The Eight Immortals

The eight are Zhongli Quan, Lu Dongbin, Zhang Guolao, Han Xiangzi, Cao Guojiu, Li Tieguai, Lan Caihe and He Xiangu, and the set is deliberately unlike itself. Zhongli Quan is a stout general. Lu Dongbin is a scholar who failed the examinations and became by far the most widely worshipped of them. Zhang Guolao is an old man who rides a mule backwards and folds it away like paper when he dismounts. Han Xiangzi is placed as a nephew of the statesman Han Yu. Cao Guojiu belongs to the imperial family. Li Tieguai is a beggar on an iron crutch whose body was burned while his spirit was away, so that he had to take a dead beggar's body instead. Lan Caihe, of uncertain sex, sang in the market. He Xiangu is a young woman who ate a supernatural mineral and stopped needing ordinary food.

Individually most of them are older than the group. Lu Dongbin and Zhongli Quan carry substantial cults and a large body of internal alchemical literature attributed to them. What is later is the grouping: sets of immortals appear in Tang and Song material, but the fixed eight, with these names and this composition, settles in the drama of the Yuan and Ming, and the Ming novel usually called Journey to the East gave the sequence its familiar shape.

The composition is the argument. Old and young, rich and destitute, official and beggar, male and female: immortality is shown as reachable from any position whatever, which is a claim about who may practise and not merely a cast list.

Each of the eight carries an attribute, and the attributes do more work in daily life than the biographies do. Zhongli Quan has a fan that revives the dead, Lu Dongbin a sword, Zhang Guolao a fish drum, Han Xiangzi a flute, Cao Guojiu castanets or a court tablet, Li Tieguai a gourd and crutch, Lan Caihe a flower basket, He Xiangu a lotus. Shown on their own the eight objects stand for the eight people, an arrangement called the covert eight immortals, and it appears on porcelain, embroidery, furniture, carved screens and birthday hangings where no figure is drawn at all.

Their commonest setting is a birthday, particularly a sixtieth or an eightieth, where the eight crossing the sea to a peach banquet is the standard subject and the wish is plainly for long life. The crossing supplied a proverb still in ordinary use: the eight immortals cross the sea, each showing what they can do, said of a group that solves a problem by eight unrelated methods rather than one agreed one.

They are also constant on the stage. Yuan and later drama put them in plays of conversion and deliverance, in which an immortal descends to wake a sleeper out of office, appetite and attachment. Door gods, temple murals and New Year prints carry the same figures into houses that would not describe themselves as Daoist at all, which is how a specifically Daoist set of saints became general Chinese decorative vocabulary.