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KEITH STEVENS
T'ai sui is worshipped to avert calamities and appears on altars individually; although in Cantonese, Shanghainese and possibly in other areas, he is usually to be seen in groups of sixty images, often each with the dates for which they are responsible marked on their base or above their heads. In some areas of China he is said to be also a Member of the Ministry of Thunder, which is the premier Celestial Ministry in the spirit world. No Cantonese devotee of T'ai Sui with whom this has been discussed appears to have heard of Yin Ch'iao; whereas Fukienese and Chinese of the Yangtse will know him as Marshal Yin rather than T'ai Sui. In some eastern and south-eastern parts of China T'ai Sui was referred to as the God of Spring.
T'ai Sui was listed in Ch'ing Dynasty regulations in the seventeenth century A.D. to receive official worship as a second-rank deity.
The words T'ai Sui mean the "Great Year", the Jupiter Year, the twelve-year sidereal period which the planet takes to travel around the sun. This figure of 12 is extended to include the 12 hours (each of 120 minutes) of the Chinese day, the twelve months of the year, and the 12 constellations of the zodiac which are believed in North China to be all ruled over by this key star, Jupiter.
Confusing though it may seem, the actual Ministry of Time is itself called T'ai Sui. Depending upon which part of China you are in, it consists of either sixty or one hundred and twenty officials who rule the hours, days and months.
The Story of Yin Ch'iao
General Yin Ch'iao was the eldest son of the evil King Chou of Shang. He is depicted in the Deification of the Gods as both a good human and an evil, very ugly deity with a face as blue as indigo, and with long protruding fangs. He is also referred to in another famous novel of the same era, the Hsi Yu Chi (The Travels to the West) as blue-faced with ugly protruding teeth. T'ai Sui, according to the Feng Shen Yen I (The Deification of the Gods) was
1 In order to calculate a person's horoscope by the traditional Chinese method, the two characters for the hour, day, month and year on which he was born and which govern his fate forever, are required. These four pairs of eight characters comprise one from each of two sets: one set of 12 called Branches, the other of 10 called Stems. These combinations of characters produce a cycle of 60, the cycle of Cathay, which are 120 binomial terms.