Council & Hidden Society

Zhongli Quan
(鍾離權)

The fan-of-revival immortal — sometimes called the leader of the Eight — whose feathered fan can wake the dead and cool the living down.

Jackie Vs. AI

Zhongli Quan is one of the Eight Immortals, often considered the senior or leader of the group in Daoist hagiography. He is depicted as a fat-bellied man with a topknot, a bare chest, and a feathered fan in his hand — the fan of revival, which can return the recently dead to life and cool the living back into themselves when they have been overheated by their own ambition. He is traditionally the master of Lü Dongbin, the most famous of the Eight. In the Council of Eight Immortals, when the Eight need a chair, the chair is usually Zhongli Quan.

In the Lotus Prince Chronicles

Zhongli Quan is at the head of the table in the dining-hall scene in Ch6 of Jackie Vs. AI. Jackie notices the topknot and the bare belly and the feathered fan that is set, casually, across the immortal's lap. Zhongli Quan does not introduce himself; Lü Dongbin introduces him. He is the one who tells Jackie, in plain language, what is happening — that the boy with taped glasses and a rabbit named Rufus is the Third Lotus Prince, that there are nine days, that there are four divine weapons that he cannot yet hold. The fan does not move during this. Jackie has the impression that the fan only moves when something needs to be brought back.

The fan moves once, in the corridor afterward. Jackie has gone pale and his knees have started to fold. Zhongli Quan, walking past, opens the fan a single inch and waves it twice — not at Jackie, just in the air near him. Jackie's color returns. He does not realize, until much later, that the fan was not for him; it was for a small fact about himself that he had stopped believing — that he was actually still alive, and that this was not, in itself, an emergency. The fan is for cooling overheated ambition and for reviving the recently dead. It works on the borderline cases too.

Backstory

Zhongli Quan is one of the oldest of the Eight Immortals in attestation, with stories tracing back to the late Han and consolidated in the Tang and Song. Some traditions identify him with a historical Han-dynasty general who attained immortality after a defeat in battle drove him into the mountains. The late-Ming Investiture of the Gods (封神演義) and the Yuan-dynasty zaju play of the Eight Immortals locked his iconography: bare belly, topknot, feathered fan, broad smile. He is the master of Lü Dongbin — the famous teacher-pupil pair — and the senior figure when the Eight gather as a council.

The fan-of-revival (扇) is the consistent attribute. In Daoist alchemical tradition it represents the inner heat being moved off the practitioner so that what is essential can return to itself. The fan does not add anything; it removes what does not belong. This is also why it can revive the recently dead — it does not bring them back so much as remove the small wrong heat that was keeping them from coming back on their own.

Key Ideas

The senior chair. Zhongli Quan is, by tradition, the chair of the Council of Eight Immortals when the council is in session — the one who speaks last and least, and most plainly.

The fan that revives. The feathered fan does not bring the dead back so much as remove the small wrong thing that was keeping them gone — a parable about cure as subtraction, not addition.

Master of Lü Dongbin. Zhongli Quan is the teacher of Lü Dongbin, the most famous of the Eight; the lineage runs through him, which is part of why the council defers.

Cooling overheated ambition. The fan also cools the living when their own ambition has overheated them — a quietly central concept in a book about an AI app named Halo that runs hot on everyone's behalf.

In the Lotus Prince Chronicles

Backstory

Key Ideas

Related Entries

Further Reading