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his patriotic rage caused him to grind his teeth so that after his death it was found that all but three or four had been worn down to the very gums.
Xu was a civil mandarin, the prefect of Suiyang, a native of Yanguang in Gansu province, who was posthumously awarded the title Weixian Wang by the emperor. His festival is celebrated on his birthday, the 29th of the first, or the 2nd of the sixth lunar months. In Mucha near Taipei an image of Xu's consort stands on a rear altar in his temple.
Although their images are to be seen in most of their temples together, both on the same altar, in a few places they are also to be seen individually as the lone main deity on an altar. Further complications include both deities noted individually on altars in temples where the temple keepers deny that their particular individual deity is in any way connected with the other deity who is not present.
When they are together as joint main deities their images are very similar and cannot easily be identified apart. They are usually portrayed as customary military figures, dressed in armour, sitting on thrones and holding unsheathed swords but without any unique identifying characteristics. In many temples they have a pair of military and civil aides flanking their altars and, in one instance, in Tainan, Zhang has an 'army' represented by six miniature images of military and civil aides on the altar table before his main altar.
Among the many legends told about these two deities one related in a Chaozhou temple in Bangkok related how the cult came from "the north” and arrived in Chaoyang, a small city on the coast of Guangdong just south of Swatow [Shantou]. Zhong Ying, a Song dynasty soldier [ca. AD 1200], whilst escorting taxes gathered in Chaozhou to the capital was resting overnight in a temple somewhere in central China when he heard voices of Xu and Zhang, the two deities on the main altar, instructing him to carry their images on his return to Chaozhou to spread their cult into southern China, which he duly did.
According to the Chaoyang county annals a force of foreigners [red-haired bandits] attacked Swatow [Shantou] in 1854. They were repulsed by the Chinese defenders when the latter were aided by giant apparitions of Zhang and Xu who, amidst a host of horsemen, came to
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