NOTES AND QUERIES
303
CHIEF MARSHAL T’IEN, PATRON OF THE STAGE, OF MUSICIANS AND WRESTLERS-EAST AND SOUTH EAST CHINA
Miss Werle in her fascinating article1 on Swatow horizontal stick puppets referred to Chief Marshal T'ien (###)* patron of Fukienese and Ch'aochow actors and musicians, and quoted from Werner's2 extract from Doré's translation of the Han dynasty classic Shan Hai Ching (1), which partly explains T'ien's deification.
Marshal T'ien appears on altars as a tablet bearing his titles, or as a lone image on the small, portable altar found backstage of most Fukienese or Ch'aowchow travelling operas and theatres in Taiwan and South East Asia, or less frequently with attendants who only appear on temple altars.
His image is easily recognised by one unique characteristic: one or two crabs painted on his face. He is also unusual, though not unique, in having a small dog under one of his feet or beside him. This animal, called the 'Dragon Dog' (#14) is normally black, though white and piebald have been seen. It is comically dressed in a theatrical jacket with trousers of red, yellow and green and is often represented kneeling and carrying a small, wrapped package said to be T'ien's official seal (Plate 19).
T'ien himself generally is depicted as a teenager, seated, with protruding eyes and a tightly rolled scroll in his right hand. His left hand is raised waist height with one finger or two fingers together, pointing vertically in a theatrical manner (Plate 20). His robes are shiny, golden and heavily decorated, and occasionally he has two long pheasant tail feathers protruding from the top of the head trailing down behind him. The crab may be painted around his mouth, across his forehead or both.
In the early part of this century a French priest on the Yangtze plain, Père Doré, described the three musician brothers T'ien as
*It is difficult to translate To Yuan Shuai meaning fully: literally it means 'the marshal of the Capital'.
1JHKBRAS, 13, (1973), pp. 73-84.
2E. T. C. Werner: A Dictionary of Chinese Mythology, pp. 125, 322 & 574.
3Père Doré: Récherches sur les superstitions en Chine (Zikawei 1961) Vol. IX, p. 188, and Vol. XI, p. 1,004.