The Eight Immortals

The Eight Immortals, or Ba Xian (八仙), are a beloved cast of characters in Chinese folk religion and Taoist tradition. They are the great wanderers of the Chinese imagination, drunk, comic, austere, and divine, who have become, in the centuries since their stories were first assembled, the most popular Taoist figures in the popular mind. They appear in temple paintings, on ceramics, in opera, in the Journey to the West, in wedding iconography, in restaurant decoration, and in the modern fantasy fiction and film. The Eight Immortals are a piece of Chinese folk religion that has had an unbroken run of popularity since at least the Tang dynasty, and they continue to be honoured in temples and shrines across the Chinese-speaking world.

The Composition of the Eight

The Eight Immortals are an unusually various group. They include a woman, a young scholar, a fat general, a beggar, a flower-seller, a flute-player, an elderly rider of a magical mule, and an androgynous character whose gender was debated even in the older texts. They were assembled gradually, over the centuries, out of a much larger set of immortals of the Taoist tradition, and the canonical list of eight was fixed in the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) and the early Ming.

The eight are: He Xiangu, the only woman, with her lotus flower; Cao Guojiu, the dignified imperial relative, with his jade tablet; Li Tieguai, the beggar with the iron crutch and the calabash of medicine; Lan Caihe, the androgynous flower-seller; Han Xiangzi, the nephew of the great Tang poet Han Yu, with his flute; Zhang Guolao, the elderly rider of a white mule that folds up into a paper tube; Zhongli Quan, the fat warrior-general, 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 composition is sometimes taken as a sign of the Taoist tradition’s rejection of social hierarchy: the beggar and the imperial relative can both become immortal, the woman and the androgyne can sit alongside the great scholar.

The Iconography of the Eight

Each of the Eight Immortals has a specific attribute that serves as his or her identifying marker. Lu Dongbin is the most literary of the eight, the scholar-hero. He is said to have been a young scholar of the Tang dynasty who met the immortal Zhongli Quan in a wine-shop and was given a magical pill that gave him the power of transformation. The sword that he carries is the Qujiang sword; the fly-whisk he carries is the symbol of the Taoist sage. Lu Dongbin is the most popular of the Eight Immortals in the modern folk mind, and his temples are still common in northern China.

He Xiangu is the only woman among the eight, and her attribute is the lotus flower, the symbol of purity and of Taoist and Buddhist enlightenment. According to the older tradition, she was a girl of the Tang dynasty who lived in the mountains of Guangxi and was given a vision of Laozi, the founder of Taoism, in a dream. Her shrine is honoured particularly in the southern coastal regions, and her attribute is the most common of the Eight Immortals in wedding iconography, where the lotus is a sign of fertility and of the pure marriage.

Li Tieguai is the beggar of the eight, a fierce, ascetic figure who is the patron of physicians and of the poor. His attribute is the iron crutch, on which he leans because, in the older tradition, he lost his leg in an accident while his soul was out of his body on a vision. The calabash he carries is a flask of medicine. Zhongli Quan is the fat general, the most cheerful of the eight, and the one most often depicted in a comic register. His attribute is the fan, which he uses to revive the souls of the dead.

Cao Guojiu, the imperial relative, is the most austere of the eight, and his attribute is the jade tablet that is the symbol of the imperial bureaucracy. Han Xiangzi, the nephew of the great Tang poet Han Yu, is the flute-player. Lan Caihe, the androgynous flower-seller, is one of the most enigmatic of the eight, depicted sometimes as a woman and sometimes as a man, with a flower basket and a pair of wooden clogs. Zhang Guolao, the elderly rider, has the most distinctive of all the attributes: the white mule that folds up into a paper tube when not in use, and the small bamboo drum that is the symbol of his music.

The Stories of Their Ascension

Each of the Eight Immortals has a story of ascension. The most common type of story is the moment of revelation: the young scholar in the wine-shop, the beggar at the gate of the temple, the girl in the mountain who sees Laozi in a dream, the imperial relative who abandons the court. The revelation is followed by the period of cultivation, in which the candidate performs the long work of physical and moral purification that qualifies the immortal for the final ascent.

The most famous is the ascension of Lu Dongbin, who is said to have ascended from the western hills of Hangzhou, the great Taoist mountain of the south. The ascension of Zhang Guolao, the elderly rider, is the most amusing: the white mule is folded up, the rider and his mule disappear, and only the bamboo drum and the small bamboo tube are left behind. The ascension of Lan Caihe is the most ambiguous: the flower-seller is said to ascend in a sort of drunken levitation. The stories of the Eight Immortals are told in the great Ming and Qing dynasty collections of Taoist stories, of which the Dongyou Ji (洞兪記) of the Ming writer Wu Yuantai is the most famous single text.

The Eight Immortals in the Journey to the West

The Eight Immortals make a famous appearance in the Journey to the West, the great Ming novel of the monk Xuanzang’s pilgrimage to India. In the eighteenth chapter, the Eight Immortals are gathered at the Peach Festival of the Queen Mother of the West, and they are challenged by Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, who is unimpressed by their claims to immortality. The scene is one of the comic set-pieces of the novel, and it is one of the most important appearances of the Eight Immortals in the Chinese literary tradition. The episode places the Eight Immortals within the larger world of the Chinese popular religion: they are part of the same celestial bureaucracy that includes the Jade Emperor, the Queen Mother of the West, the Dragon King, and the Bodhisattvas.

The Iconography of the Ming and Qing

The Eight Immortals are a major subject of the Ming and Qing dynasty painting and ceramics. The most famous single image is the “Eight Immortals Crossing the Sea” (八仙過海), in which the eight are shown crossing a sea in a series of transformations, each using his or her attribute. The Chinese proverb “八仙過海，各顯神通” is one of the most commonly cited of the Chinese folk-sayings. The Eight Immortals appear in the great painted scrolls of the Ming and Qing, in the woodblock prints of the Suzhou and Yangzhou schools, in the painted ceramics of Jingdezhen and Dehua, in the embroidered silks of the south, and in the wall paintings of the older temples.

The Eight Immortals in the Modern World

The Eight Immortals continue to be a major figure in modern Chinese popular culture. The Chinese fantasy fiction of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has produced a remarkable body of writing about the eight. The Hong Kong martial-arts films and the modern Chinese fantasy films have used the Eight Immortals as a major cast of characters. The Chinese television drama of the 1990s and 2000s has produced several long series devoted to the eight. The “Eight Immortals” dish, an arrangement of eight different foods on a single tray, is a common wedding food; the eight foods are taken to represent the eight immortals. The images of the eight are reproduced in the décor of the Chinese embassies and the cultural centres of the diaspora; the eight are a recognised Chinese symbol in the international cultural marketplace.

Sources and Further Reading

Fung, Yu-lan. A History of Chinese Philosophy. Translated by Derk Bodde. 2 vols. Princeton University Press, 1952.
Welch, Holmes. The Parting of the Way: Lao Tzu and the Taoist Movement. Beacon Press, 1966.
Kohn, Livia, ed. Gods of Mount Tai: Legend, Cult, and Pilgrimage. Brill, 2015.
Hansen, Valerie. Changing Gods in Medieval China, 1127–1276. Princeton University Press, 1990.