Man-Eating Fox of Mount Qingqiu with an Infant's Cry
The Classic of the Southern Mountains gives it four terse clauses: on Mount Qingqiu lives a beast shaped like a fox with nine tails, its voice like that of a human infant; it can devour people, and whoever eats its flesh is proof against gu, the insect-borne witchcraft poison. The predator that lures with a baby's cry can itself be eaten as a talisman. Elsewhere in the book, the Classics of Regions Beyond the Seas and of the Great Wilderness record a Land of Qingqiu whose foxes have four legs and nine tails.
To Han-dynasty eyes the creature was auspicious. The Wu Yue Chunqiu tells how Yu the Great, still unmarried at thirty, saw a white nine-tailed fox at Mount Tushan and heard the local song 'the white fox roams, its nine tails full and thick', whereupon he took the daughter of Tushan as his wife. On Han pictorial stones the nine-tailed fox stands beside the Queen Mother of the West with the jade rabbit, the toad, and the three-legged crow, an emblem of abundant offspring and rightful rule.
From the Six Dynasties onward foxes turned demonic in the tale literature, and the Ming novel Investiture of the Gods sealed the type: a thousand-year fox spirit possesses Daji and ruins the Shang court. Carried east, the figure became Japan's Tamamo-no-Mae, and it now populates fiction, comics, and games.
