Erlang Shen

Erlang Shen is a warrior god famed for a third, all-seeing eye set in the middle of his forehead and for his loyal hound, a subduer of demons and of floods who appears across Chinese mythology and folk religion and in the great classical novels. The third eye marks him as one who sees what is hidden, including demons in disguise, and much of his role is the martial suppression of monsters and unruly powers.

In the sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West, he is the one adversary able to fight the monkey-king Sun Wukong to a standstill, matching the shape-shifting monkey transformation for transformation in one of the book's most celebrated combats, and he is often shown accompanied by his faithful celestial dog, who assists him against his foes. He is frequently connected in tradition with the taming of waters: one important strand identifies him with, or associates him with, the family of Li Bing, the historical engineer whose great irrigation works at Dujiangyan in Sichuan controlled the flooding of the Min River, so that Erlang becomes a god of flood-control and of the mastering of destructive water, a matter of deep concern in a land shaped by its rivers. His parentage is variously told, often as a nephew of the Jade Emperor, and his stories include the splitting of a mountain to rescue his mother. Erlang Shen stands as the type of the heroic divine warrior of Chinese folk belief, the demon-queller whose extra eye misses nothing.

A short distance from the great irrigation works usually credited to Erlang Shen's mythic ancestry stands the temple most directly tied to that claim: the Erwang, or Two Kings, Temple at Dujiangyan in Sichuan, built into the hillside overlooking the river-splitting engineering project traditionally attributed to the Qin dynasty official Li Bing and his son. The temple, rebuilt many times after fire, flood and earthquake damage across its long history, honours father and son as the historical figures behind the flood control system that still irrigates the Chengdu plain, and popular tradition folds Erlang Shen's divine, three eyed, dog accompanied persona into that same family, treating the god of folk legend and the engineer of documented history as aspects of one lineage rather than as separate figures who happened to share a concern with water.

An annual festival held at the site around the anniversary of the dam's ceremonial opening of its floodgates draws large crowds and continues rites of thanksgiving to the two kings that long predate any interest in Erlang Shen's exploits against Sun Wukong. The site is a rare case of a folk deity's legend and a documented, still functioning piece of ancient infrastructure sharing the same physical address.