The story the tradition tells about Zhongli Quan begins with a defeat. He is a Han commander sent against the tribes of the north west; the campaign goes badly, the army is scattered, and he escapes alone into the mountains with nothing. There he meets an old man, or in some versions finds an inscribed jade casket in a wall, and receives the instructions that make him a transcendent.
The shape of that account matters more than its details. A man at the top of the worldly hierarchy is stripped of everything by failure, and the failure is the doorway. The same pattern runs through the whole group: an official who cannot pass his examinations, a courtier disgraced by his brother, a beggar in a borrowed corpse. The Eight Immortals are not a pantheon of the successful, which is a large part of why they have been popular for six centuries with people who were not successful either.
He is drawn as a heavy bare-bellied man, cheerful, with his hair tied in two loops on the top of his head and a large feather fan in his hand. The fan is his instrument: in the stories it raises the dead, and in one widely repeated episode it turns stones into silver which he distributes to the poor. He is usually placed first in the group and is regularly shown as the senior of the two figures in the teaching pair with Lü Dongbin.