Taowu

Somewhere past the last settled ground in the west, a text nobody can reliably date describes an animal shaped like a tiger and wearing the wrong coat. The hair is a dog’s, coarse and matted, and it hangs two chi long, most of a forearm’s length, so the body underneath is only a rumour of a shape. The feet are a tiger’s. The mouth is a boar’s, tusks riding up over the lip. The face, when it turns, is a human face. Behind the whole arrangement drags a tail of eighteen chi, four metres of it, sweeping a line through dust and thin scrub. The one thing the passage says the creature does is stir the wilderness into confusion, and it gives the animal a name: Taowu.

The beast arrived late. The oldest surviving use of the name is not zoology but character assassination, delivered in a speech recorded in the Zuo Zhuan under the eighteenth year of Duke Wen. A Lu official is explaining why a treacherous foreign prince ought to be shown the border, and he reaches back to the sage-kings for precedent. Zhuanxu, he says, had an untalented son. The man could not be taught or instructed. He did not understand speech. Told something he turned stubborn, left alone he went dull and silent. He was arrogant toward bright virtue and threw the constancy of heaven out of order, and the people of the world called him Taowu.

The name is the whole of the insult. Lexicographers gloss tao as a block of wood or a tree stump, and wu as a stool, or a tree cut off at the top. Together they come out as a stump: a thing that has stopped growing, will take no shape, and can only be walked around. The two alternative names that attach to the figure later, Aohen and Nanxun, arrogant and savage, hard to teach, are lifted almost intact from that same sentence. The monster’s alternate names are fossils of an old complaint about a man’s temperament.

The speech goes on to group him. Three bad sons of three clans, then a fourth added to the pile: Hundun out of Emperor Hong’s line, Qiongqi out of Shaohao’s, Taowu out of Zhuanxu’s, Taotie out of the Jinyun. Yao could not get rid of any of them. Shun, serving as Yao’s minister, received the nobles at the four gates and then flowed the four wicked clans outward, casting them to the four distant borders and setting them to ward off the chimei, the goblins of the waste places. Sima Qian copied the passage into the opening chapter of the Shiji almost word for word, which is how the four hardened into a set with a title, the Four Perils, and how a difficult relative of Zhuanxu’s came to be filed permanently alongside a glutton and a winged tiger.

There is a parallel list, and it changes the picture. The Book of Documents has Shun punishing four men rather than four clans: Gonggong banished to Youzhou, Huandou sent to Mount Chong, the Sanmiao driven out to Sanwei, and Gun put to death at Mount Yu. Commentators from the Han onward have laid the two lists side by side and set Gun in the Taowu’s slot, which would make the stump the man who spent years failing to dam the great flood, and whose son Yu the Great finally succeeded by cutting channels instead. That equation belongs to the commentators, not to the Zuo Zhuan, which names no one. It is also difficult to unsee: a father who would not change his method, and a word that means a length of wood.

The same speech carries a quiet cruelty. A few lines earlier the Gaoyang clan, which is Zhuanxu under his other name, is credited with eight talented sons, the Eight Kai, harmonious and deep and honest, whom Shun set over the earth. One household supplies both columns of the ledger.

Then the Taowu changes jobs entirely. The Guoyu preserves a line, repeated afterwards in the Shuo Yuan, with no punishment in it at all: when the Shang rose, the Taowu halted at Mount Pi, and when the Shang fell, the Yiyang stood in the pasture. Here the creature is not a criminal to be removed but a sign to be read, the sort of thing a court diviner writes down and files. A dynasty begins and a monster stops on a hill to watch it happen.

The strangest turn is bibliographic. Mencius, arguing about how history writing came into being, says that Jin’s Sheng, Chu’s Taowu and Lu’s Spring and Autumn are all one and the same thing. Chu named its state chronicle after this. Zhao Qi, commenting in the Eastern Han, read the title as deterrence, a record of wrongdoing named for the worst of beasts so that reading it would frighten men into behaving; other readers have argued for something older underneath, a clan animal rather than a warning. The question cannot be settled, because not one line of the Chu Taowu survives. The title outlasted the book by two thousand years and was taken up again in the Northern Song, when Zhang Tangying wrote the Shu Taowu, a history of the Later Shu.

All of which leaves the famous body in an awkward position. The description with the dog hair and the boar tusks comes from the Shenyi jing, traditionally credited to the Han courtier Dongfang Shuo, who died in 93 BCE. The attribution does not hold. The book is absent from the Han imperial catalogue, and its ornate style points instead to the Southern Dynasties, five or six centuries into the common era. The monster is younger than the insult by the better part of a millennium. The Shenyi jing all but admits the sequence, closing its entry by noting that the untalented son of Zhuanxu mentioned in the Chunqiu, named Taowu, is this animal here.

Its powers run in one direction only, and they are unusual in being wholly negative. The Taowu cannot be instructed, cannot be shamed, cannot be reasoned with and cannot be worn down. Nothing lands on it. In the human version that obstinacy is sufficient to disorder the constancy of heaven, which in this literature is a charge of real weight rather than a turn of phrase; in the animal version it comes out as brute disturbance, the wilderness stirred up wherever the thing walks. It also has a durability the other Perils lack, having survived as a man, a beast, an omen and a book title without ever mislaying its name.

The limits are just as consistent. Nobody kills a Taowu. Shun does not fight it, he relocates it, and the entire sage-king remedy is an admission that the problem cannot be corrected, only carried to the rim of the map and put to work frightening things that are worse. Virtue does not touch it. Geography contains it. Past that the record goes quiet, and no text says what the Taowu ate, whether there was ever more than one, how it came by a human face, or what became of it out on the far border once the four gates were clear and the court had found other things to discuss.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Taowu?

The Taowu is one of the Four Perils of Chinese myth, described in later sources as a beast with a tiger’s body and feet, long coarse dog hair, a human face, a boar’s tusked mouth and a tail eighteen chi long. Its name is built from two words meaning a block of wood and a stump. In the earliest texts it is not an animal at all but a byword for a man who could not be taught.

Why was the Taowu banished?

The Zuo Zhuan says that Shun, serving as Yao’s minister, expelled four wicked clans and cast them out to the four distant borders to ward off the chimei. The Taowu was counted among them alongside Hundun, Qiongqi and Taotie. The charge was obstinacy: he could not be instructed, did not understand speech, and threw the constancy of heaven into disorder.

Is the Taowu the same as Gun, the father of Yu the Great?

Commentators from the Han dynasty onward have identified the two, matching the Zuo Zhuan’s four wicked clans against the Book of Documents’ list of four men punished by Shun, in which Gun is put to death at Mount Yu. The Zuo Zhuan itself calls the Taowu only an untalented son of Zhuanxu and never names him Gun. The identification is an interpretation laid over the text rather than a statement in it.

Why is a Chinese history book called the Taowu?

Mencius records that the state of Chu called its chronicle the Taowu, ranking it with Jin’s Sheng and Lu’s Spring and Autumn. The Eastern Han commentator Zhao Qi explained the title as a deterrent, a record of wrongdoing named after a monster so that readers would take the warning. The Chu Taowu is entirely lost, so the reasoning behind the name cannot be confirmed.

What does the Taowu look like?

The detailed description comes from the Shenyi jing, which places the creature in the western wilderness with a tiger-shaped body under dog hair two chi long, a human face, tiger’s feet, a boar’s mouth and teeth, and a tail one zhang eight chi in length. That text is traditionally credited to Dongfang Shuo but is far later, most likely compiled in the Southern Dynasties period. The earlier sources that name the Taowu give it no body at all.

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