support during this time, but elite opinions seem to have very little effect on the rapid dissemination of the cult. 35. See also Pomeranz, “Power, Gender, and Pluralism,” 196–97. 36. For examples see Huang Kaijun, Yishui zayan, 5.19a, “Huxian zhenjie”; Xun Kun, Liuya waibian, 1.14b, “Baosheng”; Tang Yongzhong, Yijiong baibian, 1.42b–43a, “Yuanjiang Huangshi huayuanhu”; YWCT, 165, 547. In one story a female fox helps girls undergo the painful experience of binding their feet. See Qingliang daoren, Tingyuxuan biji, 1, zaji. 10b–11a. 37. Another version ascribes the invention of foot binding to a pheasant turned woman. She, a fox spirit,and another female figure were the three wives of King Zhou of the Shang dynasty. This version may be derived from the Ming popular novel, Fengshen yanyi, in which the goddess Nü Wa sent out three female demons to punish King Zhou. See Wang Sanpin, Gujin shiwu kao, 6; Burkhardt, Chinese Creeds and Customs, 55; Bredon and Mitrophanow, Moon Year, 416–17 and note 9. 38. Yuan Mei, Zibuyu, 7.7b, “Huxian maochong Guanyin sannian.” Pomeranz also cites this story to show the dangerous potential of the Bixia cult in “Power, Gender, and Pluralism,” 197. 39. Xu Changzuo, Yanshan conglu, 7.3b, 6a–b; Anne Goodrich, Peking Paper Gods, 105–7; Chavannes, Le T’ai Chan, 38; Hu Pu’an, Zhonghua quanguo fengsu zhi, xiabian, 5.12; Watters, “Chinese Fox-Myths,” 54. Xu Changzuo records that Bixia temples were widespread north of the Yangzi and Huai rivers, and the goddess specialized in curing chicken pox. 40. Pomeranz, “Power, Gender, and Pluralism,” 204. 41. Yuan Mei, Zibuyu, 4.6a–7a, “Chen Shengtao yuhu.” 42. Guan Shihao, Yingtan, 86b, “Luoshen.” Western scholars at the turn of the century also observed this relationship; see Doré, Researches Into Chinese Superstitions,

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43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

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701; Day, Chinese Peasant Cults, 45; Burkhardt, Chinese Creeds and Customs, 55; Maspero, Taoism and Chinese Religion, 104–5. Yuan Mei, Zibuyu, 5.3b–4b, “Fu duan huwei.” Yuan Mei, Zibuyu, 1.5b–6a, “Hu shengyuan quanren xiuxian.” A similar view about the Taishan goddess’s exam for foxes is also found in Tang Yongzhong, Yijiong baibian, 6.10b–11a, “Huxian qing kanxi.” The story specifies that the exam was held every 60 years. Pomeranz, “Power, Gender, and Pluralism,” especially 188–92. Xizhousheng, Xingshi yinyuanzhuan, 891; Dudbridge, “Women Pilgrims to T’aishan,” 39, 48. Xu Kun, Liuya waibian, 11.4a–6b. Pomeranz, “Power, Gender and Pluralism,” 200–3. LZZY, 618–22, “Humeng”; 997, “A Xiu.” Another example is in Wang Tao, Dunku lanyan, 8.14b–15b, “Shuohu,” in which a fox lived in the palace of the Queen Mother and made a dress for her every year. As the Empress of the Jade Emperor, the Queen Mother is well known in popular lore for hosting the peach feast in the celestial palace every year. See Maspero, Taoism and Chinese Religion, 194–96. Luo Xianglin, “Miaofengshan yu Bixia Yuanjun,” 7–10; Okumura, Manchu nyannyan ko, 159–61; Liu Hui, Taishan zongjiao yanjiu, 140–41. Luo Xianglin, “Miaofengshan yu Bixia Yuanjun,” 11–13. Gu Jiegang, “Miaofengshan niangniang miao dianyu luetu,” 131–32; Zhou Zhenhe, “Wang Sannainai,” 70–73. Anne Goodrich, Peking Temple, 259. Li Wei-tsu, “Four Sacred Animals,” 43, 50. Gu Jiegang, “You Miaofengshan zaji,” 176; Zhou Zhenhe, “Wang Sannainai,” 83–84; Yin Zhaohai and Lü Heng, Miaofengshan Wang Sannainai de chuanshuo, 2–5. The photo was on the front page of the same issue of Minsu, and it was too blurry to recognize anything. Li Wei-tsu, “Four Sacred Animals,” 51; Anne Goodrich, Peking Temple, 259. Gu Jiegang, “You Miaofengshan zaji,” 176. Zhou Zhenhe, “Wang Sannainai,” 68–107. The quote is from 70. Li Wei-tsu, “Four Sacred Animals,” 6. Cahill, Transcendence and Divine Passion, 54–57, 147–56. Xu Changzuo, Yanshan conglu, 6.7a. Li Shiyu, Xianzai Huabei mimi zongjiao, 11. Pak Sang-gyu, Manju pungsok torok, 105. Uchida, Chūgoku nōson no kazoku to shinkō, 323, 327, 338. Uchida also notes that because fox shrines were often attached to major temples, they could be easily neglected in local records. This can at least partially explain the discrepancy between the abundant accounts of the fox cult in anecdotal literature and the absence of such records in local gazetteers and other official documents.

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66. Anne Goodrich, Peking Temple, 193–94, 261. Yeh, Beiping Dongyuemiao diaocha, 5–6. Both include the layout of the temple and the location of the fox shrines. 67. An Jinghan, Boluo Jieyinsi gujin tan, 2–5. The pamphlet’s information can be found in earlier gazetteers. See He Bingxun, Huaiyuan xianzhi, 2 (no page number); Liu Ji’nan, Hengshan xianzhi (1929), 2.9a; Ma Shengjun, Hengshan xianzhi (1993), 569. 68. An Jinghan, Boluo Jieyinsi gujin tan, 14–16. 69. Ibid., 21. These incidents were not recorded in Liu Ji’nan’s 1929 edition of Hengshan xianzhi. They might have originally come from oral sources after 1949. 70. Gao Family’s Oil Mill is a village about 3.5 kilometers from Boluo. 71. This is a much more famous Buddhist temple complex (53 temples in total) in Jia county of the Yulin region. A widely circulated local legend tells that Mao Zedong once visited there and had his fortune told while he stayed at the Communist headquarters in Jia county in the early 1940s. 72. On Xuanzang and his pilgrimage route, see Wriggins, Xuanzang. 73. He Bingxun, Huaiyuan xianzhi, 2 (no page number); Li Xiling, Yulin fuzhi, 24.5a; Ma Shengjun, Hengshan xianzhi (1993), 307. 74. In a seminal essay, David Johnson shows the power of written texts in promoting elite values and perpetuating elite dominance. See Johnson, “Communication, Class, and Consciousness,” 34–72. 75. Myron Cohen argues that the concept of “peasants” was a cultural invention in Communist China. It denotes negative perceptions of Chinese rural inhabitants as “intellectually and culturally crippled by ‘superstition.’” They were seen as a major obstacle to China’s modern development. Dorfman uses the worship of the five animal spirits in contemporary Hebei to discuss the fact that nongmin was not only an official identity assigned to rural residents but also an imagined entity whose existence “relies on establishing the state as the opposed other without which nongmin has no name.” See Cohen, “The Case of the Chinese ‘Peasant’,” 154–55; Dorfman, “Spirits of Reform,” especially 257–58. 76. Duara shows that the Republican government converted temples into schools or other government offices. Duara, Culture, Power, and the State, 148–55. Both Weller and Dean discuss the Nationalist and Communist hostility toward popular religious practices. Weller, Unities and Diversities, passim; Dean, Taoist Ritual, 41; Lord of the Three in One, 20–21. 77. On the latter, see, for example, Dean, Lord of the Three in One.

. Fox Spirits and Officials 1. Preface to Kang Hai, et al., Wugong xianzhi. 2. On the vitality of local cults, see Hansen, Changing Gods; von Glahn, “Enchantment of Wealth”; Szonyi, “The Cult of the Five Emperors.” On official attempts to quell local cults, see Overmyer, “Attitudes Toward Popular Religion”; Boltz, “Not by the Official Seal Alone”; Schneewind, “Competing Institutions.”

6. fox spirits and officials

229

3. Changbai haogezi, Yingchuang yicao, erbian, 4.199, “Datong ji”; Tu Shen, Liuhe neiwai suoyan, 6.15a–16a, “Duanbing.” 4. LZZY, 5.606, “Yatou”; Tu Shen, Liuhe neiwai suoyan, 8.4b, “Ershao”; Baiyi jushi, Hutianlu, xia. 32b. 5. Jiuweihu written by Pinghua zhuren. Ji Yun also mentions that a famous prostitute’s name was “Jade Face Fox (yumian hu).” YWCT, 445. 6. YWCT, 213 and 310. The second story was copied in Xu Ke, Qingbai leichao, bai 84.43–44, “Ji shiwei hunü yi xingpian.” On the link between foxes and prostitutes, see also Huntington, Alien Kind, 187–94. 7. Changbai haogezi, Yingchuang yicao, sanbian, 3.287–90. 8. Tang Yongzhong, Yijiong baibian, 6.10b–11a, “Huxian qing kanxi.” 9. On Qing official treatment of popular entertainers, see Smith, Village Life, 37–48; Feng Erkang and Chang Jianhua, Qingren shehui shenghuo, 306–12; Hanssen, Chinese Outcasts, 42–48. 10. Naquin, Shantung Rebellion, 43–44. On connections between rebellions and the magic power of female sexuality and prostitution, see Esherick, Boxer Uprising, 298; Cohen, History in Three Keys, 138–45. 11. Lang Ying, Qixiu leigao, 48.10b–11a. 12. Watters, “Chinese Fox-Myths,” 54; Nagao, Shina minzoku shi, 2.86–92; Wang Jinglin and Xu Tao, Zhongguo minjian xinyang fengsu cidian, 369; Ren Cheng, Zhongguo minjian jinji, 310–11, 361. 13. Skinner, “Regional Urbanization,” 211–52; Naquin and Rawski, Chinese Society, 140–47. On peasant vagrancy in north China, see Huang, Peasant Economy, 94, 114; Esherick, Boxer Uprising, 25–28; Will, Bureaucracy and Famine, 38–49; Kuhn, Soulstealers, 72 and note 34. Naquin and Rawski show that the lack of geographical and cultural barriers in north China facilitated the high mobility of the population. Esherick notes that poverty in Shandong was so severe that peasants struggled at the subsistence level in normal times and left their homes to beg in bad years. Kuhn notices that social awareness of vagrancy was already evident in the 1760 and became more noticeable in the nineteenth century. 14. For wanderers as social threats, see Kuhn, Soulstealers, 42–47; Ter Haar, White Lotus Teachings, 173–95, 263–88; Will, Bureaucracy and Famine, 38–62; Sommer, Sex, Law and Society, 96–101. 15. Lang Ying, Qixiu leigao, 48.9b–10a. 16. YWCT, 396. 17. See, respectively, Zhang Jingyun, Qiuping xinyu, 11.23b, “Fangjiayuan hu”; Tang Yongzhong, Yijiong baibian, 3.12b–14a, “Caifeng.” 18. LZZY, 4.500–4, “Huxie.” 19. Zhang Jingyun, Qiuping xinyu, 10.17a, “Sichao.” The author specified that the war and chaos in Shaanxi were Jiang Xiang’s rebellion in the early years of Kangxi’s reign (1622–1722). 20. LZZY, 2.273, “Weishui hu.” The turmoil mentioned by the fox was pinpointed by one annotator of the LZZY as the anti-Qing Rebellion led by Shaanxi governor

230

21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

6. fox spirits and officials

Wang Fuchen in 1675, and the rebellion was a response to the revolt of the Three Feudatories in the south from 1674 to 1681. Li Qingchen, Zuicha zhiguai, 2.36b–37a. Theft was often linked to various kinds of spirits. For stories featuring foxes committing theft, see Zhang Jingyun, Qiuping xinyu, 8.23b, “Zhaiyi” and YWCT, 125. See also Boltz, “Not by the Seal of Office Alone,” 249, quoting a story from Yijianzhi. The Wutong spirits had similar attributes. See von Glahn, “Enchantment of Wealth,” 657; Cedzich, “Cult of Wu-t’ung/ Wu-hsien,” 166. Zhang Jingyun, Qiuping xinyu, 7.9b–11a, “Jiesu fu.” See also Wang Tao, Dunku lanyan, 3.1a–b. The story recounts a romance between a young scholar and a fox, who claimed to be a “concubine running away from a rich household.” See respectively, Fang Yuankun, Liangpeng yehua, 1.16–18a, “Gulou hu”; Deng Xuan, Yitan kexinlu, 22.8a, “Daibo.” On the popularity of gambling in Qing local society and official policies against gambling, see Smith, Village Life, 104; Feng and Chang, Qingren shehui shenghuo, 288–91, 312–14. YWCT, 94. Another similar example is in Yuan Mei, Xu Zibuyu, 9.1b–2a, “Anqing fuxuehu.” LZZY, 8.1086, “Daohu.” The story is also cited in Spence, Death of Women Wang, 23. I have used Spence’s translation here but made a few changes. On the power of and government regulations on religious professionals, see Yang, Religion in Chinese Society, 180–89; Kuhn, Soulstealers, 42–46, 95, 107–9; Overmyer, “Attitudes Toward Popular Religion,” 191–222. Kuhn, following EvansPritchard, defines sorcerers in the Chinese context as people who had three kinds of enhanced powers: “Cognitive (the power to see through time and space, but mainly to foretell the future); telekinetic, and biodynamic. These powers were commonly described as ‘arts,’ shu.” Xu Changzuo, Yanshan conglu, 8.1a–b; Zhou Xuanwei, Jinglin xuji, 7b; Wang Bu, Yin’an suoyu, houji, 7.15b; Wu Chenyan, Kuangyuan zazhi, houji, 14.35a; Du Han, Zhuanxiang zhuibi, shang. 42a. Ter Haar, White Lotus Teachings, 173–95, 263–81; Kuhn, Soulstealers. Wang Yingkui, Liunan suibi, 3.47; Gu Gongxie, Xiaoxia xianji zhaichao, shang. 28b–30a; Qian Yong, Lüyuan conghua, 16.2a–b; Wu Boya, “Zhu Fangdan,” 369– 73. Yue Hesheng, Canweizi ji, 4.30b–31a, 63a; Huang Zunsu, Shuolue, 21a–23b; Yanchu youcanlu, 3.85a; ter Haar, White Lotus Teachings, 227–38. LZZY, 2.240–43, “Jiushan wang.” Qian Yong, Lüyuan conghua, 16.8b, “Hu baochou.” It is also collected in Liang Gongchen, Beidongyuan bilu, sibian, 6.7b–8a. Yuan Mei, Xu Zibuyu, 1.7a–b, “Zhiyaoyi, zhirennan.” Schneewind, “Community Schools and Community Shrines,” 62–69; Naquin, Shantung Rebellion, 27; Watt, District Magistrate, 169–84. On the limited power of officials in governing local society, see, among others, Hsiao, Rural China; Ch’ü, Local Government; Chung-li Chang, Chinese Gentry;

6. fox spirits and officials

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

231

Watt, District Magistrate, 211–12; Esherick and Rankin, Chinese Local Elites. On the power of yamen clerks and runners and their relationship with officials, see Ch’ü, Local Government, 36–55; Reed, Talons and Teeth. Xu Changzuo, Yanshan conglu, 8.5a and 8.1b. For Ming-Qing records of Wang Sizong’s story, see TSJC, 71.54c. For Hu Yan’gao’s story, see TSJC, 71.55a; Lin Pu, Jimo xianzhi, 12.44a. Yuan Mei, Xu Zibuyu, 2.1b, “Quhu sizi.” Zhang Jingyun, Qiuping xinyu, 5.26a, “Hu bu ruyu.” Tang Yongzhong, Yijiong baibian, 2.13b–14a, “Feicheng hu.” Yongna jushi, Zhiwenlu, 3.7a–8b, “Zhihu.” Huang recorded the whole process of the chase in great detail in Fuhui quanshu, 387–95. It is also included in Spence, Death of Woman Wang, 89–98. Wang Jian, Qiudeng conghua, 2.2a. See also a story in Xie Zhaozhe, Wu zazu, 9.13b–14a: a white fox a thousand years old lived in the Temple of Heaven of Beijing. He grew a long beard and gray hair and interacted with humans as a normal man. But when the emperor went to the Temple of Heaven to pray for rain, the fox disappeared. He later returned and told people that he had to hide in a cave in Mount Tai when the emperor arrived, because the emperor was guarded by hundreds of celestial deities. Another story recounts that a fox who had been haunting travelers in an inn fled when Mr. Li, a military officer, arrived. The fox explained that Li was a guiren (man of high rank). Wang Tonggui, Ertan, 5.6a. Li Wei-tsu, “Four Sacred Animals,” 21. Watt, “The Yamen and Urban Administration,” 353–90. He includes a layout map of the Shanyin county yamen in the city of Shaoxing prefecture of Zhejiang province on 380–81; it shows the different quarters of the yamen in detail. Dongxuan zhuren, Shuyiji, shang. 11a. “Husui.” LZZY, 2.244, “Zunhuashu hu.” Ibid., 255, “Fenzhou hu.” Liu Shoumei, Chunquan wenjianlu, 17b. Yuan Mei, Zibuyu, 11.2a, “Hushi.” Tang Yongzhong, Yijiong baibian, 2.21b–22a, “Jizhoushu hu.” Yu Hongjian, Yinxuexuan suibi, 1.21b. Xu Ke, Qingbai leichao, bai 74.170–71. Wang Tonggui, Xinke Ertan, 4.16a, “Xunchashi Magong.” Tang Yongzhong, Yijiong baibian, 5.10a–b, “Hu Fanghuo.” Boltz, “Not by the Seal of the Office Alone,” 250–51. LZZY, 2.244–45, “Zunhuashu hu.” Xu Ke, Qingbai leichao, bai 74.166–67, “Laohu fuchou.” Xue Fucheng, Yong’an biji, 212–13, “Mengyinhu baochou.” Another example is in Yuan Mei, Zibuyu, 4.3a, “Yan Bingjie.” LZZY, 2.244, “Zunhuashu hu.” Yuan Mei, Zibuyu, 11.2a, “Hu shi.” Xu Ke, Qingbai leichao, baibian 74.170–71, “Hu sui Gu Qinggong.”

232 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

92.

6. fox spirits and officials

Tang Yongzhong, Yijiong baibian, 7.27a–28a, “Hu qiu yingxiang.” See, for example, SSJ, 18.221–22, Story 424; “Chen Fei,” in TPGJ, 447.313–14. Tang Yongzhong, Yijiong baibian, 2.21b–22a, “Jizhoushu hu.” Ibid., 8.17b–18a, “Zhangdeshu hu.” Xu Kun, Liuya waibian, 3.4a–5a, “Cuifang.” A similar case is in Deng Xuan, Yitan kexinlu, 22.2b, “You Xuguancha,” in which a fox in the form of a Daoist priest visited a prefectural official regularly and provided him with information about the illegal acts of one of the magistrates under his supervision. Wang Jian, Qiudeng conghua, 10.19b. LZZY, 2.255–56, “Fenzhou hu.” Another story features a fox in the yamen office of Guangxin prefecture, Jiangxi, who predicted the future for presiding officials. See Yuan Mei, Zibuyu 19.9b, “Guangxin huxian.” Maobin yeke, Jiechengyu, 3.20a–b, “Hu baochou.” Doré, Researches Into Chinese Superstitions, 698–99. Liu Shoumei, Chunquan wenjianlu, 4b; see Huntington, Alien Kind, 108–9 for a discussion of this story. YWCT, 4, 20, 330. Ibid., 6. LZZY, 2.273–74, “Weishui hu.” Li Qingchen, Zuicha zhiguai, 2.18a–b, “Yumou.” Xu Kun, Liuya waibian, 4.1a–4a. Krappe, “Far Eastern Fox Lore,” 126. Der Ling, Imperial Incense, 144–49. Der Ling records that the fox temple was situated in a corner of the city walls of Mukden, and the major function of the god was healing. Takizawa listed sixteen fox shrines and temples in the same city, and several of them were at the four corners of the city walls. See Takizawa, Manshū no gaison shinkō, 220–24. Mao Xianglin, Moyulu, 4.3a, “Huxian quzei.” Yang Fenghui, Nan’gao biji, 4.15a and 16a. Zong
, Chongming manlu, 2.10a. Xu Feng’en, Licheng, 132, “Zhejiang xueshishu hu.” Cheng Wan, Qian’an manbi, 3.6b–7a, “Huxian.” Jianwen suibi, in Lu Lin, Qingdai biji xiaoshuo leibian, jingguai juan, 384, “Hu songcai.” Yuan Mei, Zibuyu, 4.3a, “Yan Bingjie.” Chen Qiyuan, Yongxianzhai biji, 2.3b–4a. Baiyi jushi, Hutianlu, xia. 7b Xuan Ding, Yeyu qiudenglu, 3.39. Xue Fucheng, Yong’an biji, 213, “Ningshao taidaoshunei hushe.” Qian Yong, Lüyuan conghua, 16.6b–7a, “Guanku huxian”; Baiyi jushi, Hutianlu, xia.7b; Doolittle, Social Life, 1.288–89, 357–58; Watters, “Chinese Fox-Myths,” 53, 58; Yao Lijiang, “Zhongguo beifang de huxian chongbai,” 66. Wu Chichang, Kechuang xianhua, 2. chuji 6b–8b, “Wuzhen sou.”

conclusion

233

93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

Yang Fenghui, Nan’gao biji, 4.6b–7a, “Xiangugu.” Boltz, “Not by the Seal of Office Alone,” 254–55. Takizawa, Manshū no gaison shinkō, 212. Doolittle, Social Life, 1.357–58. Watters, “Chinese Fox-Myths,” 58–59; Doolittle, Social Life, 358. Zhang Chen, Pingpu zaji, 5b; Zhang Naiwei and Wang Airen, Qinggong shuwen, 4.78b; Nie Changzhen, “Riben daohe shenshe yu Zhongguo minjian xinyang de guanxi,” 44. Zhang Chen, who served the early Qing court, recorded that a black fox was found in the Forbidden City during the Shunzhi reign (r. 1644–1660), but he mentioned no fox worship. By Republican times, Zhang Naiwei and Wang Airen recorded that “according to unconfirmed reports, huxian were worshipped in the [Yanhui] Pavilion [in the Forbidden Palace during the Qing].” Nie mentions that foxes were worshipped in the Forbidden Palace in the late Qing. The Yanhui Pavilion is located in the Imperial Garden of the Forbidden City. It is notable that about a hundred yards across from the rather magnificent Yanhui Pavillion is a small hexagonal building very similar in shape and size to the fox shrine in contemporary Yulin discussed in chapter 5. The building is called the “Four Spirits Shrine (Sishen ci).” It is not marked on most current maps of the Forbidden City and has been made into a storage room. But the title of “Four Spirits” seems to echo the popular worship of the Four Sacred Animals in the Beijing region. It is also significant that the Four Spirits Shrine appears to be a subordinate building of the much larger Zhenwu temple to the northwest. I am indebted to Mr. Jin Yunchang of the Forbidden City Museum for drawing the Four Spirits Shrine to my attention. 99. Boltz, “Not by the Seal of the Office Alone,” 243.

Conclusion 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

See the summary in Shahar and Weller, “Introduction,” 10–11. Szonyi, “Illusion of Standardizing the Gods,” 113–35. Guo, Exorcism and Money. Yu Hongjian, Yinxuexuan suibi, 2.17a. Tang Yongzhong, Yijiong baibian, 2.39b. Yu Jiao, Meng’an zazhu, 66–67. On a cult of homosexuality in late imperial Fujian, see Szonyi, “Cult of Hu Tianbao.” 7. Shahar and Weller, “Introduction,” 10–12. The quote is from 10. 8. Hymes, Way and Byway, passim, particularly 4–5. 9. Using examples from ancient China, Mu-Choo Poo has rightly pointed out that the most enduring theme of religion in China is the search for personal welfare. Man’s inferiority to gods “was not a moral problem but a physical one” and “he could choose to employ whatever forces he could muster to suppress, to overcome, or to evade the powers of the ghosts and spirits.” Poo, In Search of Personal Welfare, 210.

234 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

conclusion

Li Wei-tsu, “Four Sacred Animals,” 8, 24–25. Hymes, Way and Byway, 5. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 33–43. For an overview of fox lore worldwide, see Xu Changju, “Lun huli de chuanshuo jiqi yanjiu,” 83–91. It mentions that although the fox motif in stories of Reynard and the fables of Aesop have appeared frequently in European paintings and architecture since the thirteenth century, they are little studied. See also de Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology, 122–42, which introduces the fox in Hindu and Slavic literatures. Krappe notes that fables and tales of Reynard the Fox are found in “all countries of Europe, including Russia, and of the Near and Middle East.” The motif of the fox wife was also found in Chinese and Japanese folklore and across the Bering Strait, among the Eskimos in North America. Krappe, “Far Eastern Fox Lore,” 124–47. Studies of Japanese fox lore are many and include, among others, de Visser, “The Fox and the Badger,” 1–159; Yoshiro Hiroko, Kitsune; Bathgate, “Shapeshifter Fox.” Two European works on Chinese and Asian fox lore came to my attention too late to be discussed in this book: Le Renard: Tours, Detours, et Retours (Etudes Mongoles et Siberiénnes, Número Spécial) 15, 1984, and Hardmut Walravens, ed., Der Fuchs in Kultur, Religion und Folklore Zentral und Ostasiens, vol. 1 and 2 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001 and 2002). I thank Vincent Goossaert for the references. Smyers, Fox and Jewel, 7–10, 15–18. The quote is from 213–14. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 72–111; 150–83. Foxes are occasionally represented in biological fox form when they are pictured as being successfully exorcised. See Doré, Researches Into Chinese Superstitions, illustration between 550 and 551. Smyers, Fox and Jewel, 207–11. The quote is from 208.

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MBPYJBOTIFOH
⽛㎰㻩㪛 )V
-JHV
⽛徱⹤ )V
NPHVHV
⽛㚋⹤⹤ )V
2JPOHIVB
⽛┣㤢 )V
RJV
ZJOHYJBOH
⽝㤔䇑㼒 )V
4BOOBJOBJ
⽛㧞㚭㚭 )V
4BOUBJZF
⽛㧞㲌᭵ )V
TIFOHZVBO
RVBOSFO
YJVYJBO
⽝㪛޵ ‫ے‬㦬㾿㻪 )V
4JKJF
⽛㯥ㆄ )V
4POHDBJ
⽝㯮⤬ )V
TVJ
(V
2JOHHPOH
⽝㰏嗺㤈⹌ )V
5BJUBJ
⽛㲌㲌 )V
5BJZF
⽛㲌᭵ )V
:BOHBP
⽛໊ⷀ )VBOH
-JVIPOH
怴㒚嵺 )VBOH
4IBPOBJOBJ
怴㩺㚭㚭 )VBQJ
◬㠅 )VBTIBO
LF
㤢㩞㋮ IVDIPV
⽝⨕ IVDIPV
⽛⨕ IVHVBJ
⽝⹷

ĠĥĨĬĬĚīIJ
ùúþ
IVHVJ
⽝⺎ )VJYJBO
KJ
᎟㻪䆼 IVKJOH
⽝㈌ )VKJOH
NFJSFO
⽝㈌㗥㦬 IVMJKJOH
⽝㏋㈌ IVNFJ
⽝㗥 IVNFJ
⽝峩 )VNFOH
⽝ક IVOZVBO
KJOEPV
」䊋㆑Ⱈ )VP
OÛ
〕㝏 )VP
9JBPZV
〕㾂䈒 )VRJF
⽝個 IVTIFO
⽝㪒 )VTIJ
⽝฀ )VTIV
OÛ
CJBO
OBO[J
⽝㽈㝏䒤㚱䓴 IVTVJ
⽝㰏 )VXBOHNJBP
⽝㶖๳ )VYJBO
⽝㻪 )VYJBO
KVOFJ
⽝㻪ၷ‫ש‬ )VYJBO
NBPDIPOH
(VBOZJO
TBOOJBO
⽝㻪 㗑⨅䅿䅕㧞㛋 IVYJBO
RJOH
LBOYJ
⽝㻪䌩㋕႓ IVYJBO
UBOH
⽝㻪㲤 )VYJBO
[IFOHMVO
⽝㻪䎞䌴 )VYJBO
[IFOKJF
⽝㻪䕲᤮ )VYJF
⽝䎤 IVZBP
⽝䂞 )V[VTIJ
⽝䔇฀ KJ
ガ +J
3POHTIV
ぐ㦾㭇 +J
:VO
ぐ匡 +J
;IFO
ゟ䎇 +JBOHOBO
NVLF
ㅎ㚰㚟㋮ KJBP
孕 +JBP
MJBOTIJ
ㅚ᪳฀ +JBPOVP
௪㚩 +JBYJBO
コ㻪 +JFTV
GV
ㆉ㯿୥ +JMJO
る㑷 +JNP
ゕ㚌 +JO
4IPV[IFO
㆚㬹䎇 +JOIVB
YJBO[J
㆑⿉㻪䓴 KJOTIJ
䩮㬠

+JOHTIJ
㈊฀ +JVTIBOXBOH
㈦㩞㶖 +JVZPV
㈧䇲 +JXFO
ぐ㓥 KJYJBO
䖡㻪 +JYJBO
MV
ゐ㻪乼 +JZJ
KJ
ゐ◱䆼 +J[IPVTIV
IV
㭦䐾㭑⽝ KV
[F
DIFOHYJOH
TBO
[F
DIFOHRJ
㈼ٕ⧪㾯 㩃ٕ⧪ᝃ KVSFO
㜆㦬 ,BJZVBO
[IBOKJOH
刀䊋䍝ㄼ LBOH
㋜ ,BOH
)BJ
㋖⼄ ,BOHKV
㋖㈴ -BO
3FORJV
㱎す㤐 -BOH
:JOH
㎪儙 -BO[IVTIBO
CFJMBJ
EBYJBO
㱎亟㩞⡒Ҏ ⫔㻪 MBPGPZF
㎰ⴑ᭵ MBPIV
㎰⽝ MBPIV
GVDIPV
㎰⽝໮⨑ MBPNB
[J
㎰஭䓴 MBPYJBO
TIBPYJBO
㎰㻪㩺㻪 MBPZF[J
㎰᭵䓴 -FJTIVP
嗱䌇 -J
:JOBO
㏏ට㚰 -J
:VBOHPOH
㏏䊋⹈ -J
;JDIFOH
㏏䓵⧪ -JBOH
㑛 -JBOYJBOH
㨰㼄 MJOH[IFOH
呁䲈 -JO[J
㛳䓮 -JV
+JKJV
‫ڃ‬ァ㈧ -JV
:VBOEJOH
‫ڃ‬䊋Ⰷ MPOHMJ
㕡厁 MPVTIBOH
LV
ᖨ㩰㋿ -VPTIFO
㕆㪒 -VPZBOH
RJFMBOKJ
㕆勷䙅㱎䆼 .BP
TBOHV
㗌㧞⹤ NBPIV
㗌⽝ NBUPOH
埳㵐 NFJ
㗥

ùúÿ NFJ
峩 NFJQP
㗞㠦 .FOHZJOIV
CBPDIPV
㗪勯⽝৔⨑ OBP
MBPYJBO
娼㎰㻪 /J
:PVSPOH
㛀䇸㦾 /JBOEPOH
YJBOTIFOH
㛏Ꮭ㻩㪛 OJHV
㛂⹤ OÛZBP
㝏䂞 1FJ
4IBPZJO
㞂㩺䅝 RJ
ᝃ 2J
想 RJBOQP
夐㠦 2JBORJOHUBOH
TIVNV
㣈唶㲤᎙㚠 2JBOZBOH
MJOH
ᝧ勷㒏 2JBPOJBOH
㣪㛐 RJBPYJBOHEF
㣧㼄⭥ RJOH
㤊 2JOHGFOH
㤁崱 2JOHNFJ
㤁㗘 RJONJO
[IJHVBO
䅩㘒䐏⹺ 2VBOEFOH
㦏ᬕ RVF
MBPZF[J
㦔㎰᭵䓴 2VIV
KJOH
壭⽝ㄼ RVIV
TJ[J
壭⽛㯥䓷 3FOTIJ
㦯㬰 3VPDVJ
㧖⫅ TBOHBOH
XVDIBOH
㧞ㆷ㹆⧄ TBOHV
MJVQP
㧞⹤㒚㠦 TBPKJOH
壞㈕ TB[BJ
㧗ᨥ 4IBOH
KJVXFJIV
CJBP
㩰㈦㸓⽝⢎ TIBOHYJBO
㩰㻪 TIBOYJBP
㩞峭 TIF
㪈 TIFO
㪒 4IFO
+JKJ
㪓ォᦛ TIFOHZVBO
㪛޵ TIFOUPOH
㪒㵉 TIFOYJBO
㪒㻪 TIJGV
฀ⶖ TIJKJF
ಧㆃ TIJKJF
YJBO
ಧㆃ㻪 TIJQP
฀㠦

ĠĥĨĬĬĚīIJ TIJQP
IVJ
฀㠦᎟ TIJXV
฀㸸 TIJYJPOHEJ
฀㾷⭽ TIPVZJO
EBYJBO
㬹䇂⫔㻪 TIV
㽈 4IVBOHEFOH
厑ᬕ TIVBOHYJV
厑㾿 4IVPIV
䌇⽝ TIVTIJ
㽈㬠 4JDIBP
㯥䳏 4JTIFO
DJ
㯥㪒哕 4VO
2J
రᓅ 4VO
:BO
రී UBJCBP
㲌⡄ 5BJTIBO
㲊㩞 5BJTIBO
OJBOHOJBOH
㲊㩞㛐㛐 5BJZF
㲌᭵ 5BJZJ
NJGB
㲌䄳㗹ⳉ 5BODIFOH
䟑⧨ UBOYJBO
੐㻪 UBOZJ
IV
䌥䄸⽝ 5BP
)POHKJOH
㲶⽌㈑ UJBOMFJ
KJF
㳍㎸ㅺ UJBOYJBO
㳍㻪 UJBP
EBTIFO
㳙⫔㪒 UJBP
EBYJBO
㳙⫔㻪 5JF
HPOHKJ
儧⹌厖 UVEJ
㵞⭽ UVTVO
㵞ర 8BOH
"O
㶖崗 8BOH
$IFOH
㶖⧪ 8BOH
)BPYJBO
㶖⼤䘕 8BOH
+JBOQJOH
㶖ㅉ㠢 8BOH
-VO
㶖ӱ 8BOH
4BOOBJOBJ
㶖㧞㚭㚭 8BOH
4FO
㶖㩎 8BOH
8FORJOH
㶖㸥㤅 8BORVBO
㥇㦌 XFOQP
ⲡ㠦 8FOYJBOH
KJBP
㓥㼄ㅭ 8FOZV
ᢹ䈒 XV
㸸 8V
4BOOJBOH
‫ݨ‬㧞㛐

ĠĥĨĬĬĚīIJ
ùúĀ
8V
YJBPMJBO
㹅㾃㑏 8VDIBOH
㹆⥟ 8VEBKJB
㹆⫔コ 8VEBNFO
㹆⫔凵 8VEBP
㹆⭡ 8VEBYJBO
㹆⫔㻪 8VEJ
㹆⭼ 8VMFJ
[IFOHGB
㹆㎸䎞ⳉ 8VMV
DBJTIFO
㹆㔘䕵㪒 8VUPOH
㹆㵉 8VXFO
TIJ[IF
㹆㸢㬚䎀 8VYJBO
㹆噡 8V[IFO
TPV
᪐䎇䟦 YJBO
㻪 YJBOFS
㻪‫כ‬ YJBOCJOH
㻪⤂ YJBOHFO
㻪ⷚ YJBOHUPV
㼄喿 YJBOHV
㻪⹤ YJBOHV
MBPUBJ
㻪⹤㎰㲌 YJBOKJB
㻪コ YJBOKJB
NBJNBJ
㻪コ䗪䘖 YJBOOÛ
㻪㝏 YJBOSFO
EPOH
㻪㦬Ⱅ YJBOSFO
UBOH
㻪㦬㲤 YJBP
DBJTIFO
㾂䕵㪒 9JBPDVJ
㾂⫅ 9JBPNFJ
㾂㗘 9JBPOJBO
㾂㛋 YJBPTIVP
㾂䌇 YJFUPOH
㾑㵉 9JO
TIJTJOJBOH
㾢㬏㯥㛐 YJOH
ZJKJB
CBJ
ZJKJB
㜅䄜コኂ䄜コ YJOKJOH
[IVIV
㾥ㄼ䋥⽝ YJVDBJ
㿄⤦ 9JXBOHNV
㹘㶖㚙 9V
)POHSV
㿍嵺㧆 9V
+JFGFOH
㿍卢崱 9VBOIVKJBP
㿟⽝ㅭ 9VBOTIJ
[IJ
㿜㬳䐟 9VBO[IPOH
KJ
㿟䐱䆼 9VODIBTIJ
.BHPOH
䁓⥍㬚埳⹌ ZBNFO
䁤凵

:BO
䂁 :BO
#JOHKJF
࣡⢝⎅ :BOH
#PDIFOH
ᔏ⤏⧪ :BOKJ
䁴る ZBP
CV
TIFOH
EF
䂞⤜‫⭣ں‬ ZBP
ZPV
SFO
YJOH
䂞䇪㦬㜅 ZBPIV
䂞⽝ ZBPKJOH
䂞㈌ ZBPQP
㮯㠦 ZBPTIV
䂞㽈 ZBPUPOH
䂞㵉 ZBPYJF
䂞㾑 ZBQP
䁡㠦 :BUPV
嵇喿 ZF
᭵ :F
'BTIBO
㥟ⳉ㩧 ZJ
EF
TIFOH
ZBP
䄵⭣‫ں‬䂞 :JNJBOQP
䄜㘇㠣 ZJO
䅚 ZJODJ
䅚哕 :JOHOJOH
ఌ౯ ZJOTJ
䅚哌 :JO[IFO
䶚䰹 :JTIJ
TIJ
◱㬘㬰 ZJUPOH
䄡㵉 ZPVIV
KV
䇱⽝㈴ ZPVIV
[VPTVJ
䇱⽝䔘㰏 :V
9VBOKJ
婟㿟ᗤ ZVBO
㇪ :VBOKJBOH
)VBOHTIJ
IVBZVBO
IV
䊍ㅎ怴 㬰⿉ड⽝ :VF
:VKJV
䊡䇻㈦ :VMJO
䇽㑷 :VNJBO
IV
䈒㘇⽝ :VO
$VJYJBO
厦⫅㻪 ZVOEJ
࿤ᮚ ;BKJ
XV[F
厔䆼㹆ٕ [BPKJF
䋃ㅺ [IBJ
惴 [IBJZJ
䍍◱ ;IBOH
4IBOHZJOH
ຩ㩭䇃 ;IBOH
;IVP
ຩ廝 [IBOHOÛ
凭㝏

ùû÷

ĠĥĨĬĬĚīIJ

;IBOHTVO
KJB
凭రジ [IBOH[IF
YJBOKJB
HVPSJ[J
䍭䑙㻪コ䩿㦶䓴 ;IBP
4VOZJ
䛘ర䉓 ;IFKJBOH
YVFTIJTIV
IV
䎄ㅎస㬚㭑⽝ ;IFOH
;IJYJBO
䭮䢧㻪 [IFOHSFO
䎞㦬 ;IFOXV
䎇㹅 ;IJ
4IFO
䐨䉷 [IJHVBJ
䐟⹷ ;IJIV
䐯⽝ ;IJMJ
䐒厁

[IPOHIV
YVFEBP
DIFOHYJBO
৷⽝స⭡ ⧪㻪 ;IPV
YJBPMJBO
䐽㾃㑏 ;IV
'BEBO
&SNFJ
䑍Ⳟ⭊ ᭷㗗

;JHV
䓰⹤ ;JYJB
EBPSFO
䓰㻝⭡㦬 ;POHKJOHMJ
㊣ㄼ㏎ ;POHKJOHMJ
[IVMJ
㊣ㄼ㏎䑛㏎ ;VOIVB
TIVIV
䔒⿐㭑⽝ ;VP[IVBO
䔔՘

#JCMJPHSBQIZ

ӽĨĮīĜĞĬ
ӚĢĭĞĝ
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#JKJ
YJBPTIVP
EBHVBO
ⷱ䆼㾂䌇⫔䅿
5BJCFJ
9JOYJOH
TIVKV
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#JKJ
YJBPTIVP
EBHVBO
ⷱ䆼㾂䌇⫔䅿
:BOH[IPV
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HVBOHMJOH
HVKJ
LFZJOTIF
øĀÿû ):

8FOH
%VKJBO
㸭⋻ㅂ
DPNQ
%BP[BOH
[JNV
ZJOEF
⭡⤹䓴㚠䅞⭤
øĀúü
SFQSJOU
5BJCFJ
$IFOHXFO
DIVCBOTIF
øĀýý +54


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9V
‫ڃ‬哄
FU
BM
FET
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5BOHTIV
㜇㲧᎙
#FJKJOH
;IPOHIVB
TIVKV
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4POHMJOH
㠲㯪愈
-JBP[IBJ
[IJZJ
IVJKJBP
IVJ[IV
IVJQJOH
CFO
㑥惴䐟◱᎟㾄 ᎟䈾᎟䉖⡟
&E
;IBOH
:PVIF
ຩ䇲庲
4IBOHIBJ
4IBOHIBJ
HVKJ
DIVCBOTIF
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4IBOIBJKJOH
KJBP[IV
㩞⼄ㄼ㾄䈾
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CZ
:VBO
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4IBOHIBJ
4IBOH IBJ
HVKJ
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øĀÿ÷ 44


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5VP
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FU
BM
FET
4POH
4IJ
㯯㬘
#FJKJOH
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TIVKV
øĀþþ 44+


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#BP
ⶪ౻
4PVTIFOKJ
㯲㪒䆼
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TIVKV
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ⷀ剋唹⪯㎪
BOE
8BUBOBCF
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FET
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4IJOTIǰ
%BJ[PLZǢ
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5BJTIǢ
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㏏ዱ
FU
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4IBOHIBJ
4IBOHIBJ
HVKJ
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FET
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TIVKV
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TIVKV
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Index

age, 17, 29, 52, 70, 131; see also foxes as old men Ahern, Emily, 109 ancestor worship, 72–73, 78–83; and gender, 81–82, 218n26 anecdotal writings, 8–10, 35 An Lushan, 27–28 associations (hui), 153–54, 159 automatic writing. See spirit writing Baihutong, 15 Bai Juyi, 20–21 Baptandier, Brigitte, 99 barbarians. See foreigners Barr, Allan, 90, 91 Big Dipper, 18, 54 Bixia Yuanjun, 137–42, 146, 226n39; and divine bureaucracy, 138–39, 195, 227n44; and Eastern Peak, 141–42; and elite/official criticism, 139–40, 226n34; and female sexuality, 4, 137, 138; and Granny Wang, 143; and huxian term, 63; images of, 143, 144 Boltz, Judith, 176, 188, 189–90 Book of Changes, 213n33 boundary-crossing. See liminality; marginality bound feet. See foot binding

Bourdieu, Pierre, 6, 7, 198 Boxer Uprising, 184–85 Buddhism: and divine bureaucracy, 196; and exorcism, 36; and female rule, 34; and foreigners, 28, 30–35, 209n54; and fox cult suppression, 39; and Granny Wang, 143; and huxian term, 64; and Inari worship, 199; and Queen Mother of the West, 22; see also Stone Buddha temple Campany, Robert, 9, 51 carnival effect, 222n31 celestial bureaucracy. See divine bureaucracy celestial foxes, 23–24, 35, 63, 225n20 Chan, Leo Tak-hung, 10, 66 Chan Buddhism, 32–33; see also Buddhism chastity, 85, 87, 218n35 Chen Yinque, 28 Chuanjiang zaji (Lü Xizhe), 40–41 City God, 127, 128, 192, 224n4 Cohen, Myron, 228n75 comparative perspective, 198–201, 234n13 concubines: and ancestor worship, 79–83, 218n26; and fox as omen, 16; and foxearth god marriages, 137; and outlaw role, 165; and spirit mediums, 117–19; see also marginal women; women’s roles

262 Confucianism: and ancestor worship, 79; and family wealth, 86, 95; and female rule, 34; and foreigners, 28; and fox as omen, 15–16; and foxes as old men, 132; and sources, 8; and spirit mediums, 117, 223n43; see also literati; Neo-Confucianism; official order; officials; women’s roles courtesans, 162; marginality of, 26–27, 208n43; and spirit writing, 60; and xian term, 57–58; see also marginal women Da’an, 32 Daji spirit, 37, 39, 138, 210n81 Dakini, 30 Daoism: and Bixia Yuanjun, 137; and Chan Buddhism, 33; clerical, 128–29, 224–25nn7, 11, 13; and divine bureaucracy, 195, 196; and exorcism, 35–37, 40, 111–12, 128–29, 224–25nn7, 11, 13; and female roles, 99; and female rule, 34; Five Thunder Rites, 39, 129, 225nn11, 13; and foreigners, 30–31, 209n59; and foxes as old men, 131, 132; and interior alchemy (neidan), 52–53, 213n33; and menstrual blood, 215n59; and metamorphosis, 206n18; and outlaw role, 167; and Queen Mother of the West, 21–24, 141; and sexuality, 53, 57, 213n37; and Song suppression, 36–37, 39, 210nn76, 80; and Zigu, 111–12 daughters-in-law, 109–11; see also marginal women; women’s roles Davis, Edward, 9, 111 Deng Xuan, 67, 216n76 Der Ling, 232n79 Dikötter, Frank, 208n44 disease. See illness divine bureaucracy, 5, 129–33, 192–98, 233n9; and Bixia Yuanjun, 138–39, 195, 227n44; and cult upgrading, 145–46; and exorcism, 127–28, 224n4; and fox-earth god marriages, 136; and foxes as old men, 131– 33; and Granny Wang, 143–45, 195; and marginal groups, 192; and Stone Buddha temple, 157–59; see also local cults

Index domestic worship: and ancestors, 72–73, 78– 83, 218n26; categories of, 72–73, 216–17n2; and fox sexual possession of women, 88, 219nn43, 44; and ghosts, 72–77, 217n9; and Wutong spirits, 4; see also family wealth Doolittle, Justus, 188–89 Doré, Henry, 48, 99, 101, 119, 180 Dorfman, Diane, 220–21n3, 223n40, 228n75 Douglas, Mary, 6 Dubois, Thomas, 220n3, 223n40 early traditions, 14–43; exorcism, 35–37, 40– 42, 211n91; fox as political omen, 15–17; hair-cutting sorcery, 19–20, 207nn20, 23; and liminality, 24–25; and literati, 25–27; metamorphosis, 17–18, 206n18; possession, 18; and Queen Mother of the West, 21–24; sexual enchantment, 20–21; Song suppression, 36–40, 210nn76, 80, 81; see also foreigners earth god, 127–28, 132–37, 226n29 Eastern Peak (Taishan), 136–37, 141–42, 147 Eighteen Lords cult, 84 elite/official acceptance, 40; and Great Guardians of the Official Seal, 5, 185–89, 233n98; and spirit medium visits, 111, 119–25, 180; and yamen office invasions, 178–80 elite/official criticism, 112–19, 162–70; and Bixia Yuanjun, 139–40, 226n34; and elite family members, 117–19; and female sexuality, 162; and huxian term, 70–71; and marginal groups, 218–19n37; and marginal women, 114–15, 119–20, 222–23n36; and mediating role of spirit mediums, 117; and morality, 115, 116–17, 223nn40, 43; and Neo-Confucianism, 113, 223n45; and official order, 157, 168–70, 228nn75, 76; and outlaw role, 165–68, 230nn21, 22, 26; and popular entertainers, 162–63; and social control, 168–70; Song suppression, 36–40, 210nn76, 80, 81; and wanderer role, 164–65, 229n13; and women’s roles,

Index 114–15; and xian term, 57; and yin designation, 3, 204n6; see also officials; Republican/Communist fox cult suppression elites: and literary talents, 25–26; weakness of, 97–98, 220n1; see also elite/official acceptance; elite/official criticism; literati exorcism: and Daoism, 35–37, 111–12, 128–29, 224–25nn7, 11, 13; and divine bureaucracy, 127–28, 224n4; and early traditions, 35–36, 40–42, 211n91; and officials, 40–42, 170–74, 196, 231n43; and spirit mediums, 107–108, 110, 111–12 family wealth, 83–95; and ancestor worship, 78–79, 80; and fox sexual enchantment of men, 89–92, 219n47; and fox sexual possession of women, 83–89; and mandarin images, 92–95, 220nn53, 54; and same-sex fox friendships, 92; and spirit mediums, 99, 108 Fang Yuankun, 134 female rule: challenges to, 209nn67, 69; and foreigners, 34–35; and hair-cutting sorcery, 19–20, 207n23 female sexuality: and Bixia Yuanjun, 4, 137, 138; exploitation of, 87–88, 221n23; and foxes as social threats, 162; and ghosts, 74–75; and huli jing term, 2; and NeoConfucianism, 85, 218n35; and transcendence, 213n34; and xian term, 57–59; see also fox sexual enchantment of men Feng Menglong, 62–63 Fengshen yanyi, 226n37 festivals, 49–50, 73, 112, 153, 222n27 filial piety. See ancestor worship Five Great Families cult. See Wudajia (Five Great Families) cult five sacred animals. See Wudajia (Five Great Families) cult Five Thunder Rites, 39, 129, 225nn11, 13 food offerings, 78–79, 88, 219n44 foot binding, 137, 138, 143, 226n37 Forbidden City, 189, 233n98

263 foreigners, 27–35; animal associations with, 27–28, 208n44; and Buddhism, 28, 30–35, 209n54; and Chinese names, 29; and Daoism, 30–31, 209n59; and female rule, 34–35; and fox cult suppression, 39–40; and odors, 28–29, 208n48 Foucault, Michel, 6–7 fox as political omen, 15–17 foxes, terms for, 2, 11, 50, 138, 212–13n29; see also huxian term foxes as old men: and family wealth, 92–95, 220nn53, 54; and Great Guardians of the Official Seal, 197; and huxian term, 65–66; and local cults, 130, 131–33, 225n20 fox men. See foxes as old men; fox sexual possession of women fox sexual enchantment of men: and courtesans, 26–27; and early traditions, 20–21; and family wealth, 89–92, 219n47; and ghosts, 74–75, 76–77; and huli jing term, 2; and huxian term, 62, 64–65, 66; in literary studies, 3; and metamorphosis, 55–56; and xian term, 58, 59 fox sexual possession of women: and domestic worship, 88, 219nn43, 44; and exploitation of female sexuality, 87–88; and family wealth, 83–89; and female power, 86–87, 218–19nn37, 39; and literati, 25–26; and metamorphosis, 55–56; and social status, 24–26; and women’s roles, 86–87, 90, 91, 218–19nn37, 39; see also spirit mediums fox shrines, 1; and divine bureaucracy, 194; ephemeral nature of, 8; and ghosts, 74; layout of, 125–26; and popular entertainers, 163; see also Stone Buddha temple fox spirits, images of, 2–3, 4, 200, 234n17 fox women: and ancestor worship, 79–81, 82–83; and earth god, 133–37; and merchants, 68–69; as mothers, 80–81, 106, 218n25; and popular entertainers, 162–63; as sisters, 68, 108; see also female sexuality; fox sexual enchantment of men fuji. See spirit writing fuluan. See spirit writing

264 gambling, 166 Gao Guanying, 52, 53, 54 Gao Heng, 123 Gao Jiwen, 122 Gaozong, Emperor, 31 Ge Hong, 17, 51 gender: and ancestor worship, 81–82, 218n26; and divine bureaucracy, 196–97; and power, 7; and spirit mediums, 102; see also female rule; women’s roles Geshu Han, 27–28 ghosts, 73–77; and domestic worship, 72–77, 217n9; and haunting, 74, 217n6; and metamorphosis, 18; and spirit mediums, 103 Grandpa Hu images. See mandarin images Granny Wang, 142–45, 195 Great Guardians of the Official Seal (Shouyin daxian), 5, 185–89, 233n98 groups of five, 4, 204n9 Guandi, 133 Guangyi ji, 32, 35 Guanyin: and Bixia Yuanjun, 137; and fox shrines, 125–26; and Queen Mother of the West, 21; and Stone Buddha temple, 152, 157 gui. See ghosts Guo Pu, 16, 23 Guo Qitao, 192 hair-cutting sorcery, 19–20, 207nn20, 23 Hansen, Valerie, 134, 210n80 healing: and spirit mediums, 56, 102–104, 223n40; and Stone Buddha temple, 154–55, 158–59 He Bang’e, 65, 66 He Xiu, 53–54, 55, 214n38 Hong Mai, 37, 46, 56 Huang Junkai, 68 Huang Liuhong, 172–73 hu (barbarians). See foreigners Hu Gangzi, 36 Huineng, 33 Huizong, Emperor, 39

Index hujing term, 50, 63, 64, 68, 212–13n29 huli jing term, 2 Humei congtan (Mochizi), 58–59, 62, 215n60 humei term, 20, 24, 30, 62 Huntington, Rania, 60, 95, 124, 219n47 hushen term, 24, 50 huwang term, 50 huxian term, 11, 50, 61–71; as general term, 69–71, 216n83; and huxian’er term, 67–68; and marginality, 2; and Ming writings, 61–63; in Northern Qing writings, 64–66, 215n70; and publishing, 66–68, 216nn75, 76; and storytelling, 66; and travel, 68– 69; in Xingshi yinyuanzhuan, 63–64; see also xian; xian as transcendence Hu Yan’gao, 41–42, 170 Hymes, Robert, 9, 193, 195, 196 I Ching. See Book of Changes “illicit cult,” 3–5, 38–40, 65, 97, 112–13, 159– 60, 192–93, 204n6 illness, 30, 56, 223n40; see also healing Inari worship, 199–200, 209n54 interior alchemy (neidan), 52–53, 213n33 Jade Emperor, 141, 145, 227n50 ji. See courtesans Jiaxian, 71 Ji Rongshu, 223n44 Ji Yun: on courtesans, 162; and divine bureaucracy, 133; on exploitation of female sexuality, 87; on fox sexual enchantment of men, 91; on ghosts, 74, 75; and huxian term, 65, 67, 68; on local cults, 128; on marginality, 2; and Neo-Confucianism, 223n45; and North China as fox cult heartland, 46–47; on officials, 181; as source, 9–10; on spirit mediums, 115–17, 223n44; and storytelling, 66; on thunderbolt crisis, 129; and xian as transcendence, 53 Johnson, David, 228n74 Kang Hai, 161, 190 Katz, Paul, 204n6

Index Korea, 36, 210n70 Kuhn, Philip, 19, 167, 230n26 Lady Linshui, 221n3 Lang Ying, 44–46, 54, 55, 61, 211n1 laohu term, 50 Leishuo, 58–59 Lewis, I. M., 98, 218–19n37 Li, Wai-Yee, 219n47 Liaozhai zhiyi (Pu Songling), 9, 10, 64–65, 90, 91; see also Pu Songling Lidai fabaoji, 32–33 Liji, 15–16 Li Jianguo, 210n81 Li Jing, 37, 210n76 Li Jinghan, 103–104 liminality, 6, 24–25, 28, 100; see also marginality Li Qingchen, 48, 70 Li Shiyu, 147 literary studies, 3 literati: and courtesans, 26–27; and exorcism, 35; and fox men, 25–26; and spirit mediums, 56, 121–24; and xian as transcendence, 52–54, 214n38; see also elites; specific sources Liu Shoumei, 181, 215n70 Liuya waibian (Xu Kun), 91 Li Wei-tsu: and divine bureaucracy, 133; on family wealth, 83; on huxian term, 71; on metamorphosis, 54–55, 56, 214n40; on officials, 173–74; on spirit mediums, 99, 101, 104–105, 120; on thunderbolt crisis, 129 local cults, 127–47, 159–60, 192; and clerical Daoism, 128–29, 224–25nn7, 11, 13; and divine bureaucracy, 5, 129–33; and exorcism, 128–29; and fox-earth god marriages, 133–37; and foxes as old men, 130, 131–33, 225n20; Granny Wang, 142–45, 195; Queen Mother of the West, 21–24, 141, 146–47, 227n50; and temples, 8, 134–35, 226n29, 227n65; see also Bixia Yuanjun; Buddhism; divine bureaucracy; Daoism; Stone Buddha temple

265 Lu Can, 61 Luoyang qielan ji, 19 Lü Xizhe, 40–41, 211n88 mandarin images, 92–95, 195, 220nn53, 54 marginal groups: and Bixia Yuanjun, 138; and divine bureaucracy, 192; and fox sexual possession of women, 86–87, 218–19n37; and liminality, 6; and officials, 176; popular entertainers, 162–63; see also foreigners; marginal women marginality, 2–3, 7–8, 191; and fox sexual enchantment of men, 25; and fox sexual possession of women, 24–25; and xian as transcendence, 51–52; see also marginal groups; marginal women; women’s roles marginal women: and ancestor worship, 81–82, 218n26; and Bixia Yuanjun, 138, 139–40; courtesans as, 26–27, 162, 208n43; and elite/official criticism, 114–15, 119–20, 222–23n36; empowerment of, 86–87, 218– 19nn37, 39; and ghosts, 75; and Granny Wang, 143; and outlaw role, 165, 230n22; sexual exploitation of, 221n23; and spirit mediums, 98–99, 108–109; and Zigu, 111–12, 222n27 mediating role of spirit mediums, 104–13; anecdotal accounts of, 106–13; and elite/ official criticism, 117; ethnographic reports on, 104–106 menstrual blood, 62, 215n59 merchants, 68–69 metamorphosis: and early traditions, 17–18, 206n18; and menstrual blood, 62; and self-cultivation, 54–56, 214n40; and Wutong spirits, 207n24 Mianshui yantanlu (Wang Pizhi), 40 Ming Taizu, Emperor, 169 Mochizi, 58–59, 62, 215n60 morality: and elite/official criticism, 115, 116–17, 223nn40, 43; and fox as political omen, 15–16; fox guardianship of, 116, 179, 181–85, 232nn67, 79; see also official order

266 mothers, fox women as, 80–81, 106, 218n25 Mother Taishan. See Bixia Yuanjun Nagao Ryuzō, 48, 83, 92, 94, 222n27 Neo-Confucianism: and elite/official criticism, 113, 223n45; and family wealth, 85, 218n35; and xian as transcendence, 214n38; see also Confucianism Niangniang term, 138 nine-tailed fox, 15, 16, 21–23 North China as fox cult heartland, 44–50; beliefs in, 3, 46–47, 203n2, 211–12n10; and huxian term, 69; and terminology, 11–12; and Wudajia (Five Great Families) cult, 47–48 odors, 28–29, 208n48 official order: and ancestor worship, 79; and Bixia Yuanjun, 140–41, 142; challenges to, 4–5, 8, 157–59; and domestic worship, 73; and early traditions, 42; and elite/official criticism, 157, 168–70, 228nn75, 76; and family wealth, 85, 86, 218n35; and female rule, 34; and foreigners, 28; and fox sexual enchantment of men, 90, 219n47; and power, 7; and Stone Buddha temple, 148–49, 156–57; and written texts, 156, 228n74; and Zigu, 111–12; see also women’s roles officials, 4–5; and Bixia Yuanjun, 139; and exorcism, 40–42, 170–74, 196, 231n43; and foxes as Great Guardians of the Official Seal, 5, 185–89, 233n98; and ghosts, 76; limitations of, 169–70; and moral guardianship, 179, 181–85, 232nn67, 79; and yamen office invasions, 4–5, 41–42, 174–80, 188–89; see also elite/official acceptance; elite/official criticism; official order Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko, 208n37 outlaw role, 165–68, 230nn21, 22, 26 outsiders. See marginality Owen, G., 83, 220n53

Index Patriarch of Foxes, 130, 131, 177–78 “peasants,” 157, 228n75 Pingyao zhuan (Feng Menglong), 62–63, 68 plague spirits, 4 political power: and fox as omen, 15–17; and hair-cutting sorcery, 19–20, 207n23; see also female rule Pomeranz, Kenneth, 140, 226n34 Poo, Mu-Choo, 233n9 popular entertainers, 162–63 possession, 18; see also fox sexual possession of women; spirit mediums power, 6–7, 8; and marginal women, 86–87, 218–19nn37, 39; and women’s roles, 90, 91, 136; see also political power premonition. See fox as political omen printing. See publishing projections, foxes as, 26, 87 propitiation: and ancestor worship, 78–79; and family wealth, 88–89; and female power, 87; and huxian term, 2, 64; and yamen office invasions, 41, 178–79, 188–89; see also domestic worship; elite/ official acceptance; fox shrines publishing, 66–68, 216nn72, 75, 76 Pu Songling: on courtesans, 162; on fox sexual enchantment of men, 64, 76–77, 90, 91; on ghosts, 76–77; and huxian term, 61, 64, 68; and North China as fox cult heartland, 45–46; on officials, 176–77, 178, 182; on outlaw role, 166; on Queen Mother of the West, 141; as source, 9, 10; on spirit mediums, 56, 122–25; and Xingshi yinyuanzhuan, 63 Qianlong, Emperor, 69, 169 Qian Xiyan, 61–62 Qian Yong, 69 Qingbai leichao (Xu Ke), 70–71 Queen Mother of the West, 21–24, 141, 146–47, 227n50 Republican/Communist fox cult suppression, 2, 154–55, 157

Index resistance, 7 ritual: and domestic worship, 73; and fox cult suppression, 77; and liminality, 6; and spirit mediums, 101–102; and Zigu, 112 Robinet, Isabelle, 206n18 same-sex fox friendships, 92 sazai, 55, 214n40 Schneewind, Sarah, 135, 204n6 Scott, Joan, 7 self-cultivation: and huxian term, 63, 65–66, 70; and metamorphosis, 54–56, 214n40; and thunderbolt crisis, 129; and xian as transcendence, 52–54 sexuality. See female sexuality; fox sexual enchantment of men; fox sexual possession of women; sexuality and transcendence sexuality and transcendence, 53, 57–58, 59, 213nn34, 37 Shahar, Meir, 193, 222n31 shamanism: and ancestor worship, 80–81; and fox women as mothers, 81, 218n26; and Queen Mother of the West, 22, 23; and spirit mediums, 221n3; and xian term, 56–57 Shanhaijing, 15, 21 Shen Defu, 46, 47, 61, 62 Shen Jiji, 21, 209n69 shenxian, 56–57 shijie, 213n32 Shouyin daxian. See Great Guardians of the Official Seal shrines. See fox shrines sisters, fox women as, 68, 108 Skinner, William, 11–12 Smyers, Karen, 198–99, 200 social order. See official order social status: and fox sexual possession of women, 24–26; and spirit mediums, 98–99, 119, 220–21n3; see also marginal groups; marginal women Songshi, 39, 40, 41

267 sorcery, 167, 230n26; and hair-cutting, 19–20, 207nn20, 23 sources, 8–11, 205n21 spirit mediums, 97–126; and divine bureaucracy, 193; and elite weakness, 97–98, 220n1; and exorcism, 107–108, 110, 111–12; and female power, 86, 218–19n37; and Granny Wang, 143; and healing, 56, 102– 104, 223n40; and huxian term, 65; initiation process, 99–102; mediating roles of, 104–12; and morality, 116, 223n40; and outlaw role, 166–67; and social status, 98–99, 118, 220–21n3; and Stone Buddha temple, 154–56, 158–59; and women’s roles, 99, 100, 108–11, 113–14, 118–19, 221n23; xiangtou (incense head) term, 103, 221n16; and xian term, 56–57; and Zigu, 111–12; see also elite/official criticism; fox sexual possession of women spirit writing, 59–60, 111–12, 143 Stone Buddha temple, 147–59; illustrations of, 150, 151; informant stories, 153–56; official interpretations of, 148–49, 156–57; temple site, 149–52, 156–57 “Story of Huo Xiaoyu,” 26–27 storytelling, 66 Stove God, 72, 73, 133, 216–17n2 Sutton, Donald, 113 Szonyi, Michael, 192 Taiping guanjichao (Feng Menglong), 62 Taiping Rebellion, 184 Taishan. See Eastern Peak Taiwan, 47, 84 Taizong, Emperor, 16 Takizawa Shunryō, 49, 232n79 Tan Qian, 114 Tantric Buddhism, 30, 31, 209n54 Tanxian, 71 Tao Hongjing, 21, 203n2 Teaching of Smelling the Fragrance (Wenxiang jiao), 113, 167 Teaching of the Black Fox (Xuanhu jiao), 113 Ter Haar, Barend, 167, 168

268 terms. See foxes, terms for; huxian term; xian term theft, 105–106, 165, 230n21 Tianhou, 137 transcendence: and literati, 25, 52–54, 208n37, 214n38; and official power, 139; and sexuality, 53, 57–58, 59, 213nn34, 37; see also xian as transcendence Transcendent Pei, 47 travel, 68–69 Turner, Victor, 6, 26 Uchida Tomō, 147, 227n65 Unsullied Woman, 52, 213n34 vagrancy, 164–65, 229n13 vampirism, 74–75 Van Gulik, R. H., 208n43, 213n37 von Glahn, Richard, 84, 86, 193, 210n80, 218n35 wanderer role, 164–65, 229n13 wandering ghosts. See ghosts Wang Airen, 233n98 Wang Lun rebellion (1774), 163, 169 Wang Pizhi, 40, 211n88 Wang Sizong, 40–41, 170, 176 Wang Tao, 216n83 Wang Tonggui, 61 Wang Wenqing. See Huizong, Emperor Watson, Rubie, 92 Watters, T., 188, 189 Weller, Robert, 5, 84, 193 White Lotus uprising (1622), 114, 167–68 women’s roles: and ancestor worship, 79–80, 81–83, 218n26; and chastity, 85, 87, 218n35; courtesans, 27, 208n43; and fox sexual enchantment of men, 89–90, 91–92; and fox sexual possession of women, 86–87, 90, 91, 218–19nn37, 39; itinerant teachers, 222–23n36; and outlaw role, 165, 230nn21, 22; and power, 90, 91, 136; sexual exploitation, 87–88, 221n23; and spirit

Index mediums, 99, 100, 108–11, 113–14, 118–19, 221n23; and Zigu, 111–12, 222n27; see also marginal women Wu, Empress, 32, 33, 34, 35, 209nn67, 69 Wudajia (Five Great Families) cult, 4, 204n9, 228n75; and cult upgrading, 146; and divine bureaucracy, 133; and family wealth, 83, 93; and North China as fox cult heartland, 47–48 Wutong spirits: and domestic worship, 4; and family wealth, 84, 86, 218n35; and metamorphosis, 207n24; and North China as fox cult heartland, 46, 211– 12n10; shrines for, 219n43; and Song suppression, 37–39; and spirit mediums, 56 xian as transcendence, 51–54; and Book of Changes, 213n33; and huxian term, 64, 65, 70; and literati, 52–54, 214n38; and marginality, 51–52; and sexuality, 53, 57–58, 59, 213nn34, 37; and shijie, 213n32 xian’er/huxian’er term, 60–61, 67–68 xiangtou (incense head) term, 103, 221n16 xianjia term, 1, 11 xian term, 11, 50–61; and female sexuality, 57–59; and metamorphosis, 54–56, 214n40; and spirit mediums, 56–57; and spirit writing, 59–60; translations of, 51; and xian’er, 60–61; see also xian as transcendence Xiaowendi, Emperor, 16 Xie Zhaozhe, 46, 61 Xingshi yinyuanzhuan, 63–64, 68, 138–40 Xuanzang, 153 Xuanzong, Emperor, 30, 31 Xu Changzuo, 61, 226n39 Xu Dishan, 111 Xue Fucheng, 70, 83 Xu Jiefeng, 59, 65 Xu Ke, 70–71 Xu Kun, 65–66, 91, 183 Xu Shen, 17 Xu Zibuyu (Yuan Mei), 67

Index yamen office invasions, 4–5, 41–42, 174–80, 188–89 Yanyibian, 57–58 Ye Fashan, 31–32, 209n59 yin designation, 3, 204n6 yin/yang dichotomy: and Book of Changes, 213n33; and fox sexual enchantment of men, 20, 91; and ghosts, 18, 73, 74, 75; and hair-cutting sorcery, 19–20; and metamorphosis, 18, 206n18 Yitan kexinlu (Deng Xuan), 67, 216n76 Yuan Haowen, 41, 42 Yuan Mei, 67, 133 Yuewei caotang biji (Ji Yun), 9–10 Yu Xuanji, 57, 208n43

269

Zeitlin, Judith, 10, 77, 216n75 Zeng Yandong, 215n70 Zeng Zao, 58 Zhang Jingyun, 65, 103 Zhang Naiwei, 233n98 Zhang Shangying, 39 Zhang Zhuo, 14, 24, 57 Zhenzong, Emperor, 38 zhiguai collections, 9, 10, 66–67 Zhishen, 33 Zhu Ermei, 129, 167 Zibuyu (Yuan Mei), 67, 216n75 Zigu (Purple Maiden), 60, 111–12, 222n27