XXI. The Eight Immortals

One of the subjects beloved of Chinese artists is a venerable figure in an attitude of profound reverie shown as part of a wild and romantic scene of forest, crag, and torrent. Sometimes below his rocky hermitage there stretches a plain with far-off shadowy outlines of ordinary mortal habitations, of which the faint remoteness suggests the gulf separating him from mundane cares and vanities. Looking at such a one, instinct tells us that he feels, to use the words of Shelley, “as if his nature were resolved into the surrounding universe, or as if the surrounding universe were resolved into his being.” He belongs to a strange race, variously named by Western writers Fairies, Immortals, Genii, Rishi. And here may it be remarked in parenthesis that neither “fairy” nor “immortal” is a term that exactly fits them; nor, indeed, does Arabic jinn or Sanskrit ṛishi. They are a race peculiarly Chinese and apart. Hence it would seem most appropriate to call them by their native name hsien, now commonly written , a pictogram representing perfectly the essence of their cult—the primitive contact of man with Nature typified by the mountains. Hsien, therefore, they will be termed in these pages.