Taotie

A bronze cauldron from Anyang, cast three thousand years ago and green now with corrosion, carries a face across its belly. Two enormous lidded eyes stand up in relief, high enough to catch a raking light and throw shadow. Above them curl a pair of horns. There are brows, ears, flared nostrils, the beginnings of fangs. Below the fangs there is nothing. No chin, no lower jaw, no closing mouth, just the place where a mouth should have been and a ground of tight spiral scrollwork running away into the metal. The eyes find you before anything else does, which is what they were made for.

Nobody knows what the people who cast that face called it. The word taotie was fastened onto the design much later, and there is no good reason to think the Shang ever used it. What survives of the name comes from a different world, the argumentative record-keeping of the Eastern Zhou, where taotie is not an ornament at all but a person, and a badly behaved one.

The Zuo Zhuan gives him a lineage. He was a descendant of the Jinyun clan, an officer’s line reaching back to the Yellow Emperor, and he was born without ability or virtue. He was greedy of eating and drinking, craving money and property, insatiable in his exactions, piling up stores of wealth with no notion of where a man ought to stop. He made no exception for the orphan or the widow and felt no pity for the poor. The people set him beside three other wicked ones, Hundun, Qiongqi and Taowu, and called him the Glutton. When Shun took charge under Yao he swept all four of them out to the four frontiers, to stand between the settled world and whatever lived past its edge.

That is the version in which the taotie is a man, and it is the oldest one we have. The bestiary versions came afterwards and did not agree with each other.

The Shanhaijing puts a creature on Mount Gouwu, a mountain with jade at its summit and copper at its foot. It has the body of a goat and a human face, tiger’s teeth and human hands, and its eyes sit under its armpits. It cries like an infant, which is how the hunting works, and it eats people. The text calls it paoxiao. It was Guo Pu, writing commentary in the fourth century, who said that this was the taotie of the Zuo Zhuan, and Guo Pu added a detail that fits nothing else in the passage: the thing is so ravenous that it starts biting itself before it has finished with the person it is eating. The identification is his, not the Shanhaijing’s, and it has been repeated ever since as though the two beasts were always one.

A Han collection, the Shenyijing, describes something shaggier: a beast with a human shape under its hair, tusks like a pig’s on its head, and a wolf’s appetite pointed at things that are not food. It hoards. It watches the road. It takes the weak and the ones travelling alone, and leaves the strong parties to pass.

The best-known account is the shortest, and it explains the vessels. The Lüshi Chunqiu says that the Zhou cast the taotie on their bronze tripods with a head and no body, because the creature devoured a man, could not swallow him, and the harm came back around into itself. Picture the moment the compilers wanted: the jaws close, the throat is not there, the meal has nowhere to go, and the thing begins to consume its own flanks while the man is still in its mouth. That was the point of putting it where the meat and millet wine were offered. Greed eats itself first.

Whether anyone in the Shang would have recognised that reading is another matter. The name only became standard for the bronze masks in the twelfth century, when the imperial catalogue Xuanhe bogu tu applied it to the design and explained that the taotie was there to warn against covetousness. Song antiquarians were reading Zhou moral philosophy back onto Shang metalwork across a gap of two thousand years, and the label stuck so hard that it is still the term of art in every museum case.

The label travelled. Japanese readers pronounced the same two characters tōtetsu, and the creature reached Japan the way most Chinese learning did, through books: the 1712 encyclopedia Wakan Sansai Zue copied out the Chinese entry, mountain, goat’s body, armpit eyes and all. What took hold there was not the monster but the mask. Edo and Meiji collectors pursued Shang and Zhou bronzes in earnest, and the Sumitomo family built the finest of those holdings, now the Sen-oku Hakukokan in Kyoto. Japan never grew a tōtetsu of its own. It bought the face.

Scholars have been arguing about what the mask meant for a century. One line, associated with Max Loehr and Robert Bagley, holds that it means nothing much at all, that the eyes and horns emerged out of the logic of filling a curved surface with pattern and only later hardened into a face. Another, associated with K.C. Chang and Sarah Allan, reads it as a real animal helper, the protective spirit of a king who was also a shaman, a creature that carried him between the living and the dead. Faces of this general shape appear earlier still on Liangzhu jades and on Erlitou pottery, staring, symmetrical, mostly eyes. The honest position is that the Shang left no caption.

What the taotie can do follows from what it is. Its power is simply that the appetite never closes, and an appetite that never closes will take a village as readily as a bowl. It has strength enough to hold a grown man, teeth borrowed from a tiger, hands rather than paws, and a cry that draws rescuers toward it. Set on bronze, the face acquires a second power, the one that made it worth casting: it frightens, and a thing that frightens at the threshold of a rite is a guard.

Its limits are built into the same design. It has no belly and no throat, so the eating cannot finish, and every mouthful turns into self-injury. It can be named, and once named it can be judged and driven out, which is what Shun did to it. It hunts the isolated because it cannot manage a crowd. And it is bound to the vessel it decorates, immobile, endlessly hungry, staring out over other people’s dinners for three thousand years without ever getting one.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the taotie in Chinese mythology?

The taotie is a gluttonous monster of Chinese myth, best known as the frontal animal mask cast onto Shang and early Zhou ritual bronze vessels. In the earliest written accounts it is not a beast but a man, a worthless descendant of the Jinyun clan whose greed was so notorious that people simply called him the Glutton. Later texts turned him into a creature.

Why does the taotie have no lower jaw?

The Lüshi Chunqiu explains that the Zhou cast the taotie on their bronze tripods with a head and no body because it once devoured a man, could not swallow him, and the injury rebounded onto itself. The missing jaw and body were read as the mark of an appetite that destroys its owner. On the actual vessels, the mask is usually shown with upper fangs and an open lower edge rather than a closing mouth.

Is the taotie one of the Four Perils?

Yes. The Zuo Zhuan groups the taotie with Hundun, Qiongqi and Taowu as four wicked beings whom the sage-king Shun banished to the four frontiers when he governed under Yao. Each represents a different vice, and the taotie’s is greed for food, drink, money and property.

Did the Shang dynasty call the bronze mask a taotie?

Almost certainly not. The word first appears in Eastern Zhou texts describing a person, and it was only applied to the bronze designs in the twelfth century by the Song imperial catalogue Xuanhe bogu tu, which read the mask as a warning against covetousness. No one knows what the Shang themselves called the motif, and the modern name is a borrowed label rather than a recovered one.

What does the taotie look like?

On bronzes it appears as a symmetrical frontal mask with large protruding eyes, curved horns, brows, ears and fangs, often with a split body shown in profile on either side and a ground of fine spiral scrollwork. In the Shanhaijing the associated creature, the paoxiao, has a goat’s body, a human face, tiger’s teeth, human hands and eyes set beneath its armpits, and it cries like a baby.

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