Li Tieguai is almost never drawn without his gourd, and it is the most interesting thing about his iconography. A double-lobed gourd hangs at his belt or is carried on the crutch, and from its open neck a cloud of vapour rises, in which a tiny figure is often shown, sometimes recognisably himself.
The gourd does two jobs at once. It is the ordinary container in which a Chinese physician or apothecary carried medicine, which is why he is patron of pharmacists and is petitioned in illness, and an old expression for practising medicine refers to hanging up the gourd. It is also the standing image in Daoist writing for a complete world in miniature, entered through a narrow neck, in which time runs differently and everything is whole: the gourd heaven, into which a man in one famous story follows an old drug seller and finds a palace inside. The little figure in the vapour is that second meaning made visible.
His popularity in painting is out of proportion to his position in the group. A lame figure in rags, with a wild head of hair, an iron crutch and an expression somewhere between suffering and amusement, is a considerably better subject than a courtier with a jade tablet, and artists have used him accordingly for six hundred years. He appears on temple walls, on porcelain, on New Year prints and on the ridge tiles of roofs, and is usually the first of the eight a viewer can name.