Panhu

A palace physician spent a full year working on one old woman’s ear. Something was living in it. When he finally drew the thing out it lay in his fingers at about the size of a silkworm cocoon, blunt-headed and pale, and the woman carried it away and set it in a hollowed calabash with a plate laid across the top, the way you would cover food. When she lifted the plate the worm was gone. A dog looked back at her, its coat patterned in five colours. She called it Plate-Gourd. In Chinese that is Panhu, and it is the only name he ever gets.

The court was that of Gaoxin, the sage-king the Chinese record also calls Ku, and the dog grew up in it as a pet. Beyond the border the Rong Wu were strong and raiding. Generals went out against them and came back with nothing. So the king put out a call: a thousand catties of gold, a fief of ten thousand households, and his youngest daughter, to whoever brought in the enemy commander’s head. In other fragments of the tale the raiders are named as the Quanrong, the Dog Rong of the old Zhou texts, which makes the joke visible. The dog barbarians were finished by an actual dog.

Panhu came into the hall with the head in his mouth and put it down. The king turned it over and recognised the face.

Then the ministers spoke, and their objection is worth reading twice. Panhu is an animal. He cannot be appointed to office or drawn a salary, and he cannot be given a wife. Meritorious service or not, he should have nothing. It was the youngest daughter who broke it. She went to her father and told him he had promised her to the realm, that Panhu had removed a threat to the kingdom, that Heaven had clearly had a hand in it and no dog’s cleverness could account for the rest. A king’s word carries weight. A ruler who breaks a public promise over one woman brings disaster down on the state.

The king was frightened, and did as she said.

She took off her blouse and skirt, tied her hair up the way a servant wears it, put on the clothes of a menial labourer and followed the dog south. They went up over the mountains and down into the valleys, into forest with no trace of anyone living in it, and settled in a stone chamber. Her father missed her and sent men to look. When the search party got close the rain came down, the mountains shook, and cloud shut out the light until they could not go on.

Within about three years she bore six sons and six daughters. Panhu died. The children paired off and married one another, wove bark into cloth and dyed it with the juice of grass and fruit, and favoured clothing in five colours with a tail worked into every design. The king, when the story was brought back to him, gave them famous mountains and wide marshes to live in and called them Man-Yi.

Nothing in the early texts describes him beyond the markings. No height, no build, nothing about how he moved or what his voice was like. What fills that silence is later and comes from the people who claim him: on Yao charter scrolls he appears twice on the same sheet, once as a dragon hovering over a dog with the words “Panhu the dragon-dog” beside it, and once as a robed emperor labelled “Panhu the Yao Emperor”. The version most often retold now, in which he asks to be shut under a golden bell for seven days so he can become a man and the princess lifts it on the sixth, leaving him with a man’s body and a dog’s head, is not in the early record at all. In the oldest surviving telling he never changes shape. A fourth-century variant attributed to Guo Pu does not send the couple south but out to an island east of Kuaiji, where the sons are born as dogs and the daughters as beautiful girls.

The stone chamber acquired an address. A Tang commentary on the dynastic history quotes a lost geographical record placing it halfway up Mount Wu in what is now Luxi county, Hunan, a cavern said to hold tens of thousands of people, with a stone bed inside and footprints left by Panhu. Stone sheep and stone beasts stand in front of it. Further off there is a rock still shaped like a dog, which the local Man said was his likeness.

Here is the uncomfortable part. Every early witness to this myth is a Han Chinese one: a lost passage in Ying Shao’s second-century compendium of customs, a third-century fragment, Gan Bao’s collection of the strange from around 330, and Fan Ye’s history a century after that. The myth itself looks to have come from the indigenous peoples of the middle Yangzi, the Man of the Five Rivers along the tributaries of the Yuan, but it reaches us only as Chinese ethnography, and Chinese ethnography knew exactly what to do with it. The same passage that tells the story goes on to say the descendants are outwardly stupid and inwardly shrewd, that they squat to eat, that their speech is unintelligible noise. It is a large part of why the names of so many southern peoples were written, for centuries, with the dog radical stuck to the side of the character. The story was an insult before it was anything else.

It was also a deed. Because their forefather earned merit and their mother was a sage-king’s daughter, Gan Bao writes, they may farm and trade without carrying travel permits or tallies, and they pay no tax. That clause is the part that mattered. From at least the Qing dynasty, Yao communities across Hunan, Guangxi and Guangdong, and later in Vietnam, Laos and Thailand, kept scrolls known as the Charter of Emperor Ping or the Passport for Crossing the Mountains: long documents crowded with imperial seals, talismans, maps and painted Daoist deities, naming the twelve Yao surnames and confirming their right to their land and their slash-and-burn fields. For most of the twentieth century scholars read them as genuine imperial edicts. Barend ter Haar argued instead that the clumsy classical prose and the internal contradictions give them away as Yao productions, composed out of oral tradition; Eli Alberts reads them the same way, as work by local leaders who understood imperial paperwork well enough to make their own.

His powers are the powers of something no one thinks to guard against. He walks into a camp that beat professional generals and walks out with the general. His weaknesses are the ones the ministers named out loud: he cannot hold rank, cannot draw pay, cannot be married by law, and no version of the story gives him speech. He dies early, offstage, before his children are grown, and in the popular telling the one transformation he asks for stops a day short.

What survives is not a dog but a rite. The She paint his story on cloth scrolls, the zutu, and hang them when the ancestors are honoured. Among the Iu Mien of northern Thailand in the 1970s, descent from Panhu was still being sung at weddings. The Panwang Festival, held on the sixteenth day of the tenth lunar month across Guangxi, Hunan, Yunnan, Guangdong, Guizhou and Jiangxi, went onto China’s first national list of intangible cultural heritage in May 2006. And in Gan Bao’s day the offering was already old: rice mixed with fish and meat, set down in a feeding trough, the people bowing over it and wailing. The charter that grew out of it was a document no emperor ever issued, made by people whose name was written with a dog beside it, and used to keep the tax collector below the treeline.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Panhu?

Panhu is a five-coloured dog of Chinese and Miao-Yao myth who killed an enemy general, married a sage-king’s youngest daughter, and became the ancestral progenitor of the Yao and She peoples and of some Miao communities. His name means “plate-gourd”, after the covered calabash he emerged from. He is worshipped as King Pan, or Panwang.

What did Panhu do to earn the king’s daughter?

King Gaoxin offered a thousand catties of gold, a fief of ten thousand households, and his youngest daughter to anyone who brought back the head of the enemy commander raiding his border. Panhu carried the head into the palace in his mouth. The ministers argued that an animal could not be rewarded, but the princess insisted her father honour a public promise, and he did.

Where does the story of Panhu come from?

The oldest complete written version is in Gan Bao’s Soushen ji, compiled around 330, with a fuller version in Fan Ye’s Book of the Later Han about a century later. A second-century compendium by Ying Shao also carried it, though that passage is lost. All the early witnesses are Han Chinese texts, even though the myth appears to have originated with the indigenous Man peoples of the middle Yangzi.

Are Panhu and Pangu the same figure?

No. Pangu is the primordial giant who separated heaven from earth in Chinese cosmogony. Panhu is the dragon-dog ancestor of the Yao, She and some Miao. The names differ by a single syllable and have been confused since at least the Ming dynasty, but the two beings have nothing in common beyond that.

How is Panhu honoured today?

The Yao hold the Panwang Festival on the sixteenth day of the tenth lunar month, a celebration added to China’s first national intangible cultural heritage list in May 2006. She communities keep painted ancestral scrolls, the zutu, that carry his story and are hung during ancestor worship. The older recorded offering was rice mixed with fish and meat, placed in a feeding trough.

Related Entries

Pangu, Nüwa, Fuxi, Shennong, Tiangou, Longma, Pixiu, Qilin, Adlet, Anubis, Xolotl, Cerberus, Laelaps, Amarok, Inugami