THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
Mount Sanwei, home of the three azure birds, 'measures a hundred li around'. On it lives a beast 'shaped like an ox, white-bodied with four horns, its long hair like a draped rain-cape; it eats men'. The name is written Aoyin in some recensions and Aohen in others, and the phrase 'haired like a draped rain-cape' — the straw cloak of Chinese farmers — is among the book's most vivid strokes of description.
Sanwei itself was famous long before commentators tried to place it. The Book of Documents records that the sage-king Shun 'banished the San Miao tribes to Sanwei', making the mountain a place of exile at the western edge of the known world; tradition later fixed it as the Sanwei hills southeast of Dunhuang, facing the Mingsha dunes across the valley of the Mogao caves. That one ridge should house both the azure birds who fetch food for the Queen Mother of the West and a shaggy white ox that eats men is a pairing entirely typical of the western mountains, where auspicious and murderous creatures share a single slope. Ming and Qing illustrated editions draw the Aohen as a four-horned white ox whose hair sweeps the ground.
