The pantheon · The Celestial Bureaucracy
Taibai Jinxing
太白金星 · Taibai Jinxing (Wade-Giles: T'ai-pai Chin-hsing)
Daoist
The planet Venus as heaven's grey-haired envoy
The planet Venus personified — the Great White, an element of Metal and the West — cast in vernacular story as the Jade Emperor's grey-haired envoy who favours negotiation over war.
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- The planet Venus · Diplomacy and envoys · Metal and the West
How to recognise them
An old man with white hair and beard in plain court dress, leaning on a staff or holding a fly-whisk, mild and unhurried in bearing. He is the personified planet Venus — Metal in the Five Phases, the quarter of the West — and appears as a court messenger rather than an armoured marshal.
Taibai Jinxing (T'ai-pai Chin-hsing, 太白金星) is the planet Venus given a person. 'Taibai', the Great White, is the old Chinese name for the bright evening and morning star; 'Jinxing', the Metal Star, places it in the Five Phases as Metal and among the directions as the West.
In vernacular narrative, and especially in Journey to the West, he serves as the Jade Emperor's envoy — a mild, white-bearded old official repeatedly sent down to negotiate with troublesome powers. It is he who proposes bringing the rebellious Monkey King up into heaven with an official title rather than crushing him outright by force.
That temperament is the character worth remembering: among the martial marshals of heaven he is the diplomat, preferring a settlement to a battle, a title to a war. And the astronomy is worth keeping straight — this is Venus as Metal and the West, a grey-haired negotiator, not a goddess of love in the Greco-Roman sense.
Nearby
Written from
- Xiyouji (Journey to the West) — Wu Cheng'en
- The Daoist Tradition: An Introduction — Louis Komjathy, Bloomsbury, 2013
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