Before Xuanzong's dream, Zhong Kui was already a name

In the Huangyou years, Shen Kuo reports, a tomb was opened at Jinling, and its stone epitaph said that the general Zong Que had a younger sister named Zhong Kui.⁵ Zong Que belonged to the earlier Song dynasty, and the Song shu dates his Linyi campaign to 445, by our conversion.⁶ The legend has Emperor Xuanzong dream of Zhong Kui in the Kaiyuan years, in the Tang.⁷⁸ Shen Kuo did not give up the dream because of the tomb. In a supplement to his notebook he quotes it from a colophon written by a man of the Tang, and he settles the clash by saying the name is old and only the picture began in Kaiyuan.¹³

The colophon nobody signed

The dream rests on a colophon whose writer Shen Kuo does not name.¹ In his supplement, the Bu bitan, he says a Wu Daozi scroll of Zhong Kui is kept in the palace and that a man of the Tang wrote a colophon at its head.¹ He gives no date for the colophon, and Zelnitskiy calls his passage the earliest record of the Zhong Kui and Xuanzong story.¹² We found nothing older that tells the dream: the Taiping guangji, put together in the 970s or 980s by our conversion, already has a Wu Daozi Zhong Kui in the hands of the Later Shu ruler, and no dream with it.¹⁰

The same item says what happened to the picture in Shen Kuo’s own time. In the fifth year of Xining, 1072 by our conversion, the emperor had painters copy and print it, gave a print to each minister of the two offices, and on New Year’s eve sent the palace attendant Liang Kai to hand out Zhong Kui images.¹¹

The compendium Shiwu jiyuan, which quotes Shen Kuo elsewhere in the same entry, tells the dream with small differences.¹²⁵ Its large ghost calls himself one cast out by the military examination and gouges the small ghost’s eye with his right thumb, and it adds that people therefore put his image on doors and bed-curtains.¹²

Shen Kuo’s own conclusion comes in the item’s last lines.

A tomb at Jinling

Shen Kuo made the point twice. In the main Bitan he says nobody knows when painting Zhong Kui on the door at the New Year began, and in the next breath he reports the tomb.⁵

The supplement adds that the epitaph makes Lady Zheng the daughter of Zheng Zhong, a minister of the Han.³ It lists other men called Zhongkui: a Li of the Later Wei and the Sui generals Qiao and Yang.³

We found no second report of the stone. The Song shu biography of Zong Que records his Linyi campaign and his title General Who Campaigns in the West, awarded after death, and it says nothing of a mother called Lady Zheng or of a sister.⁶ The volume as printed was put together from other books, so in our reading its silence settles little.⁶ Fang Yizhi saw another problem: a minister of the Han and a general of the Song are far apart, and he wondered whether Lady Zheng was a great-granddaughter.¹³

Yao Xuan, styled Ward-off-evil

The Wei shu says that Yao Xuan was first named Zhongkui, written 鍾葵, and styled Bixie, “ward off evil”.¹⁴ Gu Yanwu and Zhao Yi each list more men with the name under the Wei, Qi, Zhou and Sui.¹⁴

Which way the name travelled is where readers part. Hu Yuanrui, quoted by Fang Yizhi, holds that the spirit already existed in the Six Dynasties, that a story was attached to him later, and that men such as Yao Xuan took their names from the spirit.¹⁵ Shen Kuo reads names like these as proof that the name is old.³

The mallet theory

The Zhouli’s Kaogong ji says that the Son of Heaven’s great jade tablet, three chi long, had a zhongkui head, and the commentary Zhao Yi cites glosses the word as a mallet.¹⁶ Gu Yanwu, who lived from 1613 to 1682, argued that 終葵 was that mallet, that the people of Qi called it so, and that the ancients drove ghosts away with a mallet, as in the great exorcism.⁴¹⁶ He thought the dream story “not necessarily so”.⁴

Zhao Yi agreed with Gu’s reading and found the name of Yao Xuan plausible.¹⁷⁴ He still saw no explanation for how the tablet’s word became a person’s name, and he judged the dream story false without needing argument.¹⁷

Zelnitskiy adds that the deity’s name is written with different characters from the mallet’s.⁴ He reports that Danielle Eliasberg rejected the derivation on phonetic and historical grounds, and that she found a figure named Zhongkui who drives out disease spirits in a Six Dynasties text, the Taishang dongyuan shenzhou jing.¹⁸ His own guess is that Xuanzong’s court took the figure up partly because of that text and the Daoist leanings of the reign.¹⁹

A picture that came with the almanac

By the Tang the picture had a job. At year’s end the court gave officials a Zhong Kui painting together with the new calendar, and some of the thank-you memorials survive: one is attributed to Zhang Yue in the Quan Tang wen, and two are by Liu Yuxi, written for a Vice Censor-in-Chief Li and a Chancellor Du.²⁰ Zelnitskiy, after Eliasberg, puts the earliest such letters in Xuanzong’s reign, by Zhang Yue and Sun Ti.²⁰ We did not check the attribution of Zhang Yue’s memorial.

None of the three memorials we read mentions a dream, Xuanzong or Wu Daozi.²² They thank for a painting and a calendar and speak of driving off pestilence.²¹²²

Painters, then performers

By the tenth century court painters were making him, and Wu Daozi’s own picture was among them. The Taiping guangji, quoting the Yeren xianhua, describes Wu Daozi’s Zhong Kui in a blue robe, with leather on one foot, one eye, a tablet in his belt and loose hair, holding a ghost in his left hand and gouging its eye with the second finger of his right.¹⁰ The Shu ruler hung it in his bedroom and asked Huang Quan to redraw it with the thumb; Huang said Wu’s force was in the second finger and painted a separate thumb version.¹⁰ The Yizhou minghua lu says that at the Later Shu court the painters of spirits presented a Zhong Kui every year in the last ten days of the last winter month.²³ The Tuhua jianwen zhi lists Zhong Kui pictures by Five Dynasties painters, among them a monk’s “Dancing Zhong Kui” presented under Zhou Taizu.²³

The Yizhou minghua lu also tells of two painters whose Zhong Kui differed by one finger. Zhao Zhongyi’s poked the ghost’s eye with the second finger and Pu Shixun’s gouged it with the thumb; Huang Quan preferred Pu’s, and the Shu ruler thought them equal and rewarded both.²⁴

In the city memoirs he is a New Year trade and a costume. The Dongjing menghua lu says that shops printed and sold Zhong Kui before the festival, and that the court’s exorcism troupe on New Year’s eve included performers dressed as Zhong Kui and a “little sister”.²⁵ The Mengliang lu has households hang a Zhong Kui that night and puts him in the court troupe as well.²⁵

The same dream, longer

The Tianzhong ji and the Gujin shiwen leiju give a fuller dream and cite a Tang yishi for it, and the Jinxiu wanhua gu, whose preface is dated 1188 by our conversion, gives a short form that cites a Suishi ji.²⁶ The small ghost now has a name, Xuhao, “Waste”.²⁶ The big ghost is a Zhongnan jinshi who failed the examination in the Wude years, struck the palace steps and died, and was buried in a green robe the emperor gave him.²⁶ The colophon in Shen Kuo’s text has its Zhong Kui fail the military examination instead.⁸

Laid beside the colophon, the Tang yishi text as the two compilations quote it shares much of its wording: the same opening, the same small ghost, the same theft of the pouch and the flute, the same eye, the same remark about the shared dream.²⁷ It adds Xuhao’s speech and the jinshi account and leaves out the colophon’s year-end edict.²⁷ We read the Tang yishi only through these quotations, so we cannot say which text came first. Zhao Yi, who also could not see the Tang yishi, judged the dream story false without needing argument.¹⁷

The story against the record

Shen Kuo is where our trail to the colophon and the epitaph begins, and nothing we read says who wrote the one or where the other stone went.¹⁵