A former missionary, Samuel Couling, in his Encyclopaedia Sinica described Fox Spirits as having ‘a form something like a fox, a creature with man’s ears, which gets on roofs and crawls along the beams of houses. It only appears after dark and often not in its own shape but as a man or a beautiful girl to tempt to ruin’. People live in great fear of them and immense sums of money are expended to keep on good terms with them by offerings, incense, meats, tablets, etc. Some wealthy people ascribe their good fortune to their careful worship of the fox, and in many places Fox Spirits were addressed as Cai Shen 財神, gods of wealth, as they were believed to bring prosperity to the devotee.

Pu Songling also relates the tale of a friendly and beneficent Fox Spirit. Che 車, a young scholar, awoke to find that a fox was curled up asleep beside him with one of the bottles of wine beside him which having been full was now empty. Not too sure what he should do, Che decided to curl up and go back to sleep. However, when he awoke next morning the Fox had disappeared and in its place was a well-dressed young man. They soon became boon companions, with the Fox not only leading Che to a hoard of silver but also guiding him to shrewd investments, enabling Che to lead a comfortable life. The Fox remained a good friend to Che and his family until Che died whereupon the Fox disappeared forever.

Peter Lum and her mother returned to the Far East to study wood block prints, first renting a Chinese house in a Peking Hutung in 1927. Within a short time they realised that their life was being affected by a series of misfortunes. Eventually their servants suggested calling in a Fengshui man to discover the cause of the troubles. He revealed the house to be occupied by a Fox Spirit who felt neglected and needing her shrine to be moved to a pleasanter site. Even with the new shrine constructed misfortunes continued to befall them. Some months later the Lums left for Japan and handed over the house to friends. Before they left they explained the whole story causing laughter at the idea of a Fox Spirit. Within months, with major misfortunes persisting, the house was vacated and left empty.

Robert Swallow related the story of the Fox Spirit in Peking, disguised as an old man, visiting the watchman in the guard house on the former city wall near the Tower of the City Gates, the Qihua Men 齊化門, the Gate of Unmixed Blessings, officially known as the Chaoyang Men 朝陽門, The Gate Facing the Sun, and referred to colloquially as The Fox Tower. The story described how, during the last decade of the 19th century, the watchman used to receive visits from an old man who would stay some little time and talk with him. One of these occasions happened to be New Year's Eve when the watchman invited the old man to drink some wine with him. It was accepted, and the guest not only drank heartily but gave his friend two pieces of silver, each worth ten taels. He then got onto the table and went to sleep. The host covered him with his coat and was greatly surprised to find that his guest’s features changed into those of a fox, and that eventually he disappeared from sight. The next morning his guest returned and apologized for his conduct of the previous evening. As the watchman only received a tael a month as wages, he acted as a hawker by day, and his old gentleman guest guaranteed him that in future his daily profits would be 50 coppers more than they had been in the past. This promise was faithfully kept for about three years, though nothing more was ever seen of the strange visitor.

Again, according to Swallow, there was a Fox Spirit in the Temple of Heaven in Peking, whose temper seemed to have been badly disturbed in the past, for he was dangerous, sometimes appearing to a man in the form of a beautiful lady, and on other occasions posing as a handsome young man. Friendship with him was fatal, and the poor victim would die in a very short time.

Legend in northern China claimed that annual examinations were held for foxes, supervised by the Fertility Goddess, Tai Shan Niangniang. Degrees were awarded to the worthy ones just as imperial degrees were awarded to humans. Tai Shan Niangniang is considered by some to be the patron of Fox Spirits

Although Fox Spirits are also understood to have been revered in parts of central China they would appear not to have been seen or heard of in southern China. That is, apart from the claim by an elderly temple keeper in a temple in Mongkok, part of Kowloon, who claimed that the main goddess deity on one of the temple side altars was the Fox Immortal, Hu Xian, and not the image of He Xiangu, one of the Eight Immortals, despite the embroidered altar cloth bearing the name of He Xiangu. Apart from this flash of imagination on the part of the old man I have not heard mention of the dreaded Fox Spirits in Hong Kong, Taiwan or Southeast Asia. And in 1926 a member of the Hong Kong Civil Service, J. Dyer Ball, claimed that superstition about foxes prevails more in the north than in the south of China, but failed to provide any authentication confirming evidence of any fox superstition in southern China .


Fox Spirit Altars

Although I can recall reading about Fox Spirit myths I have always assumed that the political campaigns mounted by succeeding Chinese governments had eradicated the cult. And, having not come across a temple altar dedicated to them during visits to several thousand or more Chinese temples China-wide, the moment I encountered the tiny altar in the Yao Di Temple I was incredulous and somewhat imprudently tempted to suggest that this shrine might be unique. Fortunately I have lately discovered an important work by Kang Xiaofei, who had researched the Fox cult during her trip to China in 1997, in which she describes being taken to the Jieyin Si 接引寺, a Buddhist temple in Boluobu, a small town on the Dinghui River within the Yulin region of northern Shaanxi, in which she had actually seen an image of the Fox Spirit. Within the temple, images of the Eight Diamond Kings flanked the altar of the Buddha, seven of whom were warriors in armour and armed, whilst the eighth was a middle-aged scholar in civilian robes and cap. This, her informants claimed, was Huxian, the Fox Spirit in human form. Hanging in the temple entrance were red banners, one of which read The Boluo Huxian is truly efficacious. Kang was reminded by her informants that “This is the Fox shrine, and we don’t usually open it to public worship”.

Until I obtained Kang Xiaofei‘s description of being introduced to the image of a Fox Spirit in Shaanxi in the late 1990’s, as far as I was aware human or animal images of foxes were not placed on altars. The usual custom, as I had understood it, had been for tablets bearing the characters Fox Spirit to be raised in a small separate shrine where peasants could place their offerings to placate the Fox Spirits. I asked a middle-aged local Chinese resident in the courtyard of the Yao Di Miao in Yaocheng who had the air of being more learned, about the title The Great Immortal who brings Benefits to Society, Jishi Da Xian濟世大仙 written in large black characters on a red cloth draped behind the shrine written on the wall, as well as 必誠則靈, a four character title plaque on the front of their shrine conveying the concept ‘that our desire of the gods expressed with a pure heart will come true’. He shrugged and either because he did not understand or wish to understand, or did not wish to display ignorance, he simply replied ‘devotees ensure the Spirits are propitiated as often as possible’!

Kang Xiaofei referred to a small shrine her mother had recalled, in the backyard of her childhood home in a suburb of Beijing during the 1940s, dedicated to a ‘Xianjia 仙家’, the respectful term for Fox Spirits in the local idiom. Kang added that, as frightening as the Fox Spirits might be, it was common (if unspoken) knowledge within the family that maintaining the shrine would ensure good fortune and wellbeing.

Dubois, an historian of Chinese religion and society at the Australian National University, researched rural life in southeast Hebei during the late 1990s and observed that in general, psychic mediums, known in northern China as xiangtou 香頭  , are practitioners who heal through the power of Fox Spirits and were their servants, even though ‘xiangtou’ is the common term for senior spirit mediums in temples across most of north China. Ordinary people, whilst knowing that Fox Spirits could be capricious, accepted that they could also be pacified by mediums. Dubois also reminded us that many tales told about Fox Spirits appear in compilations such as Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (Liaozhai zhiyi), said to have been written in Shandong during early Qing dynasty by Pu Songling, describing their antics as they reward or punish their human acquaintances by affecting their wealth, romantic affairs, or physical health.

The subject of fox-lore was also exhaustively dealt with by a former H.B.M. Consul-General at Canton, Thomas Watters, in the Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society . He sums up much of what others have said adding that in general, the fox is a creature of ill omen, long-lived (living to eight hundred or even a thousand years) and with a peculiar virtue in every part of his body; able to produce fire by striking the ground with his tail; cunning, cautious, and sceptical; able to see into the future; able to transform himself (usually into old men, or scholars, or pretty young maidens), and fond of playing pranks and tormenting mankind. He concluded with his belief that many Chinese peasants in north China regarded the fox as a malicious creature.

Watters then went on to claim during a talk he gave in 1874 in Shanghai that the fox had been considered an inauspicious creature since earliest time, and that shrines were often erected in the fox’s honour, a sign of the fox being more than simply a malicious demon. Watters referred to the myths describing the Foxes’ Yin 陰 characteristic, ‘female, cold and dark,’ the polar opposite to “the male”, Yang 陽. Their Yin element enabled them all too easily to assume the womanly guise; however, to seek a balanced constitution they had to obtain jing 精, the Yang male element, wherever they could, leading to Fox Spirits preying on the life-essence of men, their sperm, in order to achieve longevity. Watters, who had also been stationed in Taiwan twice during the 1860s and 1870s, in an early reference to Fox Spirit temples, added without explanation that “the Temple of the Nine Envoys 九使廟 in Foochow (Fuzhou) was where local prostitutes would pray”.

The waters of the Jade Springs close by the Summer Palace in Peking were believed to have great curative powers, due to the influence of the Fox Spirit who was reputed to live in a hole close to the spot where the water came out through five sluices. This led many Chinese before entering the park to burn incense outside the wall in order to propitiate the Fox Spirit as pointed out by Arlington and Lewisohn. This rendered the waters still more efficacious. On the other hand, Shan Min’s work on Fox Spirits, based on his work as a doctor in Shandong, maintained that the association of Fox Spirits with healing was one of the most important reasons that their popular worship has continued unabated for thousands of years.

Kang Xiaofei observed that a Fox Spirit shrine described in Pu Songling’s Liaozhai Zhiyi (Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio) clarified its physical layout.

In it a painting of the bodhisattva Guan Yin and two other paintings of unknown armoured figures were worshipped. We learn from the conversation between the fox and Pu’s friends that the spirit’s ability to reach higher gods or goddesses, the bodhisattva Guan Yin and King of the Underworld, Yanluo Wang, was exactly what captured the attention of Mr. Niandong. While the image of Guan Yin was hung on the wall, the altar of the fox, symbolised the miniature seat, was set up on a table. The physical positions of the two divinities demonstrated an hierarchical order. Furthermore, the image of Guan Yin was forever present and yet motionless, whereas the fox though invisible, constantly came and went upon human requests submitted by the medium. The layout of the shrine may reflect the mentality of the people who engaged in cult practices: the fox actively answered worshippers’ pleases whilst the presence of the higher deities enhanced the credibility of the cult.


I have to admit that I was sufficiently sceptical about the so-called Fox Spirit shrine in the Yao Di temple in Yaocheng to accept that it is no more than an Earth God shrine, and that someone within the vicinity of the temple, for whatever reason, had introduced the notion that it is in some way the shrine of the Fox Spirit and, nowadays, because it was so uncommon and of unusual significance that it has popularly become regarded as such by devotees. However, in view of Kang Xiaowei’s discovery of an active spirit medium at the Fox Spirit temple in neighbouring Shaanxi province, it could well be that a comparable spirit medium could be active within the vicinity of the Yao Di Miao and using the Earth God shrine for his rituals, especially as it is without the walls of the temple proper.



<<**KMB_IMG_TAG1**>>

Huli Shen at Yaocheng temple ,Taigu Shanxi

Additional notes- Keith Stevens


Fox Spirits (Huli) 狐貍

An insignificant tiny shrine located within the roofless passageway between the Sakyamuni Hall of the Buddhist temple and the temple dedicated to Emperor Yao proved to be of much greater interest than the other engaging features within the whole complex. It contained two small images of an elderly couple and was so inconsequential that a passer-by would be unlikely to heed it unless pointed out by local residents. In the event the swarm of Chinese of all ages, predominantly children, who by this time had joined and nearly swamped us, were excitedly identifying them as Fox Immortals 狐仙, even though the images looked remarkably like the ubiquitous Earth God and his Wife, Tu Di Gong and Tu Di Po 土地公婆.

When I expressed misgivings over their identification, the chorus of voices made it quite clear that they were Huli, Fox Spirits, with several of the boys barking like dogs to underscore their identification. One middle-aged man volunteered in passing the fact that Fox Spirits lived in graves and only emerged at night.

Belief in Fox Spirits during the Qing dynasty had been prevalent in North China, mainly in Zhili, Shandong, Shanxi, Shaanxi and Hebei provinces, and in Manchuria (now Dongbei, the North-East). Isabella Bird Bishop photographed the Fox Temple in Mukden in 1897, sadly using very grainy film. She offered little additional information merely explaining that “it was greatly frequented by mandarins and that the temple was situated close to the city wall”.

Fox Spirits were revered and according to Chinese folklore they were much feared creatures, though not regarded as deities but as creatures endowed with supernatural powers of transformation. Many believed them to be bewitched women Huli jing, 狐貍精 and that it was wise to be polite when referring to them lest one should eventually become one’s sister-in-law, or even one’s wife. A woman who has been possessed by a Fox is said to have Ding 頂 a Fox. The honorific title on Fox altars was the Honourable Fox Immortal, Hu Xian or Hu Xianye 虎仙爺, although Christian missionaries referred to them as Fox fairies.

E.T. Williams, a former American Chargé d’Affaires at Peking, referring to Chinese superstitions noted that one such superstition was the fear of foxes. He echoed the popular understanding that they make their dens in cemeteries, adding that when he was living in Nanjing the officer in charge of the arsenal, said to be very superstitious, kept a fox skin in his room and was a worshipper of the fox spirit. Foxes delight, he added, to take the form of young women, said to be of ravishing beauty.

R. W. Swallow, however, noted that Foxes as a rule were to be found in old temple or dilapidated buildings, and even ordinary houses have been inhabited by them. If they are badly treated or disturbed they make trouble, and all kinds of strange things may happen. Doors will suddenly shake, windows will rattle, people will get sick and servants declare that the house is haunted. The only alternatives were moving to some other place, or seeking help of certain people known as Zhaoxiang.di 照香的 (sic), who were supposed to have an influence over these spirits.. These spirit charmers burnt incense, fell into a trance whereupon the disturbing element would leave the sick person and enter them. The profession of Zhaoxiang.di was declared by police to be illegal, as a number of them had been guilty of fraud and malpractices, and those who still wished to make use of them must have done so in secret.

Fox Spirits could be beneficent or malicious and during dynastic China wayside shrines dedicated to Fox Spirits were commonly located where passersby believed they could seek their help in curing diseases. Spirit mediums performed exorcist rituals calling upon Fox Spirits to assist them by protecting the living from roving evil spirits as well as from the Fox Spirit’s malign potency which ranged from sickness, general ill-fortune to an untimely death.

It was generally accepted that foxes were endowed with supernatural powers of transformation and were much feared by peasants who knew only too well that they can appear as men or women, the latter having the power to bewitch human men and having consorted with them, bear a half-human child. These were-foxes were so greatly feared that in some places tests were carried out by shamans on potential brides to ensure that they were a pure human. One of the most popular antidotes was the blood drawn from the arm of a shaman during a trance, the charm thus produced was carried by susceptible devotees. As Fox Spirits were night visitors ashes were sometimes spread around the door of a house to see whether any paw prints were visible on the following morning.

Such transformations only take place at night and such spirits who appear at or near their shrines late in the evening were said also to be able to cure any disease as well as ensure wealth to devout devotees. Fox Spirits were generally thought to have been the cause of any business failure. In parts of north-west China even the local mandarins offered up incense and candles to the Fox Spirits as it was widely accepted that these semi-demonic beings could cause the disappearance of official seals, a fate hardly worth thinking about for any mandarin.

Robert Swallow in his Sidelights on Peking Life explained that one of the City Gates in old Peking, the Qihua Men 齊化門, the Gate of Unmixed Blessings, also known as the Chaoyang Men 朝陽門, The Gate Facing the Sun, and probably better known by its colloquial name of the The Fox Tower, where at one time the spirit of a Fox, disguised as an old man used to visit. The story behind this claimed that in about the last decade of the 19th century the man in the guard house on the former city wall near the Tower used to receive visits from an old man who would stay some little time and talk with him. One of these occasions happened to be New Years Eve and the watchman invited him join him to drink some wine. The visitor accepted, and not only drank heartily but gave two pieces of silver, each worth ten taels, to his friend. He then got on the table and went to sleep. The host covered him with his coat and was greatly surprised to find that the old man’s features changed into those of a fox, and eventually he disappeared from sight. The next morning the visitor returned and apologized for his conduct of the previous evening. As the watchman only received a tael a month as wages, he acted as a hawker in the daytime, and the old gentleman guaranteed him that in future his daily profits would be 50 coppers more than they had been in the past. This promise was faithfully kept for about three years, though nothing more was ever seen of the strange visitor.

Again according to Swallow, there was a fox in the Temple of Heaven in Peking whose temper seemed to have been badly disturbed in the past, for he was dangerous, sometimes appearing to a man in the form of a beautiful lady, and on other occasions posing as a handsome young man. Friendship with him was fatal, and the poor victim died in a very short time.



Although tales of Foxes assuming human form go back 2000 years the final evolution appeared during the 8th Century AD when the image of the Fox as a seductress became a popular subject. One such legend tells of Daji (妲己), the beautiful daughter of the Chief of the minor state of Su, who was forcibly taken as a concubine by the tyrant, Zhou Xin, the last King of the Shang (Yin) dynasty, who died ca. 1150 BC. In the 15th Century Ming novel, The Investiture of the Gods (Fengshen Yanyi), Zhou Xin is vilified as a moral degenerate who, under the wicked influence of Daiji, committed all manner of evil and cruel deeds with her. Legend alleged that Zhou Xin had offended a malevolent nine-tailed Fox Spirit who had expelled Daiji’s soul and possessed her body.

Although also understood to have been revered in parts of central China Fox Spirits would appear not to have been seen or heard of in southern China. That is, apart from the claim by an elderly temple keeper in a temple in Mongkok, part of Kowloon, who claimed that the goddess, the main deity on one of the temple side altars, was the Fox Immortal, Hu Xian, and not the image of He Xiangu, one of the Eight Immortals, despite the embroidered altar cloth which bore her title. Apart from this flash of imagination on the part of the old man I have not heard mention of the dreaded Fox spirits in Hong Kong, Taiwan or South-east Asia.

Samuel Couling in his Encyclopaedia Sinica described Fox Fairies as having a form something like a fox, a creature with man’s ears, which gets on roofs and crawls along the beams of houses. It only appears after dark and often not in its own shape but as a man or a beautiful girl to tempt to ruin. People live in great fear of them and immense sums of money are expended to keep on good terms with them by offerings, incense, meats, tablets, etc. Some wealthy people ascribe their good fortune to their careful worship of the fox, and in many places Fox Spirits were addressed as Cai Shen, gods of wealth, as they were believed to bring prosperity to the devotee.

According to Burkhardt foxes in China prefer solitude rather than company, and prefer men dead rather than alive – hence their predilection for cemeteries where the presence of mankind is not a daily occurrence. Scared peasants, seeing a fox emerge from a grave, have endowed him with supernatural qualities. Foxes dig up skulls and place them on their bodies, then turn to the North Star and if the skull does not fall off during their prostrations they change into lovely and fascinating females. Burkhardt also pointed out that fox worship was prevalent in the North of China with a great number of shrines in Shandong province. Wieger augmented the story with the comment that a Fox, in his relations with humans, can be benevolent or vindictive, according to the treatment meted out to him, but he is a friend rather than the enemy.

Legend in northern China claimed that annual examinations were held for foxes supervised by the Fertility Goddess, Tai Shan Niangniang, after which degrees were awarded to the worthy ones just as imperial degrees were awarded to humans, with Tai Shan Niangniang considered by some to be the patron of Fox Spirits.

Fox Spirit Altars

Although I recall reading about Fox Spirit myths I have always assumed that the political campaigns mounted by succeeding Chinese governments had eradicated the cult. And so, having not come across a temple altar dedicated to them during visits to several thousand or more Chinese temples China-wide, the moment I encountered the tiny altar in the Yao Di Temple I was incredulous and was somewhat imprudently tempted to suggest that this shrine might be unique. Fortunately, I have recently discovered an important work by Kang Xiaofei who has researched the Fox cult during her trip to China in 1997 in which she describes being taken to the Jieyin Si 接引寺, a Buddhist temple in Boluobu, a small town on the Dinghui River within the Yulin region of northern Shaanxi, where she actually saw an image of the Fox Spirit. Eight Diamond Kings flanked the altar of The Buddha, seven of whom were warriors in armour and armed, whilst the eighth was a middle-aged scholar in civilian robes and cap. This, her informants claimed, was the Huxian, the Fox Spirit, and actually a Fox Spirit in human form. Hanging in the temple entrance were red banners, one of which read The Boluo Huxian is truly efficacious. Kang was reminded by her informants that “This is the Fox shrine, and we don’t usually open it to public worship”.

Until I obtained Kang Xiaofei‘s description of being introduced to the image of a Fox Spirit in Shaanxi in the late 1990’s, as far as I was aware human or animal images of Foxes were not placed on altars, the usual custom, as I understood it, being for tablets bearing the characters Fox Spirit to be raised in a small separate shrine where peasants could place their offerings to placate the Fox Spirits. I asked the middle-aged local Chinese resident in the courtyard of the Yao Di Miao in Yaocheng who had the air of being more learned, about the title The Great Immortal who brings Benefits to Society, 濟世大仙 written in crude black characters on a red cloth draped behind the shrine written on the wall, as well as Ling * * Bi 霊 * * 必, a four character title plaque on the front of their shrine, with two incomprehensible characters. He shrugged and either because he did not understand or wish to understand, or did not wish to display ignorance, he simply replied ‘devotees ensured the Spirits were propitiated as often as possible’!

Kang Xiaofei also revealed that her mother had recalled a small shrine in the backyard of her childhood home in a suburb of Beijing during the 1940s dedicated to a ‘Xianjia 仙家’, the respectful term for Fox Spirits in the local idiom. Kang added that, as frightening the Fox Spirits might be, it was common if unspoken knowledge within the family that maintaining the shrine would ensure good fortune and well-being.

Several comparatively recent academic publications have included relevant and detailed information on the cult of the Fox, including sightings of Fox Spirit altars.

T. D. Dubois, who had researched rural life in South-east Hebei during the late 1990s, reminds us that many tales told about Fox Spirits appear in compilations such as Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (Liaozhai zhiyi), written in Shandong during early Qing dynasty, describing their antics as they reward or punish their human acquaintances by affecting their wealth, romantic affairs, or physical health. He also observed that in general, psychic mediums, known in northern China as xiangtou 香頭 are practitioners, who heal through the power of Fox Spirits, and were their servants, with families approaching the Spirits through these mediums requesting protection. He added that ordinary people believed that capricious Fox Spirits could be pacified by mediums, He also surmised that belief in the healing power of Fox Spirits derives from an immediate and constantly evolving oral tradition that itself shapes the practice of xiangtou, who may justly be characterised as the ritual specialists of the cult of Fox Spirits, this despite xiangtou having been the usual term for the senior Spirit Mediums in temples across North China, especially in sectarian groups.

The subject of fox-lore was also dealt with exhaustively by Thomas Watters (formerly H.B.M. Consul-General at Canton, in the Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society . Generally, the fox is a creature of ill omen, long-lived (living to eight hundred or even a thousand years), with a peculiar virtue in every part of his body, able to produce fire by striking the ground with his tail, cunning, cautious, sceptical, able to see into the future, to transform himself (usually into old men, or scholars, or pretty young maidens), and fond of playing pranks and tormenting mankind. Many Chinese peasants in North China regarded the fox as a malicious creature. However, Watters, who had been stationed in Taiwan twice during the 1860s and 1870s, claimed during a talk he gave in 1874 in Shanghai that the fox had been considered an inauspicious creature since earliest time, yet pointed out that shrines were often erected in the fox’s honour, a sign of the fox being more than simply a malicious demon. Watters also referred to the myths describing the Foxes’ Yin 陰 characteristic, ‘female, cold and dark’ and the polar opposite to “the male”, Yang 陽. Their Yin element enabled them all too easily to assume the womanly guise; however, to seek a balanced constitution they had to obtain his jing 精, the Yang male element, wherever they could, leading to Fox Spirits preying onthe life-essence of men, their sperm, in order to achieve longevity. Watters also observed in an early reference to Fox Spirit temples that “the Temple of the Nine Envoys 九使廟 in Foochow (Fuzhou) was where local prostitutes would pray”.

In Shan Min’s work on Fox Spirits, based on his work as a doctor in Shandong, he maintains that the association of Fox Spirits with healing is one of the most important reasons that their popular worship has continued unabated for thousands of years.

The water of the Jade Springs close by the Summer Palace in Peking was believed to have great curative powers. This was due to the influence of the Fox Spirit who was reputed to live in a hole close to the spot where the water came out through five sluices. This led many Chinese before entering the Park to burn incense outside the wall in order to propitiate the Fox Spirit and pointed out by Arlington and Lewisohn. This rendered the water still more efficacious.

Kang Xiaofei observed that a Fox shrine described in Pu Songling’s Liaozhai Zhiyi (Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio) depicted its physical layout.

In it a painting of the bodhisattva Guan Yin and two other paintings of unknown armoured figures were worshipped. We learn from the conversation between the fox and Pu’s friends that the spirit’s ability to reach higher gods or goddesses, the bodhisattva Guan Yin and King of the Underworld, Yanluo Wang, was exactly what captured the attention of Mr. Niandong. While the image of Guan Yin was hung on the wall, the altar of the fox, symbolised the miniature seat, was set up on a table. The physical positions of the two divinities demonstrated an hierarchical order. Furthermore, the image of Guan Yin was forever present and yet motionless, whereas the fox though invisible, constantly came and went upon human requests submitted by the medium. The layout of the shrine may reflect the mentality of the people who engaged in cult practices: the fox actively answered worshippers’ pleases whilst the presence of the higher deities enhanced the
credibility of the cult.