Zhong Kui

Also Known As: 鍾馗; occasionally written 鍾葵; Japanese Shōki; the “demon queller”
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Chinese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He seizes malignant spirits with his hands and eats them, and the mere sight of his likeness is held to drive them off.
Role in Mythos: He is the guardian who stands at the threshold of the year and the doorway of the house, keeping out the ghosts that bring sickness and ruin.
Relation to Humans: Ordinary people put him on their gates at New Year and again at the Dragon Boat Festival, and hire performers to dance him through the streets when a shop opens or a house is new. He is the rare deity who is asked for nothing but violence on the household’s behalf.

The fever had held the emperor a month when the two ghosts came. The smaller one wore red trousers and a single shoe, the other shoe swinging from its belt, and it went skittering the length of the hall with a bamboo fan in one hand, having just lifted Consort Yang’s perfume sachet and the emperor’s jade flute. The second filled the doorway. Battered cap, blue robe, one sleeve stripped off the shoulder, both legs bound in hide. It caught the thief without hurrying, dug out its eyes and swallowed them.

The emperor, still dreaming, asked who he was. The big ghost gave his name as Zhong Kui, and said he had failed the imperial military examination. Xuanzong woke soaked through and well, and sent for Wu Daozi, the greatest painter of the age, to set the dream down exactly as it had come. When the picture was brought in, the emperor found the figure correct in every particular, as though the painter had been standing beside the bed.

That is the story, and it is worth knowing how it reaches us. The earliest surviving telling is not Tang at all. It is Shen Kuo, a Song scholar writing around 1088, describing a painting he had seen that was attributed to Wu Daozi, and copying out the inscription that came with it. A fuller version, the one that hardened into the standard account, appears later still, in a Ming anthology quoting a lost Tang miscellany. In that telling the little thief has a name, Xuhao, the Void-Waster, the spirit that eats a household’s blessings and leaves nothing to show for them. Zhong Kui is from Mount Zhongnan and failed his examination back in the reign of Gaozu, the dynasty’s founder, and took the failure so hard that he dashed his head against the palace steps and died there. Gaozu, hearing of it, had him buried in a green robe, the dress of a junior official, which was the rank the examiners had denied him. Zhong Kui spent his death repaying the courtesy.

Popular versions add a friend, Du Ping, who travelled with him to the capital, and put the disgrace differently: he had taken top honours outright and been stripped of them at the last moment because the emperor could not stand to look at him.

The stories give him a career. The philologists give him something stranger. Long before any of this, the word zhongkui named a ritual mallet, a heavy club that exorcists swung when they beat the sickness out of a house. The Han scholar Ma Rong describes them waving the zhongkui and swinging a jade axe. Somewhere along the way the implement acquired a biography. Men of the Northern Wei and the Sui were already calling their sons Li Zhongkui and Yang Zhongkui and Qiao Zhongkui, which puts the name in ordinary use in the sixth century, generations before an emperor is supposed to have dreamt it. Later scholars have proposed a plant instead, or a mushroom used against malarial fever. Nobody has settled it. What is certain is that the demon queller was in service well before the dream that supposedly created him: Tang officials such as Zhang Yue and Liu Yuxi wrote formal memorials thanking the throne for the year-end gift of a Zhong Kui portrait and a new calendar, and a manuscript recovered from the sealed caves at Dunhuang preserves a New Year’s Eve invocation calling him in to lead the exorcism.

His look shifted as his rank rose. The early description is terse and shabby, all torn cap and blue cloth. The image most people know now is a court official gone slightly wrong: vermilion robe, black gauze cap, sword at the hip or a folding fan in hand, one foot planted on a flattened ghost. Five small demons attend him carrying a lantern, a seal, a parasol, a horse’s lead and a gourd, a grouping known as the five-ghost portage. A bat is usually somewhere overhead, partly because it scouts for spirits and partly because the word for bat sounds like the word for good fortune, and Chinese popular art has never once passed up a pun.

The most beloved picture of him is not a battle at all. In it he is marrying off his sister, riding stone drunk on a small donkey while three servants hold him upright, his sister jolting along on an uncooperative water buffalo, an escort of demons showing off with banners and horns. The joke is audible rather than visible: to marry off a sister and to send a demon packing are near homophones. Yuan painters working this subject may have had a real scene in front of them, since men in Zhong Kui masks went through the neighbourhoods at New Year, driving out evil in exchange for coin, and the practice survives as the dance called tiao Zhong Kui, still performed in Shaanxi, in Anhui and across Taiwan by a masked figure in red who brandishes a sword at nothing anyone else can see.

What he does is simple and physical. He does not bargain with spirits, bind them or judge them; he takes hold of them and destroys them, which is why his cult belongs to gates, lintels and shopfronts rather than to temples of any grandeur. Daoism eventually placed him on the register of celestial officials with exactly that brief. His power ran further than the doorway. The Ming pharmacopoeia of Li Shizhen records his portrait being burnt to ash and rolled with other ingredients into pills, given for malaria and for obstructed labour, which means people were swallowing him.

The limits are built into the same story. He is a ghost, and never stops being one. He commands nothing until a household hangs him up, dances him or burns him, so the protection is only as reliable as the person who remembers to renew it, and a wall without his picture is simply a wall. The honour he defends is a dead man’s honour, and the appointment he was owed never arrived; his entire divine career is the settlement of a grudge against an examination board. And the deepest limit of all sits underneath the whole tradition, which cannot agree whether he was a scholar, a soldier, a herb or a stick.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Zhong Kui?

Zhong Kui is the demon queller of Chinese mythology, a deity who catches malignant spirits and eats them. According to the standard account he was a failed examination candidate who killed himself on the palace steps and returned after death to rid the empire of ghosts. His portrait is hung on doors and gates to keep evil out of the house.

How did Zhong Kui die?

In the fullest version of the story he died by dashing his head against the steps of the palace after being failed in the imperial examination. The emperor Gaozu had him buried in the green robe of a junior official, the rank the examiners had refused him, and Zhong Kui swore in gratitude to destroy the ghosts troubling the dynasty. Other popular tellings say he had actually won top honours and was stripped of them because of his ugliness.

Why do people hang pictures of Zhong Kui?

His image is believed to drive off evil spirits by itself, so it is pasted on doors and gates at the lunar New Year and again at the Dragon Boat Festival. Tang emperors gave Zhong Kui portraits to their ministers as a year-end gift, and officials wrote formal memorials of thanks for them. The custom is still widespread, and is joined by the masked street dance called tiao Zhong Kui.

Is Zhong Kui a ghost or a god?

He is both, and the tradition has never resolved the tension. In the dream that made him famous he appears as the larger of two ghosts, and he is only a spirit of the dead, but Daoism later placed him among the celestial officials with a formal duty to expel evil and guard households. He is worshipped as a deity while remaining, in the story itself, a wronged man who died badly.

Where does the name Zhong Kui come from?

Before it belonged to anyone, zhongkui was the name of a ritual mallet used by exorcists to beat demons out of a house. Men of the Northern Wei and Sui periods were already using it as a personal name in the sixth century, which is well before the Tang dream traditionally credited with creating him. Other scholars have argued for a plant or a fungus instead, and the question is unsettled.