Courtesan Huli Jing

The «court seductress» is the most feared form of the Chinese huli-jing (狐狸精): the fox that leaves the villages to infiltrate the imperial court, where vital energy and power are concentrated to the maximum. The archetype has deep roots in Chinese tradition, which attributed to fox spirits the fall of dynasties; the most celebrated example is Daji, the concubine of the last king Zhou of the Shang dynasty, presented in the novel Fengshen Yanyi as a nine-tailed fox whose influence ruined the sovereign. The creature infiltrates the capital (Chang'an under the Tang, Bianjing or Lin'an under the Song) posing as the daughter of a deceased provincial official, without relatives who could disprove her identity.

The imperial seductress combines supernatural beauty with acute political intelligence. She exerts a subtle fascination over susceptible males, reads palace intrigues, masters calligraphy and poetry and manipulates favors, horoscopes and factions to progressively control the emperor's will and drain his vital energy without arousing immediate medical suspicions. Tradition attributes to her the fear of bronze mirrors, which reveal her true fox form, and her downfall usually comes at the hands of a Taoist official or diviner who identifies her through divination. She retains the magic pearl and the nine tails proper to the archetype, hidden under her human appearance until her nature is revealed.

The court seductress embodies the ancient Chinese fear of the beautiful woman who corrupts the sovereign and ruins the State, a moralizing topic that Confucian historiography projected onto figures like Daji or Bao Si. Her symbology is associated with the emblems of the imperial concubine (the peony, the phoenix, the embroidered silk) and the bronze mirror that reveals her condition. She is the dark counterpart of the celestial fox: while this one chooses cultivation and ascension, the seductress chooses political power and predation. She belongs to the same family as the Japanese Tamamo-no-Mae, explicitly identified with Daji in the legend, and represents, within the cycle of the huli-jing, the path of earthly ambition versus the path of transcendence.