Daji

The bronze cylinder was heated until it glowed, and then a man was made to embrace it. Somewhere above the courtyard a woman laughed. That laugh is the oldest thing anybody claims to remember about Daji, and it is almost certainly not a memory at all.

Start where the accusation starts, at grey dawn on the day jia-zi, in the open country of Mu on the border of Shang. King Wu of Zhou stood before his army with a battle-axe yellow with gold in his left hand and a white ensign in his right, and before he sent them forward he told them why they were there. The ancients said that the hen does not announce the morning, he told them, and that when a hen crows at dawn the household is finished. Shou, king of Shang, follows only the words of his wife. That is the earliest surviving charge, and it does not give her a name. It does not have to. Everyone listening knew that a king who took orders from a woman was already a dead king.

The name arrives centuries afterwards, in texts written by the winners’ descendants. She was a daughter of the small state of Yousu, clan name Ji, style name Da. The Shang king Di Xin, whom later writers call Zhou, marched on Yousu over unpaid tribute, and the Lord of Su, with nothing else to trade, offered his daughter. The king took her and withdrew his army. Nothing in the Shang’s own oracle bones mentions her, or any consort with that kind of grip on the throne, which leaves her existence resting entirely on people who needed the Shang to have deserved what happened to it.

What those people wrote is lurid and specific. He raised taxes until the treasury was full and the granaries overflowed, and he spent it on her. The correct court music was thrown out and replaced with the frivolous stuff, the dances of the northern quarter. He built her a pool and filled it with wine, hung meat from the branches around it until it looked like a forest, and set naked men and women chasing each other between the carcasses through drinking parties that ran all night. The smell of that place must have been extraordinary. When the regional lords began to slip away from him, she is supposed to have suggested a solution: better punishments, so that everyone could see what the throne could still do. The roasting beam was hers. So, the story goes, was the pleasure of watching it used.

Then there is Bi Gan, the king’s uncle and his most stubborn minister, who would not stop telling him the truth. The old saying held that a sage’s heart has seven apertures. Daji said she was curious. They opened the old man’s chest to check.

At Muye the Shang army broke almost at once, the front ranks turning their spears on the ranks behind them, and the blood ran until it floated the pestles of the mortars. King Wu came into the ruined capital and did the things a legitimate ruler does. He raised a burial mound over Bi Gan’s grave, freed the count of Qi from prison, and scattered the treasures of the Stag Tower and the grain of Juqiao among the people. Daji he had beheaded, and her head hung from a small white banner, so that anyone passing could see that this was the woman who had destroyed the king of Shang. Some accounts say she strangled herself before they reached her. The banner is the part that matters. A dynasty has to fall on somebody.

The fox came later, and it came late enough that the scholars who trace it cannot quite agree on when. Some put the first identification in the Southern and Northern Dynasties, some no earlier than the Tang, but nobody puts it in the Zhou or the Han, which means that for something like a thousand years Daji was simply a woman. Once the fox arrived it never left. A Song and Yuan storytellers’ text gives her a nine-tailed fox’s body with a woman’s face and kills her with a mirror, because the one thing that can beat a creature who lives by being looked at is being shown to herself.

The version everyone knows is the Ming novel Fengshen Yanyi, from the sixteenth century, and it turns her into an instrument. Di Xin visits the temple of the goddess Nüwa and behaves so badly there that she decides to end him, and she sends a thousand-year-old fox to do it. On the road to the capital at Zhaoge the fox catches the real Daji, kills her, and puts her body on like a coat. Everything after that is done by something wearing a dead girl. The immortal Yunzhongzi works out what she is and gives the king a peach-wood sword that would sicken her, and the king, besotted, has it taken down. She rises from minor concubine to queen. At the end Jiang Ziya has to deal with her by exorcism and a weapon made for the purpose, because the executioners sent to behead her keep putting down the blade. In another telling of the fox-woman she spends her whole reign killing anyone who works out the secret, until the king is the last man alive who does not know.

Her powers are all one power, held from several angles. She can wear a human body convincingly enough to fool a court that saw the original every day. She can hold the attention of a man who commands everything else in the world, and turn that attention into policy. She has centuries of practice at it, which is what the tails are counting. And she has the ordinary human weapon underneath all of that, which is knowing exactly what the man in front of her wants to hear.

The limits are almost domestic. Peach wood sickens her. A mirror finishes her. Her disguise is complete except at the ankles, and the tradition that Daji invented foot binding to hide her fox feet, with the other court ladies copying a fashion whose reason they never learned, is the strangest compliment folklore ever paid her. Above all she cannot act alone. Strip out the infatuated king and she is a fox in a stolen body with no army, no treasury and no roasting beam. Everything terrible she is credited with had to be signed by somebody else.

People kept faith with her anyway. Shrines went up to her in her fox shape, the courts declared them illicit, and in 1111 an imperial edict ordered the spirit shrines of Kaifeng destroyed, hers among them. It did not work. The state could execute the consort, hang the head from a banner and write the moral into the classics, and still, a couple of thousand years on, somebody was leaving offerings for the fox.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Daji?

Daji was the favourite consort of Di Xin, the last king of the Shang dynasty, and Chinese tradition blames her for the dynasty’s collapse in the eleventh century BC. She came from the small state of Yousu and was handed over to the king after he attacked her father’s territory. She is not mentioned in any surviving Shang oracle bone inscription, so everything known about her comes from writers working for the dynasty that overthrew the Shang.

Was Daji really a nine-tailed fox?

The fox identification is not part of her earliest story. In the Book of Documents and the Records of the Grand Historian she is simply a woman, and the idea that a nine-tailed fox spirit had killed the real Daji and taken her body appears only centuries later, somewhere between the Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Tang. It became the standard version through the sixteenth-century novel Fengshen Yanyi.

What did Daji do to Bi Gan?

Bi Gan was Di Xin’s uncle and his most persistent critic. Daji is said to have remarked that a sage’s heart was supposed to have seven apertures and that she wanted to see whether it was true, and the king had Bi Gan’s chest opened and his heart cut out. After the Shang fell, King Wu of Zhou raised a burial mound over Bi Gan’s grave as a public act of restitution.

How did Daji die?

The Records of the Grand Historian says she was killed after Di Xin when the Zhou took the capital. Liu Xiang’s Biographies of Exemplary Women gives the fuller version, in which King Wu had her beheaded and her head hung from a small white banner to show that this was the woman who had ruined the king of Shang. Some accounts instead have her strangling herself.

Why is Daji associated with foot binding?

Folklore holds that Daji bound her own feet to hide the fox paws her disguise could not cover, and that the other women of the court copied the fashion without knowing its purpose. There is no early source for this and foot binding is many centuries later than the Shang, but the story stuck because it gave the practice a suitably sinister inventor.

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