As a deity Guan Yu is extraordinarily widely worshipped and remarkably versatile. Adopted into the Daoist and Buddhist pantheons alike, he is honoured across Chinese religion as a guardian who subdues demons and upholds justice, a patron invoked by soldiers, merchants and sworn brotherhoods, and a god of wealth whose image stands in countless shops and homes. Police and criminals, businessmen and secret societies have all claimed him, drawn by his reputation for absolute faithfulness to his oaths. His temples are found throughout the Chinese cultural world and its diaspora, and his cult remains vigorously alive today, an unusually clear case of a real historical person raised, by centuries of veneration, into one of the most popular gods of China.
Guan Yu's cult travelled with the Chinese diaspora well beyond China itself. In Vietnam he is venerated as Quan Cong and was formally adopted as one of the major spirits of the Cao Dai religion, a modern syncretistic Vietnamese faith founded in the 1920s that also honours figures from Christianity, Islam and other traditions. In Hong Kong his image is a fixture in both police stations and triad gang dens alike, a widely noted irony that reflects less any contradiction in the god himself than the breadth of his old reputation for absolute loyalty to a sworn code, a virtue equally claimed, in very different ways, by law enforcement and organised crime.