THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
The Classic of Regions Beyond the Seas: East installs this god in the Valley of Sunrise, between two rivers: Tianwu, styled the Lord of Waters. Its trunk is a beast's, carrying eight human-faced heads, eight legs, and eight tails, the whole body patterned green and yellow. The Classic of the Great Wilderness: East records the same name with a tiger's body and ten tails, a variant that shows the book's layered texts casting two slightly different shadows of one deity.
Some scholars have connected the name with the ancestors of the state of Wu, a guess beyond proving. What can be traced is the god's afterlife in poetry. In 'The Journey North', written amid the An Lushan rebellion, Du Fu describes his children in patched clothes cut from an old embroidered robe: 'Tianwu and the purple phoenix hang upside down on their coarse jackets.' The eight-headed water lord had become shorthand for the finest brocade figures, and one of the most quietly devastating images of a dynasty's collapse rides on this Shanhaijing beast.
