Zhang Guolao

The donkey came out of a cap-box, folded flat as a paper charm. Its owner spat a mouthful of water over it, and the creature swelled and shook itself into a white animal that could cross ten thousand li before evening. Then the old man climbed on backwards, facing the road he had already travelled, and rode away from the mountain toward whichever emperor had made the mistake of sending for him this time.

Zhang Guo was a real person, which is the odd part. He lived as a hermit on Mount Zhongtiao in Heng Prefecture and wandered the country between the Fen River and the old Jin lands, and the court histories of the Tang gave him a biography among the occultists and technicians rather than leaving him to the storytellers. The “Lao” on the end of his name is not a surname or a title of office. It simply means old, and people added it because his age was the first thing anyone said about him. He told the court he had been born in the reign of Yao, three thousand years before, and had served that legendary emperor as a minister. He looked about sixty-five. There was a man at court named Xing Hepu who could reliably guess anyone’s age, and Zhang Guo defeated him completely.

Three sovereigns tried to get him into a palace. Taizong asked and was refused. Gaozong asked and was refused. Then Empress Wu Zetian sent for him, and because refusing her outright was a poor bet, he agreed to come, travelled as far as the shrine of the Jealous Woman, and dropped dead in front of it. The weather was blazing. Within a very short time the body stank and bred worms, and the envoys had to go back and report the loss to an empress who did not enjoy being disappointed. Some while later travellers saw him again on the Hengzhou mountain, entirely well.

The summons that finally worked came in 735, when Emperor Xuanzong sent a eunuch secretary named Pei Wu at speed to fetch him. Pei Wu had heard about the shrine, so when Zhang Guo obligingly died again he burned incense at the body and explained at length how very sincerely the emperor wished to meet him. The old man opened his eyes. He went down to Luoyang and was lodged in the Jixian Academy with every courtesy the empire could arrange, and the emperor asked him about the immortals, and he said nothing worth writing down.

What followed was a season of tests, all of which the emperor lost. Offered wine, Zhang Guo said his own capacity was two pints but that he had a disciple who could manage ten. A Daoist boy of fifteen or sixteen came down off the palace roof, handsome and cheerful, and drank until the wine welled up through the crown of his head and knocked his cap off, at which point he was no longer a boy but a golden cup. The cup turned out to belong to the Jixian Academy and to hold exactly one dou. Told that a true marvel could drink aconite unharmed, Zhang Guo swallowed three doses, complained that the wine was not good, and lay down. His teeth blackened and sank into the gums. He borrowed a ruyi sceptre from a bystander, knocked the ruined teeth out, wrapped them in his sash, rubbed ointment on the bare gums, and grew a new set as white as jade while the court watched. Out hunting at Xianyang, the emperor brought down a large stag and was about to have it cooked when the old man remarked that the animal was over a thousand years old, that he had been present when Emperor Wu of Han released it in the Shanglin Park, and that a bronze tag had been fixed to the base of its left antler. They looked. The tag was there, more than two inches of it, the characters worn away to nothing.

The court could not leave the question alone. There was another Daoist at the palace, Ye Fashan, formidable in his own right, and the emperor pressed him to say what Zhang Guo actually was. Ye Fashan said the knowledge would kill him and asked for a promise: that the emperor would go barefoot and bareheaded to beg forgiveness on his behalf. The promise given, he began, “When the cosmos was separating out of chaos, the spiritual essence of a white bat,” and got no further, because blood came out of all seven openings of his head and he fell dead on the floor. Xuanzong took off his crown and his shoes and went to kneel in front of the old man and take the blame. Zhang Guo observed that the young fellow talked too much and might have given away the workings of the universe, then squirted water over Ye Fashan’s face and brought him back.

After that the emperor hung his portrait in the Jixian Academy and gave him the title Gentleman of Pervasive Mystery along with a senior court rank he had no use for, and Zhang Guo began complaining of age and ill health until he was allowed home to the mountains. Around 742 another invitation arrived. He died the same day. His disciples buried him, and when the coffin was later opened it held nothing at all.

His powers all run the same direction: away. He could vanish and reappear, walk on water, bring a flying bird down onto the table, open a flower bud or a lock with a pointed finger, make flowers bloom inside a fire, and shift the whole palace to another place and back. None of it was ever used to seize anything. His one defence against the state was to stop breathing, and he used it three times. The limits are real enough. Aconite cost him his teeth, he could not stop a talkative colleague from exposing him, and the emperor kept him at court for the better part of twenty years while getting no instruction out of him whatsoever, which suggests the arrangement was less comfortable than it looked.

The Eight Immortals did not exist as a set in his lifetime. The grouping came together across the Song and Yuan, took shape on the Yuan variety stage, and was fixed in its familiar roster by Wu Yuantai’s Ming novel about the eight of them journeying east. Zhang Guo was pulled into it as the old man of the company, and folklore went on adding to him afterwards. In one much-loved story he and Lord Chai test the great stone bridge at Zhaozhou, one riding across with the sun and moon in his saddlebag and the other pushing a barrow loaded with five sacred mountains, until the span begins to shake and its builder leaps into the river to hold it up from underneath. Visitors are still shown the hoofprints. The bridge was finished around 605, several decades before Zhang Guo was born.

He is easy to pick out in any painting of the eight. He carries the yugu, a length of bamboo with fish skin or snake skin stretched over one end and two long bamboo slips to strike it with, and when an artist draws him standing rather than mounted, the donkey is often there anyway, a small white shape drifting out of the open end of the drum in a curl of vapour. Blind singers carried that same instrument through market streets and temple fairs for centuries, telling stories over its dull note, and they claimed him as their patron.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Zhang Guolao?

Zhang Guolao was a Tang dynasty Daoist recluse who became one of the Eight Immortals of Chinese religion. His personal name was Zhang Guo, and “Lao” was added to mean “old” because his extreme age was his defining trait. He lived on Mount Zhongtiao in Heng Prefecture and was summoned by several Tang emperors before finally attending the court of Emperor Xuanzong in 735.

Why does Zhang Guolao ride his donkey backwards?

The sources record the habit without explaining it, and the backwards seat became his single most recognisable trait in Chinese art. The donkey itself is the more remarkable part: it could cover tens of thousands of li in a day, and when Zhang Guolao stopped to rest he folded it flat as paper and put it in his cap-box, restoring it later by spitting water over the packet.

What is the object Zhang Guolao carries?

It is a yugu, or fish drum, a bamboo cylinder with fish or snake skin stretched over one end, played with two long bamboo slips used as clappers. It is his emblem in painting and sculpture, and he is honoured as the patron of daoqing, the Daoist narrative singing traditionally performed with that drum by street and temple-fair singers.

Was Zhang Guolao a real person?

Yes. Unlike most of the Eight Immortals, Zhang Guo appears in the Tang dynastic histories as a genuine figure who lived roughly between the mid seventh and mid eighth centuries. He was granted the title Gentleman of Pervasive Mystery by Emperor Xuanzong. The miracles attached to his name accumulated around that historical hermit over the following centuries.

How did Zhang Guolao die?

He died repeatedly, which was his standard method of avoiding imperial summonses. Faced with a summons from Empress Wu Zetian he dropped dead at the shrine of the Jealous Woman and was seen alive in the mountains afterwards. When a final invitation reached him around 742 he died again, was buried by his disciples, and his coffin was found empty when it was later opened.

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