Chiyou, the War Monster

Somewhere in the old north country, the story went, you could dig the monster up. Turn the soil of Jizhou and now and then a skull came out of it hard as cast bronze, ringing under the spade like metal, and these, people said, were Chiyou’s bones. There were his teeth too, when you found them, each a good two inches long and so hard that no hammer would break one. It is a strange thing to say of a god, that his remains lay scattered under the ploughland waiting to be turned up, but that was exactly the point. Chiyou was the enemy the sovereign of heaven had killed and could not stop killing, the war-monster whose body kept surfacing centuries after his death, harder in the ground than he had ever been in life.

Start where the oldest text starts, though, and there is no monster at all, only a war. The Classic of Mountains and Seas is the earliest source to name him, and it is blunt: Chiyou made weapons and attacked Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor. What follows is a duel of weather. The sovereign sends his winged dragon Ying Long against the rebel; the dragon hoards up the waters; Chiyou answers by calling down the Wind Earl and the Rain Master, who loose a great wind and a great rain over the field.

Then the Yellow Emperor plays the card that ends it, a heavenly woman named Ba whose heat is drought itself, and the moment she touches the earth the rain stops and Chiyou is killed. That is the whole of him in the ancient book: a foe who could command the storm and was undone by a stronger one. The Classic never once describes his face, his hands, or his skin. The bronze-headed horror everyone remembers is not in it.

Bronze heads and iron foreheads

That horror was assembled later, and it is worth being honest about where each piece comes from. The fullest portrait waits until the sixth century, in the Records of the Strange attributed to Ren Fang, and it reads like a bestiary entry proper. Chiyou and his brothers, the Records says, had bronze heads and iron foreheads, and they ate iron and stone. Their ears and the hair at their temples stood out like swords and halberds; their heads bore horns.

As for the rest, the book is careful to hedge it as hearsay: it is popularly said, it writes, that Chiyou had a human body, the hooves of an ox, four eyes and six hands. This is the many-armed, bronze-headed god of the popular imagination, and every line of it is centuries younger than the war it decorates. The Classic of Mountains and Seas, the primary source most often blamed for the image, gives Chiyou no body to hang it on.

Even the count of those brothers refuses to settle, and the split is old enough that it should be kept rather than smoothed. The Records of the Strange gives Chiyou seventy-two brothers. The Dragon-Fish River Chart, a Han apocryphon that survives only in other men’s quotations, gives him eighty-one, with beast bodies and human speech, and adds that they ate sand and stones and forged the five weapons of war.

Seventy-two or eighty-one, an inedible mineral diet either way: the traditions agree on the strangeness and disagree on the arithmetic, and later readers have often guessed that the numbers were never brothers at all but a tally of allied clans marching under one horned banner. That is a reading, not a source, and the texts themselves simply hold the two figures apart.

A wall of mist across the plain

What no version doubts is that he was made for war. The Dragon-Fish River Chart credits Chiyou and his kin with making the five weapons, the whole armoury of the metal age set loose on the world at once, and the Records of the Strange keeps a memory of his signature trick on the battlefield: Chiyou could make clouds and fog. Picture the war-monster raising a wall of mist across the plain, blinding the sovereign’s host so that order itself lost its bearings, and you have the reason his enemies needed dragons and drought-goddesses to bring him down.

In the sober historian’s version the marvels fall away and only the menace is left. Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian, writing around the turn of the first century BCE, keeps no fog and no bronze skin, just a verdict: Chiyou was the most violent, and none could punish him. He made rebellion, would not obey the sovereign’s command, and was met at last in the wilderness of Zhuolu, where he was seized and killed.

What the ground would not forget

The killing did not end him, and this is the part that makes him a proper monster rather than a defeated general. The Classic of Mountains and Seas leaves the strangest relic of the war standing on a southern mountain: a stand of maples that are not really trees. They are what Chiyou cast off.

The fetters struck from the captured rebel were flung down there, and where they fell they took root and grew, so that the red-leaved wood is the shackles of the slain war-god turned living, a whole grove that is really a discarded chain. And in the north the ground itself would not forget him, giving up those bronze-hard skulls and unbreakable teeth to anyone who dug deep enough. A god you can bury and keep unearthing is a god who has not entirely died.

Strapping ox-horns and butting heads

He had not entirely stopped fighting, either. In Jizhou, the Records of the Strange says, the people kept a game called the Chiyou Play: two or three at a time, they would strap ox-horns to their heads and butt one another, and from this the wrestling shows of the Han dynasty were said to descend.

Long after the storm-monster fell, the country he was killed in was still putting on his horns and charging, half in memory and half in sport, the horned war-god surviving as a village entertainment. That is the truest shape of Chiyou in the end: not a beast slain once in a founding age, but a hardness left in the world after the war, in the maples and the buried bones and the men lowering their horned heads to run at each other in the old northern fields.

Chiyou and his seventy-two brothers had bronze heads and iron foreheads, and they ate iron and stone. It is popularly said that Chiyou had a human body, the hooves of an ox, four eyes, and six hands. (Records of the Strange, attrib. Ren Fang; author’s rendering from the Chinese)