Each of the eight carries an attribute, and the attributes do more work in daily life than the biographies do. Zhongli Quan has a fan that revives the dead, Lu Dongbin a sword, Zhang Guolao a fish drum, Han Xiangzi a flute, Cao Guojiu castanets or a court tablet, Li Tieguai a gourd and crutch, Lan Caihe a flower basket, He Xiangu a lotus. Shown on their own the eight objects stand for the eight people, an arrangement called the covert eight immortals, and it appears on porcelain, embroidery, furniture, carved screens and birthday hangings where no figure is drawn at all.
Their commonest setting is a birthday, particularly a sixtieth or an eightieth, where the eight crossing the sea to a peach banquet is the standard subject and the wish is plainly for long life. The crossing supplied a proverb still in ordinary use: the eight immortals cross the sea, each showing what they can do, said of a group that solves a problem by eight unrelated methods rather than one agreed one.
They are also constant on the stage. Yuan and later drama put them in plays of conversion and deliverance, in which an immortal descends to wake a sleeper out of office, appetite and attachment. Door gods, temple murals and New Year prints carry the same figures into houses that would not describe themselves as Daoist at all, which is how a specifically Daoist set of saints became general Chinese decorative vocabulary.