Fei Lian

The grain bent west and stayed bent. Doors slammed in houses where no one stood. Above the river, the willows held an unnatural stillness, as if the wind had drawn itself in and taken another shape entirely. In the southern marshlands of Chu, where the Yangtze braided into reedbeds and the rice paddies caught the first warm storms of summer, people felt this stillness and reached for their windbreaks. They knew what came next. They had a name for it, though they tried not to say the name into open air.

Fei Lian was older than the country that named him. Long before the Zhou systematizers tucked him into a celestial bureaucracy, he was the South’s own wind, raw and chimeric and not interested in being a single thing. In the earliest descriptions he comes apart and recombines: a sparrow’s head set with a bull’s horns, the body of a stag flecked with leopard spots, a long serpent’s tail dragging behind, wings folded against the spine. Han dynasty stone carvings dug from tombs in Luoyang and Ya’an show variants of this assembly. Some have feathers, some claws, some neither. The sources cannot agree on what he looks like because the wind cannot agree on what it is. Sometimes he is simply called a winged deer. Sometimes a dragon. The Shang scribes wrote his name with the same brushstrokes they used for “phoenix,” and the confusion stuck.

He carries a leather bag, and inside the bag is every wind that has ever blown. He stirs it the way a child stirs a jar full of bees. Out come typhoons that flatten millet fields, hot dry gales that crack the river clay, the cold wet sweep that strips a coast bare. The Greeks would later give a similar bag to a man named Aeolus, a tidy household manager of weather. Fei Lian’s bag is not tidy. He opens it because he wants to. He closes it when he is bored.

The most-told story comes from the war. In the deep prehistory of the pantheon, Chiyou, the bronze-skulled war god, rose against Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor, and Fei Lian rode at his side as vanguard. Together with the rain master Yu Shi he hurled what the chronicles call bitter wind and rain at Huangdi’s army, a storm so total that the Emperor’s troops lost their direction in it and stumbled in circles for days. The army would have died in that fog if Huangdi had not built the south-pointing chariot, a device whose needle held against any wind, and called on his daughter Nüba, the drought demon, whose body radiated such heat that the rain dried in the air and the gale died around her. Chiyou was killed. Fei Lian was caught.

The punishment chosen for him is one of the small grim jokes of Chinese myth. He was harnessed to the chariot of the Heavenly Emperor and made to pull it across the sky. The wind that had nearly brought heaven down was now expected to be its draft animal.

He escaped, of course. Wind that wants to escape will. By the reign of Emperor Yao, he was loose again and trailing chaos behind him, and Yao called for the archer Hou Yi, the same Hou Yi who shot down the nine extra suns, to bring him in. Hou Yi tracked him to a cave in a high mountain, cornered him there, and put an arrow through his knee. There is a parallel telling in which the arrow split the wind bag itself, and every gale on earth poured out at once before settling. Either way, the trick that finally pinned him was older than the bow: ordinary cloth, stretched and weighted with stones across the ground, breaking the wind into eddies he could not ride. Country windbreak technology, the chronicles claim, descends from this lesson.

His descendants did not vanish. The old historians liked to give the Chu wind spirit a human shadow, and so a late Shang minister, also called Fei Lian, runs through the Records of the Grand Historian as a swift-footed ancestor whose line founded the state of Qin. Whether the minister was the wind in mortal form or the wind borrowed his name, the chronicles do not commit. Both stories run together for a while, then split, then meet again.

He was worshipped seriously. Emperor Wu of Han, who had a taste for the older and stranger gods, built halls in his honor. By that time Fei Lian had been quietly absorbed into Fengbo, the Wind Earl, the official Daoist office of the wind, but the older name kept slipping through. Country shrines kept it. Poets kept it. In the Li Sao, the great lament of Qu Yuan, Fei Lian flies ahead of the wandering soul as outrider and messenger, clearing the celestial road. Folk tradition went further and made him a god of music, on the theory that wind through reeds is the original melody and human song is only an imitation of what he plays.

His power, at full force, is something close to an act of cosmology. He moves air the way a god moves planets. He can collapse a campaign, drown a fleet, drive the seasons forward or hold them in place. His flight is fast enough that distances stop meaning anything, and his presence on a battlefield was understood as a force multiplier for whichever side he had agreed, that day, to favor. He could also sit still and watch a whole kingdom dry up, simply by closing the bag and refusing to open it.

What pulls him down, every time, is something concrete. A windbreak. An arrow. A south-pointing needle. The wind has no answer to a thing that does not move. When higher deities organize themselves, when the cosmos lays down structures that hold their orientation, Fei Lian loses. He is the brilliant disorder that order eventually catches and harnesses. He gets used. He gets free. He gets caught again. The cycle has the shape of weather itself.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Fei Lian in Chinese mythology?

Fei Lian is the chimeric wind deity of Chinese mythology, originally from the Chu cultural sphere of southern China. He commands every wind that has ever blown, holding them inside a leather bag he opens at will. Fei Lian served as the wind vanguard of the war god Chiyou against the Yellow Emperor, and was later absorbed into the official heavenly office of Fengbo, the Wind Earl.

What does Fei Lian look like?

Fei Lian’s earliest descriptions give him a sparrow’s head set with a bull’s horns, the body of a stag flecked with leopard spots, a long serpent’s tail, and wings folded against his spine. Han dynasty stone carvings dug from tombs in Luoyang and Ya’an show variants of this assembly, with some featuring feathers, some claws, some neither. Sources sometimes call Fei Lian simply a winged deer or a dragon, and Shang scribes wrote his name with the same brushstrokes used for “phoenix.”

How was Fei Lian defeated?

Fei Lian was defeated twice in his major myths. After fighting alongside Chiyou against the Yellow Emperor, he was caught when Huangdi built a south-pointing chariot whose needle held against any wind, and called on his drought-demon daughter Nüba to dry the gale around her. Later, after escaping by the reign of Emperor Yao, Fei Lian was tracked to a mountain cave by the archer Hou Yi, who shot him through the knee, and finally pinned by ordinary cloth windbreaks weighted with stones that broke the wind into eddies he could not ride.

What is Fei Lian’s bag?

Fei Lian’s bag is a leather pouch containing every wind that has ever blown, and he opens and closes it at will. Out of it come typhoons that flatten millet fields, hot dry gales that crack the river clay, and the cold wet sweep that strips a coast bare. In one variant of Fei Lian’s defeat by Hou Yi, the archer’s arrow split the bag itself, releasing every gale on earth at once before they settled.

How is Fei Lian related to Fengbo, the Wind Earl?

Fei Lian was eventually absorbed into Fengbo, the official Daoist office of the wind, but the older name kept slipping through after the merger. Country shrines kept the name Fei Lian, poets kept it, and Emperor Wu of Han built halls dedicated to his worship. In Qu Yuan’s Li Sao, Fei Lian flies ahead of the wandering soul as outrider and messenger, clearing the celestial road.

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