Caishen

Caishen is the god of wealth, one of the most popular deities of Chinese folk religion, worshipped by households and businesses alike in the hope of prosperity. His moment is the lunar new year: his image is put up, and his arrival is welcomed and celebrated in the belief that receiving the god of wealth at the turn of the year brings a prosperous twelve months to come, so that greeting Caishen is one of the most widespread of new-year customs. He is not a single fixed figure but a role that several deified personages have filled, and the tradition distinguishes a military god of wealth from a civil one.

The martial form is most often identified with Zhao Gongming, a fearsome general shown with a black face and a heavy beard, riding a black tiger and wielding an iron weapon, who commands subordinate gods of wealth and good fortune; the civil form is associated with figures such as the loyal minister Bi Gan. In this Caishen reflects a general feature of Chinese religion, in which historical or legendary human beings of notable virtue or power are raised after death to divine office. As the bestower of riches and good fortune, honoured in shops, homes and temples, Caishen expresses the frankly this-worldly hopes, for prosperity, success and a comfortable life, that run strongly through popular Chinese devotion, and his cheerful image remains among the most recognisable of all the folk gods.

The martial god of wealth's most memorable scene, at least in the sixteenth century novel Investiture of the Gods, is his death rather than his glory. Zhao Gongming, serving the losing Shang side in the novel's war against the Zhou, is killed by the strategist Jiang Ziya through a ritual technique rather than a weapon: a straw effigy of Zhao is made, his name is written upon it, and it is shot with peachwood arrows across twenty one days of ritual observance until the sympathetic magic takes his life at a distance.

Only after his death, in the novel's closing distribution of divine offices, is Zhao Gongming posthumously appointed Marshal of the God of Wealth, given command over four subordinate deities of profit, joy and fair trade, and set to preside over the very prosperity his own death had nothing to do with earning. The scene is often read as characteristic of the novel's larger pattern, in which many of the folk pantheon's offices are handed out at the end as consolation prizes to defeated warriors, so that a violent death in a losing cause becomes, by literary convention rather than by any older cult tradition, the origin story explaining why a fierce general on a black tiger is the one Chinese households now welcome every lunar new year as the bringer of riches.