Han Xiangzi

Han Xiangzi is defined by his uncle. The tradition makes him a relative of Han Yu, one of the towering figures of Tang letters, a Confucian of a severe kind who wrote a famous memorial against the reception of a relic of the Buddha at court and was exiled for it. Setting a young Daoist transcendent inside that household is a deliberate arrangement, and every story about the two is a version of the same argument.

The best known has the young man abandoning study for the mountains and returning to a family gathering where his uncle presses him to take the examinations and make something of himself. Asked what he can do instead, he grows flowers in front of the company out of season, and on the petals are characters forming a couplet about clouds across the Qin ranges and snow blocking the passes. His uncle does not understand it. Years later, exiled to the south and stopped by snow at Lan Pass, he remembers the words and finds his nephew waiting for him on the road.

The story is doing something more interesting than scoring a point. The Confucian is not made a fool: he is a man of integrity punished for his integrity, and the prophecy is a kindness rather than a taunt. It is a story about two ways of being serious, told by people who did not think one had to defeat the other.

He carries a flute, is patron of musicians, and is said to make plants grow when he plays.

There was a real nephew. Han Yu wrote poems addressed to a grand-nephew named Han Xiang, including one written on the road into exile at Lan Pass which tells the young man he has come far to see him off and asks him to collect his bones by the riverside. That poem is the seed of everything: the meeting at the pass is documented in the uncle's own words, and the tradition supplied the prophecy that made the meeting a fulfilment rather than a coincidence.

The historical Han Xiang appears to have been an ordinary official who took a post and left no particular mark. The transcendent Han Xiangzi, with the flute and the flowers, develops in later collections and reaches its full form on the Yuan and Ming stage, where the Eight Immortals were a standing subject and the tension between a Daoist adept and a Confucian statesman made good drama.

This is worth stating plainly because it is the general case for the group rather than the exception. Of the eight, several have a documented person somewhere underneath: a Han general, a Tang recluse summoned to court, a Tang scholar, a Song imperial relative, this nephew. What the tradition did was not invent people from nothing but attach a body of story to names that were already there, over several centuries, and then fix the set at eight. The atlas records the immortals as the tradition holds them and marks the historical anchor where one exists.