He Xiangu

Powdered mica is not food. You grind the stone until it comes away in flakes so thin the light goes straight through them, and it tastes of cold grit and nothing else. A girl in the hills west of Zengcheng ate it anyway, a pinch at a time, every day, because someone in a dream had told her that her body was the wrong sort of body and that this was the way to correct it.

Her surname was He. Past that, the record begins arguing with itself almost immediately. Some accounts make her a shopkeeper’s daughter in Lingling, in the Hunan county seat of Yongzhou; others put her family in Zengcheng, in the wet green hill country north-east of Guangzhou. Her father is He Tai in one telling and He Su in another, and nobody can say who either man was. Even her given name is unsteady, recorded as He Qiong when it is recorded at all, which is why she is known instead by a title. Xiangu is not a name. It means immortal maiden, and it is what you call a woman whose name has stopped mattering.

What the sources agree on is the hair. She was a handsome baby, they say, except that six long hairs grew on the crown of her head and six was all she ever had. Painters have quietly ignored this for a thousand years and give her a full black coil pinned with a lotus, but the earliest account is blunt about it, and there is something bracing in a hagiography that opens by telling you its saint was bald.

She was fourteen or fifteen when the dream came. She and her mother had moved to a valley the local people called Mica Creek, under the Mica Hills, and there a divine figure appeared to her and told her to grind the stone and swallow it, and that if she did her flesh would thin out into something that could not die. She did it. She also stopped eating grain, which is a real Daoist discipline and not a metaphor, and she swore she would never marry. For a while nothing happened. Then, slowly, things began to weigh less. She still went out each morning to gather fruit and roots for her mother, but the climb stopped costing her anything, and the ferns she passed through were no longer being pushed aside so much as stirred, and by the end of it her feet were not reliably meeting the hillside.

Her mother kept arranging marriages. Her daughter kept not attending them. One day beside the river she fell in with two men who had the look of vagrants and were not: Li Tieguai, who leans on an iron crutch and carries his medicine in a gourd, and Lan Caihe, whose age and sex nobody has ever pinned down either. They told her she had the breath of an immortal on her and that if she wanted a teacher she now had two. After that she could fly.

The scene her tellers keep returning to is a domestic one. She was standing over the evening rice, steam coming up off the pot into her face, and she simply went up with it, through the smoke and out, still holding the ladle.

Word travelled, as it does, and eventually reached the court of Wu Zetian, who had an appetite for holy people and the means to indulge it. A sedan chair was sent into the mountains with instructions to bring her back. It was a good chair, well made, and it had heavy locks. The bearers were most of the way to the capital before they noticed how light it had become on their shoulders. They set it down and opened it and there was nobody inside. Investigators went out after her repeatedly and came back with nothing. Some years later, in the Jinglong period of Emperor Zhongzong’s reign, she rose into the sky in front of witnesses, in daylight, and did not come back down.

That is the shape of the legend. The oldest hard trace of her is a different story altogether, and it does not fit. In the twelfth century Zeng Minxing recorded, in his miscellany the *Duxing zazhi*, that the general Di Qing marched south to put down the rebel Nong Zhigao and stopped at Yongzhou because he had heard there was a He Xiangu there who could read the outcome of things. She told him he would not so much as lay eyes on the enemy, because they would break and run before he arrived. He did not believe her. They broke and ran. That campaign was fought in the 1050s, which is roughly three and a half centuries after the maiden of Zengcheng is supposed to have left the world, and the woman in it is a working diviner in a Hunan market town rather than a saint. There were probably several of her. The Eight Immortals themselves were not fixed as a company of seven men and one woman until the Ming, when Wu Yuantai gathered them into the novel *Dongyou ji*, and the famous crossing, in which each of them throws their emblem onto the water and rides it over, comes from that book rather than from anything older.

Her emblem is the lotus, partly because her surname sounds like the word for it, and it does more work than the others: it is her raft when the eight cross the sea, and it is also a healing thing, good for the mind as much as the body. She is drawn with it in her hand, and sometimes with a peach, or a bamboo dipper, or a fly-whisk, or playing a sheng, the mouth-organ whose bundled pipes are supposed to imitate the tail of a phoenix.

Her powers all come off the same regimen. Because she took the mineral instead of the meal she is weightless, and weightlessness is why she flies, why she cannot be carried anywhere she does not want to go, and why locks are irrelevant to her. Because she gave up the ordinary run of a woman’s life she stands outside its obligations, which is what makes her worth petitioning. The limits are set by the same bargain. She has nothing to offer anyone who is not prepared to give something up, she does not fight, and her only recorded defence against power is to not be there when it arrives.

At Xiaolou in Zengcheng her family shrine still stands, founded under the Tang by local reckoning, worked over in the Ming, rebuilt in 1858. There is a well in it a little over a metre across whose water sits at the same depth all year round, and a peach tree that grew out of the roof tiles on its own, and a coiled vine in the north-east corner that the forestry service dates to roughly eight hundred years. Her birthday is kept there in the third lunar month. What the Zengcheng He lineage did over those centuries was to take a mountain goddess of the Luofu range, bring her down into the town, and make her their own unmarried great-aunt, which turned a regional cult into a family and a family into the custodians of a saint.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is He Xiangu?

He Xiangu is the only woman among the Eight Immortals of Chinese Daoist tradition, said to have lived in the Tang dynasty. She is remembered as a young woman who ate powdered mica on the instruction of a dream, refused to marry, and ascended into the sky in broad daylight. Her name is a title rather than a personal name, meaning roughly “the immortal maiden of the He family”.

How did He Xiangu become immortal?

A divine figure appeared to He Xiangu in a dream when she was around fourteen or fifteen and told her to eat powdered mica so that her body would become ethereal. She followed the instruction, stopped eating grain, and vowed to remain unmarried. Over time she grew so light that she could travel without needing food and eventually could fly.

What does He Xiangu carry?

He Xiangu is almost always shown holding a lotus flower, which puns on her surname and is credited with restoring mental and physical health. She is also depicted with a peach, a bamboo dipper, a fly-whisk, or playing a reed mouth-organ called a sheng. In the story of the Eight Immortals crossing the sea, the lotus is what she rides across the water.

What happened when Empress Wu Zetian summoned He Xiangu?

Wu Zetian sent a locked sedan chair into the mountains to bring He Xiangu to court. On the way the bearers found the chair had grown strangely light, and when it was opened she had vanished. Repeated attempts to find her afterwards failed, and she is said to have ascended to heaven during the Jinglong era of Emperor Zhongzong’s reign.

Where is He Xiangu worshipped?

Her principal shrine is the He family temple at Xiaolou in Zengcheng, near Guangzhou, which local tradition dates to the Tang dynasty and which was rebuilt in 1858. The site contains a well whose water level never changes, a peach tree growing from the roof, and an ancient vine. Her birthday is celebrated there on the seventh day of the third lunar month.

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