Bai Ze and the Bai Ze Tu Tradition

Record summary

Bai Ze is a legendary auspicious creature associated with knowledge of supernatural beings, while the Bai Ze Tu was a reputed catalogue or diagrammatic tradition listing strange entities and means of managing them. The original form of the catalogue is not securely extant, and later references, illustrations, and Japanese adaptations complicate reconstruction. This is relevant to unknown-creature research because it shows how a taxonomy of monsters can function ritually and encyclopedically without claiming empirical zoology. Researchers should distinguish early references from much later reconstructed images and summaries.