The Cult of Guan Yu in China and the Posthumous Folklorization of His Life

Folkloristics 9/1 (2024)
Author: Liu Dingyi
Text:

Guan Yu is one of the greatest heroes in Chinese culture, a historical figure who became a folk literature character and a famous deity in folk religion after his death. As the last chronological paragraph of a hero's biography, death is often associated with mythological and religious elements embodying folk understandings of the existence of man, the world, and religion. The aim of this paper is to reveal how Chinese folk literature, rich in textual material, deals with the most common motif, death, in the case of an “immortal” hero and how religious, social, political, and poetic factors are involved in and influence this process. The analysis is based on legends, tales, stories, and the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong. Since there is little information about Guan Yu in Serbian, the paper also devotes a great deal of space to some basic information about Guan Yu and the development of his cult over the past two thousand years, in order to better understand him in a specific historical and cultural context.

Keywords: heroes, death, traditional legends, Chinese culture, folk religion.