“When heaven gave birth to the myriad things, it commanded that each should have its name. That foxes are named ‘foxes’ is just like the fact that men are named ‘men’; to call a fox a ‘fox’ is just like calling a man a ‘man.’ Why should I keep any secrets? My kind are not all alike in goodness or wickedness, just as among men there are distinctions between the noble and the mean.”
Story told by Liu Shitu (Huntington 2003, 76)
What is a “fox”?
A fox is an omnivorous mammal with a pointed muzzle and bushy tail, and is well known for its cunning character. They are part of the biological family, Canidae, whose lineage also includes domestic dogs, wolves, coyotes, foxes, jackals, and dingoes. Foxes are found on every continent except Antarctica and aren’t defined by living in one singular terrain. They may be found living in forested areas, mountains, grasslands and deserts and make their homes by digging burrows in the ground. Their global distribution coupled with their sly and devious reputation has led to a lengthy history of eminence in folklore throughout many societies around the world. The foxes essence of mutability makes them the ideal representation of individuality, gender dynamics, and ambiguity in Asian folklore.
Dynasties & Authors
As seen in the quantity and quality of stories shared in our StoryMap — a select few out of many — fox spirit tales are numerous and incredibly fascinating on individual and group levels. These written stories, however, do not exist in a bubble. The textual tradition of fox lore in China is complexly tied up in issues of author and audience.
This section of our page will investigate the following questions:
- When were strange tales of foxes written?
- How much of the textual tradition is based in the oral tradition?
- Who was writing down these stories and for what audience?
- Why were these stories told?
When were strange tales of foxes written?
How much of the textual tradition is based in the oral tradition?
The textual tradition is so intertwined with the oral tradition that it is difficult to say. Rania Huntington believes “the surviving corpus of classical tales is a mixture of records of actual oral stories, transformed to an unknowable extent by authorial choice and memory, and inventions in the same mode” (23). What is so interesting about fox lore in China is how pervasive it was in all areas of society; “an extraordinary range of people of all ages and both sexes in late imperial China — peasants, officials, servants, professional spirit mediums, flower vendors — talked about them” (Huntington 2003, 2). These stories would have been told orally through all classes and groups of people, locations, and time-periods. It is the textual tradition that is more limited to class and groups of people; authors of zhiguai and fox stories were primarily “literate, elite, and apparently all male… and a somewhat larger portion of the literate read those stories” (Huntington 2003, 3). It is likely that the direction of influence for such stories moved in both direction: from oral to written stories and vice versa.
It is interesting to wonder, however, how much of the written stories were transcriptions or reproductions of stories the authors had heard told orally, and how much those authors invented their own tales. The Random Jottings at the Cottage of Close Scrutiny (yuewei caotang biji), for instance, is presented by Ji Yun to be the written recordings of a night of storytelling with his friends. Each story is contextualized with which one of Ji Yun’s friends had told it and commentary from others about the story and their opinions. This seems to be, then, a simple case of oral stories transcribed. But, Ji Yun did not write and publish this work until many years after the actual night of storytelling had taken place (Huntington 2003, 59-60). With many years between, is it possible that Ji Yun reworked many of the stories that had originally been told to him? A case of pure invention of strange tales and fox tales occurred during the Tang dynasty. During the Tang, scholars wishing to become officials had to take the civil service examinations, which required the creation of compositions. For these compositions, candidates “would make up fantastic stories employing flamboyant language and a variety of writing techniques” including strange tales that involved the supernatural, such as fox spirits (Zhao, 2005). Pu Songling, on the other hand, did not write about a night of storytelling, merely record things he had heard and seen, nor completely invent his stories. “Pu Songling distinguishes himself from his predecessors by creating a great tradition of his own, which is characterised by his strong but subtle criticism of social injustice, his steadfast support for love and freedom, and his artistic combination of the Six Dynasties zhiguai tradition with the exuberant Tang chuanqi style” (Zhao, 2005). Even though Pu Songling, like most authors of zhiguai, based his tales in folktales and legends of the past, Pu Songling also asserted his own literary individuality and innovation in his works. While Pu Songling is famous for his unique style, it is fair to assume that all authors of zhiguai and fox tales blended old folklore with their own imaginations.
Who was writing down these stories and for what audience?
As touched on above, while the general public might have been orally telling and hearing strange tales of foxes and fox spirits, the authors of written zhiguai anthologies were almost entirely elite, male scholars known as the literati. This means that class and gender dynamics are at play in the construction and transmission of these stories. How do the identities of these authors and their desired audiences of other elites and scholars impact these supernatural creatures and the stories told about them?
As we will be focusing on the later zhiguai period in the Ming and Qing, it is important to note that the late zhiguai were known to be significantly more didactic than earlier works. The messages being conveyed in the late zhiguai “[shed] its ties to partisan conflicts between different religious faiths, it promoted morality of a more secular nature and demonstrated a particular interest in the rectification of unethical behaviour unacceptable to society” (Chan 1998, 4). So what were the stories telling audiences about class and gender boundaries?
Many zhiguai stories about fox spirits focused on relationships between young scholars and beautiful women fox spirits. As fox spirits and the stories about them are as diverse as humans and stories about humans, relationships such as these are not the only plots of stories, however it is definitely a common theme. Due to this common theme, conclusions have been drawn about what this says about the authors and audiences of such stories; “the sheer quantity of this type of tale has led to the suggestion that it was a channel for the release of sexual desires in repressed, traditional China — presumably through writing or reading the tales” (Chan 1998, 72). Because the characters in many of these tales share a resemblance to their authors and readers, we must wonder at what these stories say about their authors and what their authors have imbued in their renditions of such stories. A deeper discussion on the gender and sexual boundaries can be found in the following section and in the “Foxy Ladies” sub-page.
A commentary on class dynamics can be read in these stories, as the elite, literati authors have constructed classed characters within their works. The stories about young male scholars or religious men, such as monks, portray these male characters as having a strength of will and morals that allow them to more successfully navigate relationships with seductive and in many cases dangerous — a threat to the man’s chastity or constitution — female fox spirits. These more elite and therefore more morally superior characters are contrasted by stories of village, and therefore poor, men who act in savage or foolish ways. I would like to refer to two stories included in the StoryMap above as case examples of the portrayals of lower class men. The first story, titled “Evil Men & Fox Revenge,” depicts disturbing violence perpetrated by a group of “nameless local toughs in a village” against two innocent female fox spirits. As many of these tales speak to the countenances of men and their self-control, this story highlights the savagery and complete lack of self-control that men are capable. And it is important that Ji Yun, “an articulate, elite young man,” uses poor, likely uneducated, village men as the characters who exhibit the worst possibilities for man’s character (Huntington 2003, 63). And poor, uneducated village men were unlikely to be the readers of this story; instead, other elite men would have been the intended audience, reinforcing class beliefs they most likely shared. We can, again, see how these stories are catered to an elite, male audience in the story titled “The Shameless Medium.” While modern, Western readers might not find this story funny in the slightest, this story was considered humorous at the expense of the female medium. “The old medium is the butt of the joke, but key to the joke is her shameless resourcefulness” and the elite male readers were meant to “have just laughed at this story, with the butt of the joke so different from themselves” (Huntington 2003, 55-56). What would have been the reaction if the readers of this story had been women, particularly lower class women? Hard to say, but it is clear that they were never the intended audience, as this story is clearly meant to be something of an inside joke amongst high class male scholars.
Why were these stories told?
Are we presuming that these stories are merely legends created by and distributed amongst humans, evolving over time, place, and author, and not stories that originated from real events? I think this is answered well by Leo Tak-hung Chan (1998): “it needs to be emphasized that the moral imperatives there were voiced in a context of: (1) a belief that the supernatural realm of ghosts, deities, and other spirits did indeed exist, in spite of contentions to the contrary; and (2) an understanding of the way such supernatural beings worked, as revealed in the analysis of factual evidence from witnesses of the strange” (6).
Whether you, our reader, chooses to believe that fox spirits and other supernatural beings are real or not, these stories must be understood in the context they existed in, which includes a belief in the supernatural. These stories “[established] the boundaries of the human. As the most ubiquitous and ambiguous alien in the Chinese imagination from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, the shape-changing fox helped to establish the boundaries around the human and the ordinary. Its frequent violations of these boundaries reveal the anxieties of late imperial culture” (Huntington 2003, 4). Whether told to share lived experiences or to relay social messages and constructions of the boundaries of humanity, class, gender, or sexuality, these stories have the effect of creating or maintaining such boundaries, and thus our analyses of how these stories function as social constructions is important regardless of a belief in the existence of the supernatural. “As much as the fox reveals about the people and society who fashioned it, I do not want to reduce the fox to these social meanings and lose sight of its inherent fascination. I wish to reaffirm the fox’s place between the explicable and the mysterious, between imagination’s habits and its innovations” (Huntington 2003, 6).
Gender Dynamics in Fox Stories
Although it is now common among academia, and understood as a prevalent, if not wholly vital piece of what we know fox fairies to be, gender was not always one of the defining features of a fox spirit. In Pre-modern China, the fox was simply a creature associated with fertility, yin energy, fertility, and transformation. This description, although a catalyst for the later feminization of the fox, was highly focused on the liminal nature of the physical fox that one might find on a walk through the woods, or sleeping in a cave. Following this, the nine tailed fox came to prolific recognition, and was a messenger for the Queen Mother of the West, who was the goddess of immortality during Han China. Additionally, the fox became even further associated with the concept of its liminal identity, and was thought of as being able to negotiate the boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead. It was not until Late Imperial China where the fox became widely and commonly associated with dangerous and alluring femininity and illicit transgressions, whether those be sexual or otherwise.
Many of these stories of dangerously alluring femme-foxes are important components of what are known as Zhiguai xiaoshuo, or “strange tales,” which became popularized during the Tang dynasty forward. Many of these Zhiguai were written by men who were very well-educated scholars, known as literati. Because the people perpetuating and eventually catalyzing the canonization of these tales were men of high status, the foxes (among other anthropomorphized characters) became feminized, and by default, dangerous. The literati of the time (Tang-Qing dynasties) heavily reinforced the “uncanny embodiments of the repulsive other” (Chiang 2005, p 57), which effectively defined what it meant to be a “man” firmly against the feminine, and especially the powerful, sexualized feminine, which is the drastic, “repulsive” other.
These stories also often focus on the incredible fears surrounding loss of control over the feminine that men generally wish to have such a tight grasp on, which is shown in tales such as “Seizing a Fox” by Pu Songling. The idea that the most illusory, and therefore dangerous femininity cannot be suppressed or controlled by masculine power is one of the most important fears which penetrates to the very core of many Zhiguai tales. The concept of gender relations is perhaps one of the most important aspects to understand when reading and studying fox spirit stories, and if you are interested in learning more, check out our page titled “Foxy Ladies: Women in Mid-Late Imperial China.”
How to Defend against Fox Spirits
It can’t go without mention that there are instances in which the relationship between humans and fox spirits is positive and mutualistic for both parties, which is why one might want to be cautious when deciding whether to befriend a fox spirit, or defend against one. Fox spirits, although known for their mischief, trickery, dangerous nature, and irresistible sensuality, can also be highly beneficial to a family by means of providing wealth, protection, or companionship (whether that be romantic or friendly).
However, If you truly desire to defend against a fox spirit, there are a variety of ways you can go about doing this. Firstly, and perhaps most presumably, one may defend against these spirits as one might defend against any human or other animal that is tormenting them. Poison, stabbing, decapitation, and other forms of physical violence are all efficacious. Even the act of non-consensual sex may expel a fox spirit (if not fully kill) from your home or town. This is demonstrated in some of the stories on our Storymap, as well as within other stories about fox spirits.
Another way one might “defend” against fox spirits is through processes of sheer will. Often this includes “virtuous” behavior such as remaining chaste, resisting sexual temptation, and resisting temptations of monetary greed. Again, examples of this kind of defense may be found throughout our stories. This is a very different type of defense, and is often used, rather than to simply tell an interesting tale, to educate on desirable facets of one’s individual morality. Often, stories that are focused on this method of “defense” focus more on the human subjects than the fox spirit.
Finally, in instances of fox possession, one may also defend against a fox by exorcising it from their body, home, or realm with an exorcism performed by a specialist (such as a priest or someone with proper exorcising credentials). There is some mention of this phenomenon within our Storymap, although it is unclear if “possession” in these tales means actually being physically inhabited by a fox spirit, or something else. Although we did not mention the concept of possession within our research on this website, the issue is complicated and prevalent, and “fox possession” is mentioned often throughout anthologized fox tales.
Themes
Asian Fox Spirits don’t belong to a single category of existence. They can pass from one plain of existence to another freely and fluidly. Fox Spirits appear in so many roles that there is an uncertainty that comes with what their real nature might be. Fox spirits are very similar to humans in the way that they vary in characters and motives so diversely. In natural histories, as well as myths and legend, the fox resides in the margins between two conflicting states一between forest and open field, between social morality and unconventional intelligence, between domestic and wild, and so on and so forth. In attempts to better understand the social implications of the worship of foxes, we take a brief look at both Japan and China.
Trickster figures exist in folklore across the world and while each trickster figure might be specific and individual to local cultures and places, there is an underlying archetype that distinguishes the trickster in mythology and folklore studies. This section explores this archetype in general, in Asia and its applicability to the fox spirit myths of China, with particular focus on the gendered constructions of the trickster category.
The final component of our comparative research we have chosen to isolate are women. Women are quite central to the general idea of what fox spirits are, what they do, and often reflects responsibilities, expectations, and cultural normalities that were central to the lives of historical women in China. Much of our research on historical women is centralized on the Ming and Qing dynasties, and works to tie their lives into two major themes seen in many fox stories: chastity, and prostitution.
Chinese Terms
志怪 (zhiguai): stories of the strange; records about strange, uncanny or supernatural things
文言小说 (Wenyan xiaoshuo): classical Chinese fiction
传奇 (chuanqi): tales of the marvelous
狐狸精 (hulijing): fox spirit (a seductive woman); vixen; witch; enchantress
狐 (hu): fox
狐狸 (huli): the general name for fox (figuratively it is used to describe a sly or treacherous person)
精 (li): energy; spirit (also: sperm; semen; seed); in Chinese medicine: a fundamental substance which maintains the functioning of the body; essence of life
狐狸尾巴 (huli weiba): means fox’s tail and is an idiom meaning something that gives away a person’s real character or evil intentions (evidence of evil intentions or revealing one’s evil nature)
狐狸仙 (huli xian): fox fairy; fox immortal/celestial being
九尾狐 (jiuwei hu): nine-tailed fox; a crafty and villainous person
Bibliography
Chan, Tak-hung Leo. 1998. The Discourse on Foxes and Ghosts : Ji Yun and Eighteenth-Century Literati Storytelling.Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Chiang, Sing-chen Lydia. Collecting the Self: Body and Identity in Strange Tale Collections of Late Imperial China. Leiden: Brill, 2005.
Huntington, Rania. 2003. Alien Kind :Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative. Harvard East Asian Monographs, 222. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center.
Zhao, Xiaohuan. 2005. Classical Chinese Supernatural Fiction : A Morphological History. Chinese Studies, V. 44. Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press.
Image Bibliography
Artist/maker unknown, Chinese. Commemorative Portrait of a Scholar. 16th century; Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), Image: 8/22/2012. Place: Philadelphia Museum of Art. https://library.artstor.org/asset/AWSS35953_35953_41352158.
Gu Luo. Beauties in the Garden. Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), early 19th century. Place: University of Florida: Harn Museum of Art. https://library.artstor.org/asset/AHARNIG_10313997120.
Gu Luo. Beauties in the Garden (2). Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), early 19th century. Place: University of Florida: Harn Museum of Art. https://library.artstor.org/asset/AHARNIG_10313997115.
Rene Burri. Great wall. 1964. Beidaling (near Beijing), China. https://library.artstor.org/asset/AMAGNUMIG_10311570117.
Artist/maker unknown. Female musicians. Figure sculpture. Place: Archaeological Collection of the People’s Republic of China (Beijing, China). https://library.artstor.org/asset/LESSING_ART_10312643547.
Artist/maker unknown. Bronze Chariots and Mounted Guards. Eastern Han dynasty (25-200). Place: Gansu Provincial Museum. https://library.artstor.org/asset/ARTSTOR_103_41822003808738.
Artist/maker unknown. Dunhuang, Mogao Cave 154, scene with architecture from the Western Paradise of Sukhavati based on the Guan Wuliangshou Jing. 8th century. https://library-artstor-org.ezproxy.guilford.edu/asset/HUNT_58779.
Artist/maker unknown. Figure of dancing woman. Six Dynasties. Sculpture. Place: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. https://library.artstor.org/asset/AMICO_BOSTON_103837344.
Artist/maker unknown. Maitreya with Manjusri and Samantabhadra. 939. Painting, Textile, Fragment. Place: The British Museum, London, England. https://library-artstor-org.ezproxy.guilford.edu/asset/MIDA_101555.
Unidentified Artist (Chinese, In the style of Zhao Yong). Mongol Circus. 1289-after 1360. Paintings. Place: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://library.artstor.org/asset/SS7731421_7731421_11766582.
Artist/maker unknown. Palace Landscape. 11th Century. China, Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127). Painting. Place: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio, USA. https://library.artstor.org/asset/AMICO_CL_103801960.
Artist/maker unknown. Chinese. Scholar-Official in His Study. 1750-1850; Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Place: Philadelphia Museum of Art. https://library.artstor.org/asset/AWSS35953_35953_41353100.
Bruno Barbey. Mao portrait and slogans “Long live the People’s Republic of China. Long live the Union of the people of the world.” 1973. Jiangsu, Suzhou, China. https://library.artstor.org/asset/AWSS35953_35953_37854797.
Robert Capa. Chinese troops marching along the Grand Canal, on the outskirts of the town. 1938. https://library.artstor.org/asset/AMAGNUMIG_10311539207.
Old Master Q Comics [老夫子]. Strip #1293 – 狐狸精 Fox Devil. Available from: https://www.oldmasterq.com/comics/1293/
Page written and created by Billie D-M., Chloe W., and Lydia M.
