Chi You

Also Known As: 蚩尤; also Chiyou, Ch’ih-yu; Hmong Txiv Yawg, Xong Puob Youl; surname Jiang 姜 according to the Song-dynasty Lushi
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Chinese Mythology, Miao-Yao Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He raises blinding fog at will, commands the wind and rain through allied storm powers, and carries a head of bronze that ordinary blades cannot bite.
Role in Mythos: He is the great rebel of the founding age, the leader of the Nine Li who fought the Yellow Emperor for the central plain and lost, then was worshipped for centuries afterward by the men who did the killing.
Relation to Humans: Emperors sacrificed to him before campaigns, treating the defeated enemy as the surest patron of victory. Ordinary people set his stone at their gates and butted heads in his name at village festivals, which is a strange afterlife for a monster.

Fog came off the Zhuolu plain thick enough to taste, wet grass and cold metal, and the Yellow Emperor’s chariots turned inside it for days without finding the enemy or each other. Chi You had raised it himself. The sources that hate him still concede he did it without apparent effort, the way a man breathes out on a winter morning, and that he had eighty-one brothers standing behind him in the white, every one of them with a metal skull.

Nobody can agree what he looked like, which is itself a kind of description. One strand of the tradition gives him four eyes and six arms, a weapon in each hand, closer to a ritual exorcist’s costume than to anything born. Another gives him the head of a bull, two horns, a human trunk and the hindquarters of a bear. The one detail that survives every retelling is the metal: a bronze head, an iron brow, a skull that turned blades. He and his brothers were said to eat sand and stones, which reads less like appetite than like a boast about what their teeth could manage.

His ancestry is late and contested. The Song scholar Luo Bi gave him the surname Jiang and made him a descendant of the Flame Emperor, which would make the great war a family quarrel. Earlier texts are content to leave him where he starts: chief of the Nine Li, the Jiuli, a confederacy somewhere off the eastern or southern edge of the emerging Chinese world, and the first being in the record to organise violence properly. The Book of Documents puts it with no ornament at all in the Lüxing chapter. According to the teachings of antiquity, Chi You was the first to create disorder, and the punishments that followed became engines of oppression, slaughtering the innocent and going to excess in cutting off the nose, cutting off the ears, castration and branding. Whatever else he was, he was the moment the world stopped being peaceful.

The war began with the Flame Emperor, who met the Nine Li and was beaten badly enough to run. He came to Zhuolu and asked the Yellow Emperor for help, and the two sovereigns combined against a single warlord because neither of them could manage him alone. Nine battles went to Chi You. The fog was his best weapon and very nearly his last one: it took the invention of the south-pointing chariot, a cart with a figure that held its bearing however the wheels turned, before the imperial army could find its way out of its own confusion. When the fog failed, Chi You called the Wind Earl and the Rain Master and put a storm over the field.

The counterattack is the strangest part of the story and the part the earliest text tells best. The Classic of Mountains and Seas says the Yellow Emperor sent the winged dragon Yinglong to the wilds of Jizhou to hoard the water, and that Chi You answered with the storm, and that the emperor then sent down a woman in green called Ba. The rain stopped where she stood. It has not properly started again since; she could not climb back to heaven afterward, and drought goes wherever she settles. Into that sudden dryness came the drums. The emperor had killed the one-legged ox Kui in the eastern sea, stretched its hide, and beaten it with the bones of a thunder beast, and the sound carried five hundred li. Chi You, who could eat stones and cross broken ground at a run, went down under the noise.

He lost.

They killed him and cut the head off the invulnerable neck, and the accounts say it rained blood for a while afterward. The Classic of Mountains and Seas keeps one detail that no moral is attached to: on Song Mountain there is a stand of maples, and the maples grew from the fetters Chi You threw down. Red leaves, every autumn, out of a discarded set of manacles.

Then the story does something unusual for a defeated monster. Instead of vanishing, he was promoted. The Records of the Grand Historian shows the First Emperor of Qin sacrificing to him as a god of war, one of a small set of powers worth a ruler’s attention, and shows Liu Bang doing the same at Pei before the campaign that founded the Han. Han tombs carry his image on their walls. In Ji province people played a game called Chi You’s Sport, putting on ox horns and butting one another, which is either a memorial or a joke and may be both. The Song historian Luo Bi claimed that after the beheading the sages cast his likeness on bronze vessels to warn the greedy, which is how he became entangled with the jawless glutton mask of the ritual bronzes. Another tale has Nüwa drop a stone from Mount Tai on him; the stone missed, he escaped, and the five-fingered tablet inscribed for Mount Tai became the charm householders still plant against misfortune. A Song legend has the emperor’s Daoist summoning Guan Yu to finish him off at the Jiezhou salt pond, several thousand years late.

The Miao connection is old in outline and modern in force. The Guoyu associates his Nine Li with the Sanmiao, the Three Miao of the ancient south, and the Book of Documents passage above yokes his disorder to a people it calls the Miao. Those are ancient words used for ancient groups, not for the Miao and Hmong communities alive today. The claim that Chi You is the direct ancestor of the modern Miao and Hmong nation, honoured in Hmong as Txiv Yawg, is a twentieth-century development, argued into being by Miao and Hmong intellectuals and diaspora writers and then met halfway by the Chinese state: Zhuolu county built him an ancestral hall in 2003 and now worships him beside the Yellow Emperor and the Flame Emperor as the third progenitor of the Chinese nation. Hmong communities themselves continue to argue about whether the descent is real. It is a live and unfinished question, and it is worth more as a live question than as a settled pedigree.

His powers all come out of the same root. He is the being who made war a craft, so he gets the fog, the weather, the eighty-one metal-headed brothers and a body that will not take an edge. His limits come out of the same root too. The fog beats an army only until someone builds an instrument that ignores it. The storm is borrowed from the Wind Earl and the Rain Master and can be cancelled by a drought stronger than the rain. And a head that no sword can cut is still a head, sitting on a neck, on a battlefield, at the end of a war he was losing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Chi You in Chinese mythology?

Chi You is the leader of the Nine Li tribe who fought the Yellow Emperor for control of the central plain and was defeated at the Battle of Zhuolu. He is described with a bronze head and an iron forehead, and the Book of Documents names him as the first being to create disorder in the world. After his death he was worshipped as a god of war by rulers including the First Emperor of Qin and Liu Bang.

How was Chi You defeated?

Chi You was beaten at Zhuolu by a combination of navigation, counter-weather and noise. His fog was neutralised by the south-pointing chariot, his summoned storm was cancelled by the drought goddess Ba, and the Yellow Emperor’s drum, made from the hide of the one-legged ox Kui and struck with the bones of a thunder beast, broke his army. He was then killed and beheaded.

Is Chi You the ancestor of the Hmong and Miao people?

Ancient texts link his Nine Li confederacy to the Sanmiao of the southern frontier, but those are ancient group names rather than the modern Miao and Hmong. The claim that Chi You is the direct ancestor of today’s Miao and Hmong, honoured in Hmong as Txiv Yawg, took shape in the twentieth century and is still debated within Hmong communities. Zhuolu county built him an ancestral hall in 2003 and honours him as a third progenitor of the Chinese nation alongside the Yellow Emperor and the Flame Emperor.

Why is Chi You connected to the taotie mask on Chinese bronzes?

The Song historian Luo Bi wrote that after the Yellow Emperor beheaded Chi You, sages cast his likeness onto bronze vessels as a warning against greed. His son Luo Ping expanded the idea, describing Chi You as a shape-shifting spirit whose form was mostly animal with fleshy wings. That late identification is why Chi You is often associated with the glutton mask found on ritual bronzes.

What does Chi You have to do with the Mount Tai stone charm?

One tale has the goddess Nüwa drop a stone from Mount Tai onto Chi You, which failed to crush him and let him escape. The five-fingered stone tablet inscribed for Mount Tai afterward became a protective charm set at gates and street corners to turn away evil and disaster. The charm outlasted the story that produced it.