War God of the Nine Li, Defeated at Zhuolu
Chiyou led the Nine Li tribes of high antiquity. Fragments of the Han apocryphal text Longyu Hetu describe him and his eighty-one brothers as beast-bodied but human-tongued, with heads of bronze and brows of iron, eating sand and stones, forgers of the first swords, halberds, and great crossbows. The Shuyiji records a folk game of Jizhou in which players butted one another wearing ox horns, called the 'game of Chiyou', showing how his horned, wild-haired image lived on among the people.
The Records of the Grand Historian states that when Chiyou rebelled and defied the emperor's command, Huangdi levied the armies of the lords and fought him on the plain of Zhuolu, where Chiyou was captured and killed. The Shanhaijing preserves a mythic version of the battle: Chiyou summoned the Wind Lord and the Rain Master to loose a tempest, and Huangdi called down the drought goddess Ba to still the storm before slaying him. In other tellings Chiyou spread a blinding fog, and Huangdi's south-pointing chariot led the army out.
Defeat did not erase his cult. The Shiji lists him third among the Eight Spirits worshipped in Qi as 'Lord of Arms'; the First Emperor sacrificed to him on an eastern tour, and Liu Bang consecrated his war drums to Chiyou at Pei before rising against Qin. Miao oral epics still honor Chiyou as an ancestor today.
