Zhong Kui

Zhong Kui is the great vanquisher of ghosts and demons in Chinese folk religion, a fierce, black-bearded figure dressed in the robes and cap of a scholar-official, brandishing a sword and trampling the demons he subdues. His origin is told in a well-known legend set in the Tang dynasty. Zhong Kui was a brilliant candidate who had passed the imperial examinations at the highest level, but was denied the first place he had earned, in the usual telling, on account of his ugly and forbidding appearance. In rage and shame at the injustice he took his own life on the palace steps. But the story does not end in defeat: after death, moved by his loyalty or granted office in the other world, he became a mighty subduer of the malevolent spirits that trouble the living.

A famous episode has the emperor Xuanzong, feverish and tormented in a dream by a small demon, see a great scowling figure seize and devour the imp; asked who he is, the figure names himself Zhong Kui and vows to rid the empire of evil spirits, and the grateful emperor, on waking, has his portrait painted and circulated. From this Zhong Kui became one of the most popular protective deities of the household: his image is pasted up at the new year and at the Dragon Boat Festival, at doorways and on walls, to frighten off demons, ghosts and misfortune and to guard the family within. He is the type of the wronged and upright man whose very fierceness, turned against evil, makes him a guardian of the innocent.

Zhong Kui's fiercest and best documented artistic portrait was painted not to frighten demons but to unsettle an emperor, or so the tradition around it claims. The Song to Yuan period painter Gong Kai produced a long handscroll, now known in English as Zhong Kui Traveling, or the Demon Queller's excursion, showing the scholar-ghost setting out with his sister and a disorderly retinue of grotesque attendant spirits, rendered with an expressive, almost caricatured looseness unusual for the period's court painting.

Art historians reading the scroll against Gong Kai's own biography, that of a Song loyalist living under Mongol Yuan rule, have argued that the demon-queller's exile-like procession works as veiled political commentary on dispossession and survival under a conquering dynasty rather than as straightforward religious illustration.

The painting survives today in an American museum collection and remains one of the most studied images of Zhong Kui outside the popular new year prints, valued specifically because it treats a stock protective figure as a vehicle for personal and political meaning rather than as a repeated household charm, a use of the demon queller's image that the door prints pasted up every winter never attempted.