Chinese Folklore
Chinese folk religion in practice — the Jade Emperor's celestial bureaucracy, the hungry ghosts of the seventh month, the Dragon King, the Eight Immortals, and the rituals still kept in the villages of the Chinese diaspora.
In this section
Dragon Boat Festival Origins
The Duanwu Festival, the poet Qu Yuan, the dragon-boat races, the zongzi dumplings, mugwort and calamus, realgar wine, and the festival across China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.
The Eight Immortals
The Ba Xian of Taoist tradition — He Xiangu, Cao Guojiu, Li Tieguai, Lan Caihe, Han Xiangzi, Zhang Guolao, Zhongli Quan, and Lu Dongbin — their attributes, their stories, and their place in Chinese folk religion.
Chinese folk religion is not a single thing but a great, slow-accumulating conversation between the official systems of Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism and the older village religion of the earth god, the kitchen god, and the ancestors. The result is one of the most elaborate popular theologies on earth. Gods, ancestors, and ghosts form a single celestial bureaucracy, modelled on the imperial court and presided over by the Jade Emperor in his heaven. Underneath, in the villages, the city god of the walled town, the earth god of the local shrine, the Dragon King of the nearest river, and the kitchen god of the household keep watch over their small jurisdictions and report upward at festival time.
The Celestial Bureaucracy
The most distinctive feature of Chinese folk religion is the way it has been imagined as a state. The Jade Emperor (Yuhuang Dadi), the supreme deity of the popular pantheon, sits on his throne in the high heaven and rules over a court that is, in every visible respect, a mirror of the earthly Chinese empire. Beneath him are ministries, censors, archivists, and a long hierarchy of officials, all of them with portfolios. The City God (Chenghuang) of a town is, in the folk imagination, the magistrate of that town after death; the Earth God (Tudi Gong) is the local village headman; the Kitchen God (Zao Wang) is the household inspector who returns annually to the heavenly capital to report on the family’s conduct.
The system has a serious moral purpose. Ghosts and minor spirits who misbehave can be promoted to minor deities, and minor deities who prove unworthy can be demoted. The bureaucracy is meant to be flexible, accountable, and surprisingly close to the ground. The God of Literature (Wenchang) watches over examinations; the God of War (Guandi) protects soldiers and police; the Goddess of the Sea (Mazu) saves shipwrecked sailors; the Old Man under the Moon (Yuelao) keeps the red thread that ties the feet of those who are to be married. Each has a feast day, a temple, a story, and a small set of ritual demands that the household must meet.
For a contrasting but oddly parallel system, the elaborate pantheon of Indian folk tradition and the more austere civic religion of the Roman gods offer useful comparisons. The Chinese system is unusual, however, for the way in which the bureaucracy is taken literally: a local official who fails in his duties can be replaced by his temple’s committee, and the new incumbent is installed in a formal enthronement ceremony.
The Hungry Ghosts of the Seventh Month
The seventh lunar month is the month of the hungry ghosts, and the festival of Zhongyuan, also called the Ghost Festival or Yulan, is the most affecting of the Chinese folk-religious year. According to tradition, the gates of the underworld are opened on the first day of the seventh month, and the unpropitiated dead are free to walk abroad. They drift into the human world to find food, comfort, and entertainment; if they are neglected, they grow resentful and bring misfortune. The festival is, in essence, a month-long act of hospitality to the wandering dead.
The observances are specific. At the household altar, food is set out at dusk for the ancestors and for any passing ghost; incense is burned; joss paper (the yellow or white paper printed to look like money) is burnt in small braziers so that the dead may have currency in the other world; paper boats are floated on rivers and ponds to carry the ghosts safely away at the month’s end. Theatrical performances are put on at the village temple for the entertainment of the ghosts, who are said to occupy the empty front rows of the audience. In some southern Chinese villages, particularly in Guangdong and Fujian, the stage is occupied by the famous “living-hell” operas in which the punishments of the afterlife are enacted in vivid detail.
The festival has a long history. It derives partly from the Buddhist Ullambana festival, in which the monk Maudgalyayana rescues his mother from the realm of the hungry ghosts, and partly from the older Chinese folk belief in the wandering dead. The customs are essentially identical across the Chinese diaspora: in Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, San Francisco, and Vancouver, the seventh month is the month of the stage-set purgatories, the floating river lanterns, and the burnt joss. The kinship with the Halloween of Samhain and the Mexican Day of the Dead is unmistakable, and the same deep concern with the welfare of the unquiet dead is visible in Indian shraddha rites.
The Fox Spirits: Huli Jing
The huli jing, the Chinese fox spirit, is the older cousin of the Japanese kitsune and one of the most elaborately worked-out figures of Chinese folk belief. The fox is, in this tradition, a creature that gains supernatural power as it grows old; after fifty years it can take human form, after a hundred it becomes a “celestial fox,” and after a thousand it ascends to the ranks of the divine. The huli jing is almost always female, almost always a seductress, and almost always a danger to the unwary scholar or the young priest.
The literature of the huli jing is enormous. The most famous single text is the Liaozhai Zhiyi, or “Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio,” of the seventeenth-century writer Pu Songling, which contains more than five hundred fox-spirit stories. The pattern is recognisable. A young scholar, often poor and studious, meets a beautiful woman; she visits him at night; he falls in love; eventually it emerges that she is a fox, and the question is whether she has done him any real harm. The endings are various: sometimes she is exorcised; sometimes she marries the scholar and bears him children; sometimes she is venerated as a local goddess. The fox is, in other words, not a simple villain. The huli jing tradition is a long, sometimes amused meditation on the borders between human and non-human, between the official Confucian order and the older animist world that lies just under it.
The fox-spirit motif travelled widely. The Japanese kitsune and the Korean gumiho are its two most famous relatives, and the related fox-spirit lore of the Indian yakshas and the European were-fox traditions shows how broadly the motif of the long-lived animal spirit has been distributed.
The Dragon King and the Lady White Snake
The Chinese folk world is profoundly aquatic. The Dragon King (Long Wang) of the four seas — the East Sea, the South Sea, the West Sea, and the North Sea — rules the watery depths and is approached by fishermen, sailors, and farmers praying for rain. The dragon is a fundamentally different being from the European dragon of hoarding and fire: the Chinese long is a water-being, a serpent of rain and rivers, an emblem of the emperor, and a guardian of cities. The full description of its nine attributes — the head of a camel, the horns of a deer, the eyes of a rabbit, the ears of a cow, the neck of a snake, the belly of a clam, the scales of a carp, the claws of an eagle, and the paws of a tiger — appears in the older encyclopedias, and a useful comparison with the European dragon is offered on the page about European vs Asian dragons.
The Lady White Snake of the West Lake in Hangzhou is perhaps the most loved of the Chinese folk stories about water-beings. The tale, in its older form, is one of the great four folk tales of China alongside the legend of Meng Jiang, the Butterfly Lovers, and the Cowherd and the Weaving Maid. The Lady White Snake is a snake-spirit who has spent a thousand years cultivating the way of the Tao; she descends from the mountain, takes human form, marries the apothecary Xu Xian, and lives happily until the monk Fahai discovers her true nature and imprisons her in Leifeng Pagoda. The story exists in many variants. In some, the white snake is a villain; in others, she is a wronged wife; in the modern opera and film versions, she is a sympathetic figure of almost tragic dignity. The wider folkloric kinship with the Indian nagas and water spirits and with the Slavic rusalka suggests a pan-Asian — perhaps even a pan-Eurasian — pattern of female water-spirits and their human lovers.
Meng Jiang, the Lady of the Great Wall
The story of Meng Jiang Nü, the wife who walked three thousand li to the Great Wall and there wept it down with the force of her grief, is one of the most powerful folk tales in the Chinese language. According to the tradition, the new bridegroom of Meng Jiang was conscripted to build the Great Wall of the First Emperor, marched off to the north, and died of exhaustion in the work. When his wife arrived to look for him, she learned only that he was buried somewhere in the wall. She sat down beside it and wept; the wall crumbled, and the bones of the dead were revealed. She recognised her husband by a drop of blood that fell on the bone, and she took them home for proper burial.
The story is at once a folk memory of the human cost of the great imperial works, a domestic tragedy in the manner of the great Western love stories, and a celebration of female loyalty and persistence. The Great Wall itself, in the folk imagination, is a sorrowful place: the bodies of the unburied dead are said to lie under the stones, and the sound of weeping can sometimes be heard at night. The tale has been told in opera, in story-telling, in the classic Ming novel, in modern film, and in the patriotic operas of the twentieth century. It belongs to a wider folk-narrative family in which a great building is undone by the force of human feeling; the Reynard fox and the Anansi spider of other traditions play other parts in other such stories, but the underlying structure of a small figure overcoming a monumental work by wit or grief is recognisable.
The Eight Immortals
The Eight Immortals of the Taoist tradition are a beloved cast of characters who, like the Kitsune of Japanese folklore, are still a part of everyday Chinese popular life. They are said to have achieved immortality at different times and in different ways: He Xiangu, the only woman among them, with her lotus flower; Cao Guojiu, the dignified brother of the empress, with his jade tablet; Li Tieguai, the beggar-philosopher with the iron crutch and the calabash; Lan Caihe, the androgynous flower-seller; Han Xiangzi, the nephew of the great scholar Han Yu, with his flute; Zhang Guolao, the elderly rider of a white mule that folds up and is kept in a paper tube; Zhongli Quan, the fat immortal with the fan that revives the dead; and Lu Dongbin, the scholar-swordsman, the most literary of the eight, with his fly-whisk and his magic sword. The Eight Immortals are honoured in temples, in opera, in paintings, in ceramics, and in the iconography of the birthday banquet, where the “Eight Immortals” dish is laid out as a kind of culinary portrait.
The Eight Immortals are major characters in the Journey to the West, the great Ming novel of the monk Xuanzang’s pilgrimage to India, and they make cameo appearances in many of the older folk tales. Their images decorate the porcelain of the Ming and Qing dynasties, the wedding cakes, the New Year prints, and the modern advertising. They are, in short, a piece of living folk tradition, and they are a useful entry point to the older Chinese religion for any reader approaching it for the first time. A full account of the Eight Immortals is given in the dedicated page on the Eight Immortals.
The Lunar Year and Its Festivals
The Chinese folk-religious year is built on the lunar calendar, and the major festivals are the hinges on which the whole system turns. The New Year (Chunjie) in the first lunar month is the largest, with its red banners, its spring couplets, the long family reunion dinner, the giving of the red envelope (hongbao), and the great firework display. The Lantern Festival on the fifteenth day of the first month closes the New Year season and lights the night with paper lanterns. The Qingming Festival in early April is the day of the dead, when the family graves are swept, food is laid out, and paper money is burnt. The Dragon Boat Festival on the fifth day of the fifth month commemorates the loyal poet Qu Yuan, with its dragon-boat races, its zongzi dumplings, and its apotropaic mugwort; the full story is told in the page on Dragon Boat Festival origins. The Mid-Autumn Festival on the fifteenth day of the eighth month is the night of the moon goddess Chang’e, with its mooncakes and its moon-viewing parties. The Double Ninth Festival on the ninth day of the ninth month is the festival of the elderly. The cycle is, on the whole, recognisable across East Asia: the Japanese matsuri and the Vietnamese Tết and the Korean folk festivals all share the same underlying structure.
Funerary Arts and the Care of the Dead
The Chinese treatment of the dead is one of the most elaborate in the world. The funeral itself is a three-day affair in many rural areas, with the body laid out on a draped bed, the family in white mourning dress, the burning of incense and paper money, the procession to the grave, and the ritual feeding of the corpse. The grave is an auspicious place: its position is chosen by a feng shui master, and the family returns to it at the Qingming sweep. The dead are not, however, confined to the grave. They are honoured at the household altar, where their small wooden tablets are arranged in order of seniority, and offerings of food and incense are made at every festival. The system is, in essence, a continuation of the family line in the other world.
The funerary arts of China are world-famous. The terracotta army of the First Emperor, the jade suits of the Han, the painted tomb chambers of Tang, the spirit money and the paper servants and the paper houses of the folk tradition, the wooden effigies of the Ming — all of these belong to a single, very long attempt to give the dead a proper house, a proper household, and a proper place in the order. The kinship with the Egyptian folk traditions and the Latin American Day of the Dead is obvious, and the broader Eurasian tradition of grave goods and ancestor-veneration extends from the Norse burial mounds to the Tibetan sky burial.
Folk Religion in the Modern Chinese World
The folk religion described in these pages is not a museum piece. It is a living system of practice, even in the great cities of contemporary China, even in the gleaming skyscraper cities of Taipei, Hong Kong, and Singapore, and even in the diaspora. The household altar is still common in the older neighbourhoods of Guangzhou, Fuzhou, Xiamen, and Shanghai; the temple of the City God is still the centre of the older quarters of many towns; the Hungry Ghost Festival is still observed in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Ho Chi Minh City, where the Chinese diaspora has carried the customs forward. In Taiwan, in particular, the folk religion has experienced a remarkable revival since the 1980s, with new temple buildings going up in city and village alike.
The Chinese government has had an ambiguous relationship with folk religion. The state recognises the five great religions — Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism — and the Confucian tradition has been officially rehabilitated. Folk religion, in the strict sense, sits awkwardly with this scheme, and the elaborate rituals of the temple festivals are sometimes restricted. Yet the older practices continue, partly absorbed into the official categories, partly continuing quietly in the household, and partly surfacing in the great wave of popular interest in the older Chinese culture that has been one of the most striking features of the last generation.
Chinese Folklore and the World
The Chinese folk tradition has been a major exporter of story and image to the world. The Journey to the West has been translated, adapted, and re-imagined in every language with a substantial China-adjacent readership; Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, is now a global cultural figure. The dragon of the Chinese imagination has been a familiar presence in Western fantasy at least since the publication of the nineteenth-century translations; it is the explicit subject of the comparison with the European dragon in the European vs Asian dragons page. The Chinese festival of the Moon, the Mid-Autumn Festival, is now observed in the diaspora communities of London, Sydney, and Vancouver. The Eight Immortals, the Lady White Snake, the Cowherd and the Weaving Maid, and the story of Meng Jiang are a treasury of folk material that has been taken up in opera, in film, in television drama, and in the modern Chinese fantasy novel with great success. The wider context of this circulation is discussed in the page on oral storytelling traditions across cultures.