Taotie
Chinese · numen · mythic prehistory · Recorded classification
His face is on the bronzes. The standing motif of Shang and Zhou ritual vessels — a frontal mask with huge eyes, no lower jaw, splitting into two profile dragons — has been called the taotie since the Song, when antiquarians attached the literary name to the archaeological ornament; whether the Shang bronze-casters called it that is unknowable and the identification is a scholarly convention rather than a fact. The record keeps the name and the caveat. It is, either way, the single most reproduced image from ancient China.
Domains
- gluttony
Relations
- companion: TaowuOne of the four.Reference treatment of the Four Perils as a group. (secondary)
Sources
- Taotie is one of the Four Perils, a gluttonous beast of the Jinyun lineage in the Zuo Zhuan, exiled with the other three by Shun to the four directions.: Reference treatments of the Four Perils. (secondary)