The pantheon · The Ten Courts of the Underworld
Heibai Wuchang
黑白無常 · Heibai Wuchang (Wade-Giles: Hei-pai Wu-ch'ang)
Syncretic
The Black and White officers of impermanence
A pair of spirit-officers, one in white and one in black, sent to summon and escort the newly dead to the first court of the underworld.
- Portfolio
- summoning the newly dead · escort to the first court · impermanence
- Observance
- They appear most publicly in City God temple processions and during the seventh-month Ghost Festival, when their tall effigies are paraded to mark the boundary between the living and the dead.
How to recognise them
The White officer, Xie Bi'an, is tall and pale, in a white robe and a tall hat lettered with an auspicious phrase; he often holds a fan or a shackle. The Black officer, Fan Wujiu, is short and dark-faced, in black. The two are almost always shown together, a matched pair that has become one of the most recognisable images of the Chinese afterlife.
Heibai Wuchang means simply "Black and White Impermanence." The two are usually given names and a story: Xie Bi'an in white and Fan Wujiu in black were sworn friends who died together keeping faith with one another, and were rewarded with office in the underworld. Their job is to answer the summons when a life ends and to bring the soul in for its first hearing.
The pair belong to the lower ranks of the underworld's staff, closer to constables than to judges. In temple processions they are carried through the streets alongside the City God, and their exaggerated height, pallor and grins are meant less to frighten than to make the invisible machinery of the afterlife briefly visible and even a little comic. Their message hats — one reading roughly "meet me and prosper" — turned the White officer into a figure people petitioned for luck.
The concept behind the pair is worth pausing on. Wuchang is one of the central ideas of Buddhism: nothing lasts, and death is only the most obvious case of a universal law. To personify impermanence as two dutiful clerks is very much in the spirit of this tradition, which preferred to picture cosmic forces as officials with paperwork rather than as monsters. They do not decide anyone's fate; they only deliver the summons.
Nearby
Written from
- Chinese Hells: The Peking Temple of Eighteen Hells and Chinese Conceptions of Hell — Anne Swann Goodrich, 1981
- The Ghost Festival in Medieval China — Stephen F. Teiser, Princeton University Press, 1988
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