Huli Jing

There is a beast on Qingqiu Mountain whose form resembles a fox but with nine tails, who cries like an infant and devours human beings, and whose flesh in turn protects whoever eats it against insect-poison. That is the first textual appearance of the Chinese fox-spirit, in the Shan Hai Jing, the Classic of Mountains and Seas, compiled across the Warring States period and the early Han, somewhere between the fourth century BCE and the first century CE. The fox here is morally ambivalent. She is dangerous and pharmacologically useful at the same time. The two-thousand years of huli jing literature that follow are essentially a series of attempts to resolve that ambivalence, and they all fail, productively.

The auspicious white fox

The Han dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE) reads the white nine-tailed fox as an auspicious omen of dynastic mandate. Wang Bao’s piece in the Wen Xuan anthology records that King Wen of Zhou received the nine-tailed fox as the sign of his mandate before he succeeded the corrupt Shang. The Eastern Han Wu Yue Chunqiu attaches the same omen to Yu the Great, founder of the Xia, whose marriage at Mount Tushan was heralded by a white nine-tailed fox. The Eastern Han funerary stone reliefs of the Wu Family Shrines tradition in Shandong, mid-second century CE, place the nine-tailed fox among the attendants of the Queen Mother of the West, alongside the three-legged crow, the moon-hare grinding the elixir of immortality, and the toad. The fox in the Han imperial frame is a paradise-emissary and a marker of post-mortem ascent.

The Tang cultivation ladder

The 4th-century commentator Guo Pu had already laid down the cultivation arc that the Tang would build on. The passage is so often quoted in Chinese folklore scholarship that it has become the canonical statement of how a fox becomes a fox-spirit:

When a fox is fifty years old, it can transform itself into a woman; when a hundred years old, it becomes a beautiful woman… when a fox is a thousand years old, it ascends to heaven and becomes a celestial fox.

The Tang dynasty (618 to 907 CE) and the Tang chuanqi tradition take Guo Pu’s neutral cultivation ladder and tilt it toward sexual predation. The huli jing of the Tang tales is a cultivated fox who has lived long enough to take human form, almost always as a beautiful young woman, seduces a male scholar, and drains his yang essence through sexual intercourse until he wastes and dies. The Song-era imperial encyclopaedia Taiping Guangji, compiled by Li Fang and others between 977 and 978 CE, preserves around eighty fox-spirit records that bridge the Han auspicious framing and the Tang seductress framing. The shift is decisive but never quite complete.

Daji and the Ming retrofit

The most famous huli jing of all is Daji, the consort of Di Xin, the last king of the Shang dynasty. The historical Daji was reportedly executed after the Zhou conquest of the Shang in 1046 BCE. The Ming-era vernacular novel Fengshen Yanyi, Investiture of the Gods, composed roughly between 1567 and 1619 and traditionally attributed to Xu Zhonglin, rewrote her into a thousand-year-old nine-tailed fox sent by the goddess Nüwa to corrupt the king and destroy the Shang. In the novel’s plot the goddess sends three demons (the fox, a jade pipa spirit, and a nine-headed pheasant); the fox kills the real young Daji and possesses her body. After the Shang falls, Jiang Ziya drives the fox spirit out, and Nüwa herself condemns it for excessive cruelty in carrying out her mission.

The Daji-as-fox identification has become so dominant in Chinese popular memory that the historical king’s reputation for depravity, which was very likely a Zhou propaganda construction in the first place, has been retroactively transferred to a possessing nine-tailed fox spirit some 2,500 years after the fact. The Ming novelist has out-narrated the historical chronicle.

Pu Songling and the morally complex fox

By the Qing dynasty the fox has come back around to her dual-natured original. Pu Songling (1640 to 1715) composed Liaozhai Zhiyi, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, across the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, close to 500 short tales in the zhiguai and chuanqi styles. The collection circulated in manuscript and was first widely printed in 1766, half a century after Pu’s death. John Minford’s Penguin Classics edition of 2006 is the standard modern English translation.

In Liaozhai the fox-women are not flat demons. The collection holds both poles: the Tang-mode predator who drains yang in bed, and the loving companion who conceals her nature, marries a young scholar, helps him pass the imperial examinations, and raises a family with him. The Qing huli jing has recovered the Shan Hai Jing’s ambivalence with a thousand years of Tang and Ming seductress literature layered on top. She is the morally most interesting fox in any East Asian tradition.

Why she is the centre of the trio

Of the three East Asian fox cousins, the Korean gumiho is the morally darkest, reshaped under Joseon-era Confucian moral framing into an almost uniformly malevolent man-killer; the Japanese kitsune is the most often benevolent, protected by her long-standing association with the Shinto kami Inari, the rice god, whose messengers foxes are. The Chinese huli jing sits between them and contains both poles. She is the source from which the Korean and Japanese traditions ultimately drew, and she is the only one who never lost the original Shan Hai Jing duality. A beast on Qingqiu Mountain who eats people, and whose flesh cures poison. The whole tradition is still in that one sentence, more than two thousand years later.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Shan Hai Jing (山海經, Classic of Mountains and Seas). Compiled Warring States to early Han, c. 4th c. BCE – 1st c. CE. English: Anne Birrell, trans. The Classic of Mountains and Seas. London: Penguin Classics, 1999.
• Guo Pu 郭璞 (276–324 CE). Commentary on the Shan Hai Jing and the Xuanzhongji (玄中記).
• Bai Hu Tongyi (白虎通義, Comprehensive Discussions in the White Tiger Hall). Compiled under Ban Gu, late 1st c. CE.
• Wu Yue Chunqiu (吳越春秋, Spring and Autumn Annals of Wu and Yue). Attributed to Zhao Ye 趙曄, Eastern Han.
• Li Fang 李昉 et al. Taiping Guangji (太平廣記, Extensive Records of the Taiping Era). Compiled 977–978 CE.
• Xu Zhonglin 許仲琳 (attrib.). Fengshen Yanyi (封神演義, Investiture of the Gods). Late Ming, c. 1567–1619.
• Pu Songling 蒲松齡 (1640–1715). Liaozhai Zhiyi (聊齋誌異, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio). Composed late 17th – early 18th c., first widely printed 1766. English: John Minford, trans. Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. London: Penguin Classics, 2006.
• Kang, Xiaofei. The Cult of the Fox: Power, Gender, and Popular Religion in Late Imperial and Modern China. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
• Zeitlin, Judith T. Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.
• Wu Hung. The Wu Liang Shrine: The Ideology of Early Chinese Pictorial Art. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989.