THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
Mount Zhang'e bears no plants but abounds in jasper and green jade. Its bird is the Bifang: 'shaped like a crane, one-legged, with red markings on a green ground and a white beak; its cry is its own name; where it appears, the town suffers strange fires.' The 'Classic of Regions Beyond the Seas: South' records a Bifang bird as well, dwelling in the east, west of the Green River.
In the Hanfeizi, when the Yellow Emperor convened the ghosts and gods on the western Mount Tai — riding an elephant chariot drawn by six dragons, the Wind Lord sweeping the road and the Rain Master sprinkling it, tigers and wolves in the van, ghosts and spirits behind, the soaring serpent crouched on the ground and the phoenix overhead — the Bifang stood in attendance beside the linchpins of his chariot. The Huainanzi says 'wood begets the Bifang', and the commentator Gao You calls it the essence of wood: bird-shaped, green with red feet, one-legged, eating no grain.
A spirit of wood that portends fire, the Bifang became in later lore an omen of conflagration, sometimes simply a firebird; its single leg groups it with the Shangyang rain-bird and the one-legged Kui among the famous monopods of early Chinese legend.
