THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
The Classic of Regions Within the Seas: West gives Kunlun, the Supreme God's capital on earth, nine gates on each face, and sets a single warden over them: the Kaiming beast, its body like an enormous tiger, its nine heads all human-faced, standing on the summit and facing east. The text then uses the creature as a landmark to map the treasures around it: phoenixes to the west of Kaiming, the tree of deathlessness and the pearl tree to its north, and to its east the company of shamans holding the drugs of immortality.
The Classic of the Western Mountains assigns Kunlun a guardian under another name: the god Luwu, tiger-bodied with nine tails, human-faced with tiger claws, steward of the nine divisions of heaven and the seasons of the god's park. The modern annotator Yuan Ke takes Kaiming and Luwu to be one being recorded twice. One of the earliest gatekeeper beasts recorded in a Chinese text, and warden of no lesser threshold than the god's own capital, it is the recognizable ancestor of the many-headed tiger colossi of modern fantasy and games.
