The fangshi, masters of methods or masters of recipes, were the diviners, healers, astrologers, alchemists and technicians of the occult arts of early and medieval China.
The technicians of the occult
The fangshi were specialists in a wide range of esoteric techniques, divination and astrology, medicine and the pursuit of longevity, alchemy and the search for the elixir of immortality, the interpretation of omens, and the arts of controlling spirits, and they offered these skills at the courts of rulers and among the people, so the term names a class of practitioners of the occult arts rather than a single office. They flourished particularly in the centuries around the beginning of the common era, when their pursuit of immortality and their occult techniques drew the interest of emperors.
Ancestors of the later traditions
The fangshi are important as forerunners: their techniques and preoccupations, the quest for immortality, alchemy, the command of spirits, the reading of the cosmos, fed directly into the formation of organised Daoism, which took up and systematised much of what they practised, so the later Daoist priest and the ritual master inherit a great deal from these earlier masters of methods. The class as such faded as its arts were absorbed into Daoism and other channels, but the figure of the fangshi records an early stage of Chinese religious history, the loose world of occult technicians from which the organised traditions in part emerged. The office thus belongs to the deep background of Chinese religion, the reservoir of technique on which the later traditions drew.