Taibai Jinxing, the Great White Star, is the deified spirit of the planet Venus in Chinese belief. Where the planet appears in the western evening sky, the Chinese tradition personified it as an immortal, and unlike the fierce or martial associations Venus sometimes carries elsewhere, the Chinese star-god is characteristically imagined as a benign and venerable figure: a wise, white-bearded old man, an elder immortal of gentle and kindly temperament. He is a familiar presence in Chinese folk mythology and literature, and appears memorably in the sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West, where he serves as a messenger and mediator for the Jade Emperor, the supreme ruler of the celestial court.
In that role he repeatedly counsels patience and conciliation, it is the Great White Star who advises bringing the unruly monkey-king Sun Wukong up to heaven and giving him an office rather than fighting him, seeking to settle conflict by accommodation rather than force. This casts Taibai Jinxing as a kind of heavenly diplomat, the mild and prudent voice at the court of the gods. As a star-deity he belongs to the wider Chinese practice of honouring the sun, moon, planets and constellations as divine powers within the celestial bureaucracy, and among them he is one of the most sympathetically drawn, the evening star imagined as a benevolent old sage.