THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
Gouwu Mountain in the second guideway of the Northern Mountains is rich in jade above and copper below. Its resident beast has a goat's body and a human face, but its eyes sit in its armpits; its teeth are a tiger's, its claws like human hands, and its voice is the crying of an infant. It is called the paoxiao, and it eats people. In some thirty characters the text assembles a peculiarly unsettling creature: to see who approaches, it must lift its forelegs.
The fourth-century commentator Guo Pu connected this entry to bronze vessels and older texts: the paoxiao is 'a greedy thing that starts to harm itself before it finishes eating a man' — none other than the taotie of the Zuozhuan. That chronicle, under the eighteenth year of Duke Wen, tells of a worthless son of the Jinyun clan, insatiable in food and grasping in goods, whom the world ranked among the Four Fiends under the name Taotie. The Lüshi Chunqiu adds that Zhou tripods were cast with a taotie 'that has a head but no body, and is destroyed before it can swallow the man it eats', a warning against boundless greed.
Since Song-dynasty antiquarians, the staring, bodiless animal masks on Shang and Zhou bronzes have been conventionally called taotie designs, a name taken straight from that passage. Taotie survives in modern Chinese as the byword for gluttony, while its identity as the paoxiao — the man-eating goat with eyes in its armpits — is largely forgotten.
