Li Tieguai

The story explaining why an immortal should look like a crippled beggar is the best known of the group and is told with the timing of a fable.

Li was an adept whose spirit could leave his body and travel, and on one occasion he was summoned, in some versions by Laozi himself, to a meeting on a distant mountain. He told his disciple to keep watch over the body and to burn it if he had not returned within seven days, since after that it would be past use. On the sixth day word came that the disciple's mother was dying. The young man waited as long as he dared, then burned the body and went.

The spirit returned on the seventh day to nothing, and had to take the only vacant body within reach: that of a beggar who had just died of starvation at the roadside, lame, one-eyed and filthy. The accounts have him about to abandon it in disgust and being told to keep it, and in several versions Laozi gives him a gold band to bind the wild hair and an iron crutch to walk with.

The tradition draws the moral without much subtlety and it is a good one anyway. The people in the stories who take him for a beggar and treat him accordingly are the ones shown to be mistaken, and the immortal in the ruined body is a standing test of whether anybody is paying attention.

Li Tieguai is almost never drawn without his gourd, and it is the most interesting thing about his iconography. A double-lobed gourd hangs at his belt or is carried on the crutch, and from its open neck a cloud of vapour rises, in which a tiny figure is often shown, sometimes recognisably himself.

The gourd does two jobs at once. It is the ordinary container in which a Chinese physician or apothecary carried medicine, which is why he is patron of pharmacists and is petitioned in illness, and an old expression for practising medicine refers to hanging up the gourd. It is also the standing image in Daoist writing for a complete world in miniature, entered through a narrow neck, in which time runs differently and everything is whole: the gourd heaven, into which a man in one famous story follows an old drug seller and finds a palace inside. The little figure in the vapour is that second meaning made visible.

His popularity in painting is out of proportion to his position in the group. A lame figure in rags, with a wild head of hair, an iron crutch and an expression somewhere between suffering and amusement, is a considerably better subject than a courtier with a jade tablet, and artists have used him accordingly for six hundred years. He appears on temple walls, on porcelain, on New Year prints and on the ridge tiles of roofs, and is usually the first of the eight a viewer can name.