Zhong Kui (钟馗) – The Demon Queller

Zhong Kui is best understood as a legendary figure. The earliest detailed accounts, an inscription copied by the Song scholar Shen Kuo and the Tang Yishi (quoted in the Ming anthology Tianzhongji), tell his story through the dream of Emperor Xuanzong, and Chinese Wikipedia calls his origin unsettled, most likely a personified protective object. See the origin guide.

In the oldest telling, Emperor Xuanzong fell ill after a military review at Mount Li and dreamed of a large ghost devouring a small thief. The large ghost named himself Zhong Kui, a man who had failed the military examination, and vowed to rid the realm of demons. When the emperor recovered he had the painter Wu Daozi portray him, and the picture became a protective image. After the Song and Yuan dynasties Daoism honored him as "Saint Lord of Blessing and House Protection" (赐福镇宅圣君). Read the dream of Emperor Xuanzong.

Traditionally he guards households against ghosts, illness and misfortune. His picture is hung at doors and in halls at the Lunar New Year and the Dragon Boat Festival, and in Japan, where he is called Shōki, he is venerated as a protector against smallpox and epidemics. See New Year protection and Shōki in Japan.

Wu Daozi is credited with the first picture, but no authentic original survives. Gong Kai's handscroll Zhongshan Going on Excursion, dated by the Freer Gallery to the late 13th or early 14th century, is among the earliest surviving works. Later artists took the figure in different directions: Dai Jin's grotesque night procession in the Ming dynasty, Fang Xun's delighted wine-cup scene and Ren Bonian's reading scholar in the Qing, and Xu Beihong's ink paintings in the twentieth century. See Zhong Kui in classical art.

Zhong Kui pictures are hung at the Lunar New Year and the Dragon Boat Festival, and a Dunhuang manuscript shows he already featured in New Year's Eve Nuo exorcism rites in the Tang dynasty. In Japan, as Shōki, he appears on rooftops, in Boys' Festival pictures and dolls, in the work of many painters, and as the name of the Nakajima Ki-44 fighter of the Imperial Japanese Army Air Force.

Artists have shown the same figure in very different moods: fierce, comic, drunk and scholarly. Gong Kai gives him a retinue of servant demons carrying wine, Dai Jin a snowy night carried by grotesque little ghosts, Fang Xun wide eyes delighted at a wine cup, and Ren Bonian a seated scholar reading beside bronzes. See the symbols in Zhong Kui paintings.

No. Zhong Kui is a demon queller and protector who acts in the world of the living, while Yanluo Wang, the King of Hell, rules the underworld and judges the souls of the dead. They are often confused because both are linked to ghosts and judgment. Compare them in Zhong Kui vs Yanluo Wang.

This site's painting gallery and art heritage page present works by artists from Gong Kai to Fan Zeng. In museums, Zhong Kui paintings are held by collections such as the Freer Gallery of the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, the Palace Museum in Beijing, the Shanghai Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Ashmolean Museum and the British Museum.