Xiwangmu

Also Known As: 西王母, “Queen Mother of the West”; abbreviated Wangmu 王母; also Jinmu 金母 “Golden Mother”, Yaochi Jinmu 瑤池金母 “Golden Mother of the Jade Pond”, and colloquially Wangmu Niangniang 王母娘娘; Seiōbo in Japan, Seowangmo in Korea
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Chinese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: She commands the plagues and calamities sent down from heaven and holds the drug and the peaches that end death.
Role in Mythos: She rules the western paradise on Mount Kunlun, keeps the registers of the immortals, and grants or withholds deathlessness.
Relation to Humans: Kings and emperors travelled west or waited up at night to be received by her, and she fed them, taught them and sent them home no less mortal than they arrived. In 3 BCE ordinary people across twenty-six commanderies took to the roads carrying tokens in her name after a drought, which is the earliest mass religious movement recorded in Chinese history.

In the first month of 3 BCE the roads into Chang’an filled with people who had no business being on them. They came out of the eastern commanderies in their thousands, some barefoot, some with their hair unbound, and every one of them carried a single stalk of straw. The stalk was the whole point. It went from hand to hand along the road and it was called the Queen Mother’s edict-token, and the message travelling with it said that anyone who wore it would not die. They broke through the barrier posts at night. They went over city walls. By summer they were gathering in the lanes and on the field paths to sing and dance for her, and after dark they stood up on their roof beams holding fire into the sky, beating drums and shouting west into the black.

There had been an earthquake that year. There had been an eclipse. The rain had not come.

The court wrote all of it down in the flattest possible administrative prose: twenty-six commanderies and kingdoms disturbed, the capital reached. It is the earliest mass religious movement in Chinese history that anybody bothered to record, and the goddess at the centre of it had begun, several centuries earlier, as something crouched in a cave on a mountain nobody could find.

The oldest description of her runs to four clauses and it is not friendly. Three hundred and fifty li further west, says the Classic of Mountains and Seas, is Mount Yu, where the Queen Mother of the West lives. Her shape is like a human’s, but she has a leopard’s tail and tiger’s teeth and she is good at whistling. Her hair is wild and she wears the sheng. She presides over the catastrophes of heaven and the Five Destructive Forces.

Almost every word of that has teeth in it. The sheng was a small jade ornament copied from the crosspiece of a loom, two flat discs on a bar, and in Han pictures it sits on her head like a badge of office rather than as jewellery. The whistling is not decorative either; a long carrying howl off a bare peak is the sound the sentence wants. And what she presides over is disease and disaster. She is the one who sends the plague.

Elsewhere in the same book she is placed on Mount Kunlun, between the Red River and the Black, living in a cave. In a third passage she sits with the sheng on her head and a staff in her hand, leaning against a low stool, while three green birds fetch her food. That is the whole of the early file: fangs, tail, tangled hair, a stool, a staff, three birds, a mountain at the western limit of the world, and authority over everything that kills people.

Where she came from before that is genuinely unclear. Shang oracle bones from a thousand years earlier carry a divination about making offering to an Eastern Mother and a Western Mother, and it is tempting to read the second of those as her first appearance. It is an inference, though, not a record. The bones say almost nothing about who those Mothers were.

What happened next is the strangest career in Chinese religion. By the fourth century BCE the Zhuangzi has her among the beings who obtained the Way, seated at Shaoguang, and adds a line that stuck to her permanently: no one knows her beginning, no one knows her end. The Huainanzi turns her into the source of the drug of deathlessness, the one the archer Yi went west to fetch and his wife Chang’e swallowed before rising to the moon. Within a few centuries the tiger-toothed sender of pestilence had become the only person in the world who could stop death.

She receives visitors after that. The Mu Tianzi zhuan, a book recovered in 281 CE from a Warring States tomb where it had lain on bamboo slips for six hundred years, describes King Mu of Zhou driving his eight famous horses west until the road ran out, and being feasted by her at the Jasper Pool. They exchanged songs across the water. Hers said that white clouds were in the sky and hills rose up between them, that the way was ten thousand li, and asked whether he could come again. He told her three years. He went home and reigned and died like everyone else.

The story repeats with Emperor Wu of Han, and it repeats with the same result. She came to him on the seventh night of the seventh month, the night reserved for meetings between mortal men and divine women, with blue birds attending her, and she brought seven peaches and gave him five. He ate them. Then he set the stones down carefully in front of his knees, because he wanted to plant them, and she laughed and told him it takes three thousand years for one of those to fruit. In the longer version of the tale she also handed him charts and scriptures and instructed him to rarefy his earth-soul and expel the three corpses that live inside a body and report its sins to heaven. He kept the documents. He did not do the work.

By then she was everywhere in Han funerary art. She sits enthroned on the wall slabs and ceiling bricks of tombs from Shandong to Sichuan, on lacquer, on the backs of bronze mirrors, framed by a menagerie whose duties nobody has ever fully explained: a nine-tailed fox, a three-legged crow, a tiger and a dragon facing each other across her, a hare grinding the drug of immortality in a mortar, a toad dancing in front of her. On one Shandong slab the serpent-tailed pair Fuxi and Nüwa flank her, their long twisted tails ending in birds. The dead were being pointed west.

Daoism took her the rest of the way. The Tang master Du Guangting gave her a full hagiography as the Golden Mother of the Jade Pond, keeper of the registers of the immortals, attended by seven hundred jade girls, riding a chariot drawn by phoenixes, and made her the superior of every woman anywhere who ascends and attains the Way. By the Southern Song she stands in the liturgy immediately behind the Three Pure Ones, which is as high as it is possible to stand.

Her powers grew in step with her manners. Early on the list is calamity, pestilence and the five agents of destruction, exercised from a peak that only appears in books. Later it is the herb, the registers, the orchard, and the ability to hand a living person the exact instructions for stepping out of death.

The limits are the interesting part, and it is always the same limit. She gives, and it does not take. King Mu goes home. Emperor Wu keeps the stones and not the discipline. The First Emperor of Qin, by one Tang poet’s reckoning, had his chance at her and squandered it, and lies under an evening hill with nothing left to say. The straw tokens of 3 BCE did not bring rain, and the dynasty whose roads they clogged was gone within a generation. Nothing she offers is withheld. It simply will not stay in mortal hands, which is the reason the stories keep getting told.

The paintings made from the Ming onward show a composed court lady in a peach garden holding a tray, entirely benign, with not a fang in sight. The old sentence about the leopard tail and the tiger teeth is still sitting there in the book. Nobody ever took it out.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Xiwangmu?

Xiwangmu, the Queen Mother of the West, is a Chinese goddess who rules a paradise on Mount Kunlun in the far west and controls both plague and immortality. She is first named in the Classic of Mountains and Seas as a fanged, leopard-tailed being who presides over the catastrophes of heaven, and she later becomes the highest goddess of the Daoist pantheon and the keeper of the peaches of immortality.

What does Xiwangmu look like?

The earliest sources describe Xiwangmu as human in shape but with a leopard’s tail, tiger’s teeth and wild unbound hair, wearing a small flat jade headdress called the sheng. Later art dropped the animal features entirely and depicted her as an enthroned court lady, so her appearance depends on which century you are looking at.

What are Xiwangmu’s peaches of immortality?

They are the fruit of her orchard, and each one takes three thousand years to ripen. In the best-known story she gives five of seven peaches to Emperor Wu of Han, who eats them and then saves the stones because he wants to plant them, prompting her to explain how long he would have to wait.

Did the Queen Mother of the West ever make a mortal immortal?

No mortal in the major stories keeps what she offers. King Mu of Zhou is feasted at her Jasper Pool and goes home to die, Emperor Wu of Han receives peaches, scriptures and instructions and never follows them, and the archer Yi’s elixir is swallowed by his wife Chang’e instead of by him.

Why did people in ancient China panic over the Queen Mother of the West in 3 BCE?

A drought followed an earthquake and an eclipse, and thousands of people across twenty-six commanderies began passing a straw token said to be an edict from the Queen Mother, with a message promising that whoever wore it would not die. They travelled to the capital, gathered to sing and dance for her, and lit fires on rooftops at night; the Book of Han records it as the earliest mass religious movement in Chinese history.