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The Chinese Water Spirit
| You find this iron statue of Wuzhiqi in the Humboldt Forum Berlin inside of the building of the new Stadtschloss. The sculpture, wich is dated back to the 11th or 12th century, was donated by the german expressionist painter Hanna Bekker vom Rath (1893 - 1983). It's assumed, that this statue is based on an old tradition of rain making and flood management of several chinese rivers. This is expressed by the veneration of water gods who had a deep importance on agriculture not only in ancient China. |
| Wuzhiqi is a monkey-like demon. According to Dr. Poul Andersen, who did the main historical investigation on it's origin, two more of these iron statues representing this spirit were found. | A similar, but not identical one for example was shown in a Sotheby's catalogue about "Fine Chinese Works of Art" in 1998 on page 135. |
| In his book "The Demon Chained Under Turtle Mountain" Andersen quotes an article written by Erwin Rousselle, the director of the China-Institute in Frankfurt am Main: "In olden times, when the gods were still animals and the animals were still men and gods, a wonderful sense of the prodigious permeated human civilization. In embodiment of profound meaning, the world of animal gods embraced the heights and depth of the universe and the human spirit | Later, when the animal was dethroned, when the world was spiritualized and humanized, and the animals were reduced to companions, messengers, attribute of the gods, the prodigiuous – that noble sense of something boundless and yet plastically complete, that sense of an animal beauty and primal wisdom – was repressed and thrust back into darkness of oblivion. But in the secret dreams and visions of our nights, the holy animals still appear to us." | Source: Andersen, Poul, The Demon Chained Under Turtle Mountain, 2021 G+H Verlag Berlin, ISBN 3931768554, page 6 |
| There also is an interesting background story about the identification of the origin of the statue: According to Willibald Veit, the director of the Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst, for several years after the donation, it's identity was still unknown. It was Dr. Poul Andersen who's work finally reveiled it's origin. Veit: "Through his painstaking research of relevant texts, and fieldwork in the region, he has successfully unveiled the shrouds of mystery surrounding this figure..." According to Dr. Andersen he discoverd the key information in the book "Zhongguo de shui shen" (Water gods of China) written by Huang Zhigang, published in 1934 | in Shanghai. However Andersen could not find a copy in the libraries of Berlin. Finally he dicovered photocopies of this book at the University of Copenhagen. When he viewed these he was pretty astonished to find out, that he himself had taken and catalogued them about 30 years earlier, when he was working there as an assistant librarian around 1970. "My recent return to the photocopies from the book that I had made at that time, and filed away in a basement, was related to other purposes, and the realization of importance of the book for the assessment of the statue at the museum in Berlin thus was pure coincedental." | Source: Andersen, Poul, The Demon Chained Under Turtle Mountain, 2021 G+H Verlag Berlin, ISBN 3931768554, pages vi and 6 |
| It seems, that Huang Zhigang himself does not exclude a connection between the Chinese water monkey and the Hanuman (monkey god) mythology from India by referring to the Ramayana epos. This theorie however remains controversial. | Source: Andersen, Poul, The Demon Chained Under Turtle Mountain, 2021 G+H Verlag Berlin, ISBN 3931768554, pages 12-13 |
| There are also different versions of the myth about Wuzhiqi. They have in common, that the river beast Wuzhiqi had been chained under water by the legendary king Yu the Great, who became famous for introducing flood controls in ancient China. One day a fisherman unexpectedly caught a chain on his hook and pulled the black monkey out of the Huai river but it jumped right back into the water. | Sources: Wikipedia: Yu the Great Andersen, Poul, The Demon Chained Under Turtle Mountain, 2021 G+H Verlag Berlin, ISBN 3931768554, page 16 |
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links (English):Wikipedia fandom |
links (German):knowledgr.com |