The Fox That Wore a Queen — Daji and the Nine-Tailed Fox
Spring and Autumn of Wu and Yue (吴越春秋) · In Search of the Supernatural (搜神记) · Investiture of the Gods (封神演义)
Eastern Han to Ming dynasty (c. 1st–16th century CE)
For a thousand years the nine-tailed fox was the best omen in China — the beast that appeared when a sage ruled and peace was coming. Then, between a Han dynasty ghost story and a Ming dynasty novel, it became the animal that wore a queen's face and burned a dynasty down. This is the story of how Daji was made, and what the story did to the fox.
The White Fox of Mount Tushan
The fox’s story begins at its most beautiful. Yu the Great — the tamer of the great flood, founder-to-be of the Xia dynasty — had reached thirty without marrying, and his labor had left him no time for it. Passing Mount Tushan (涂山), he saw a white fox with nine tails.
The people of Tushan sang to him, and their song is one of the oldest pieces of music the tradition has preserved:
绥绥白狐，九尾痝痝。我家嘉夷，来宾为王。成家成室，我造彼昌。
“Slow steps, the white fox, nine tails so full. From our fair house a bride comes forth to be the king’s. Found your house, found your line — by her your house shall flourish.”
Yu married the daughter of Tushan, and the nine-tailed fox was the matchmaker and the omen in one body. A retelling in the Spring and Autumn of Wu and Yue (吴越春秋, Eastern Han) preserves the tale; the Bamboo Annals similarly has a nine-tailed fox appear before Yu’s work is done. For the early strata of the myth, this was the fox’s whole character: a beast that announced dynasties founded and ages at peace.
The Turn of the Han
Something changed around the Wei–Jin period, and Gan Bao’s In Search of the Supernatural (搜神记, c. 350 CE) catches the change in the act. In its most famous fox tale, a fox takes the name and shape of a dead woman, Azi (阿紫), and seduces a man until an exorcist drives her out — and then the text explains her kind in a sentence that fixed the fox’s reputation for fifteen hundred years:
狐者，先古之淫妇也，其名曰阿紫。
“The fox is a wanton woman of high antiquity; her name is Azi.”
Note what happened. The same animal that had blessed Yu’s marriage was now a possessing spirit and a moral warning. Scholars of Chinese religion connect the shift to the era’s anxieties about women’s autonomy and the exotic — but whatever the cause, after the Soushen ji, the fox’s tails began to multiply for the wrong reasons: Han lore held that a fox grew an extra tail every century of cultivation, and at a thousand years — nine tails — it could wear a human face.
The Woman Who Was Not There
Daji (妲己) herself was real — or at least her marriage was. The Discourses of the States (国语, c. 5th century BCE) records, long before any fox appears in her story:
殷辛伐有苏，有苏氏以妲己女焉，妲己有宠，于是乎与胶鬲比而亡殷。
“Xin of Yin campaigned against the You-su clan; the You-su clan gave him their daughter Daji as a bride. Daji won his favor, and so, with Jiao Ge, they brought Yin to ruin.”
A political marriage, a favorite consort, and a moral sentence passed on a dynasty — with no animal anywhere in it. The fox arrived very late. Medieval storytellers (The Pacification of King Wu’s Campaign Against Zhou, a Yuan dynasty pingshu cycle) first fused the two: the fox spirit kills the real Daji on the road to the capital and wears her from the inside. Then the Ming novel Investiture of the Gods (封神演义, c. 16th century) gave the fusion its final, fatal polish.
The Commission at the Nüwa Temple
The novel opens not with Daji but with an insult. King Zhou of Shang, touring the temple of the goddess Nüwa, writes a lewd poem on her temple wall. The goddess reads it and, rather than smite him directly, sends three demons from the Xuanyuan Tomb to hollow out his dynasty from within: a thousand-year fox essence, a nine-headed pheasant spirit, and a jade pipa lute.
The fox draws the assignment that matters. En route to the capital, at the posting station of Enzhou (恩州驿), the real Daji — daughter of the Su clan, on her way to the king as in the old histories — is destroyed, and the fox puts on her body like a robe. For the rest of the novel the woman at the king’s side is not a woman at all. The fox-in-Daji builds the cannon-branded pillar (炮烙) and the snake pit (虿盆), feasts on the disloyal, sends the old minister Bi Gan to his death, and watches, amused, as a six-hundred-year dynasty burns down around her ears. When the Zhou armies finally break the capital, the three demons are taken, and the fox — who by then has done everything the goddess asked and far more than she was told — is executed, still arguing that she was only obeying heaven’s decree.
What the Story Did to the Fox
The nine-tailed fox never recovered its first reputation. In 500 BCE it announced a sage; by 1500 CE it ended dynasties, and “fox essence” (狐狸精) entered the language as the standard slur for a woman who ruins a man of power. Modern readers tend to notice what the older tellers underlined less: the fox in Investiture of the Gods is a subcontractor. The goddess sends her, the dynasty is already fated to fall, and when the work is done she is killed for having done it. The scapegoat pattern is the story’s real engine — disaster needs a face, and a woman’s face wearing fur was the most available one in Ming China.
The fox’s afterlife is the site of a quiet counter-tradition: Pu Songling’s Strange Tales (聊斋志异, c. 1740) made fox spirits witty, devoted, and often better people than the humans around them. That tug-of-war — omen of peace versus dynasty-killer, victim versus monster — is why the nine-tailed fox is still China’s most retold animal.
Sources: Spring and Autumn of Wu and Yue (吴越春秋, Eastern Han) · Discourses of the States (国语, c. 5th century BCE) · In Search of the Supernatural (搜神记, c. 350 CE) · Investiture of the Gods (封神演义, Ming dynasty). All are public-domain originals; the translations above are this site’s own.
Read next: the creature itself — the Nine-Tailed Fox (九尾狐) — or was the nine-tailed fox ever a real animal?