Kui, Chinese Mythology's One-Legged Thunder Beast

What the Shan Hai Jing says

Kui appears near the end of the Great Wilderness: East, one of the later books of the Shan Hai Jing. The text places Mount Liubo in the Eastern Sea, seven thousand li out into the water, and says a beast lives on top of it. It is shaped like an ox, its body is gray or blue-gray, it has no horns and it stands on a single leg.

Everything else about it is weather. Whenever it goes into or comes out of the water, wind and rain follow. It gives off light like the sun and moon, and its voice is like thunder. The book then adds a short story: the Yellow Emperor caught the Kui, made a drum from its hide and beat it with a bone from the thunder beast. The sound carried five hundred li and filled the whole world with awe.

Why does Kui have one leg?

The single leg is the detail every later source repeats. The Shuowen Jiezi, the Han dynasty dictionary, defines kui as a kind of spirit creature, like a dragon with one foot. In the Zhuangzi, a Daoist classic, the Kui speaks to the millipede: it hops about on its one leg and cannot understand how the millipede manages so many. Even its gait is part of the legend.

There is also a famous pun. Kui was the name of the music master of the sage king Shun, and the Lüshi Chunqiu and the Hanfeizi both tell how a ruler asked Confucius whether it was true that "Kui had one foot". Confucius explained that the old saying meant "one Kui was enough": a single musician of his talent sufficed. The beast and the musician share both a name and a link to sound.

The drum of the Yellow Emperor

The drum story is told in very few words: the Yellow Emperor took the beast, turned its hide into a drum and used it to awe the world. Guo Pu, the 4th-century commentator, identifies the thunder beast whose bone became the drumstick with the thunder god of Thunder Marsh, described in Within the Seas: East as a god with a dragon's body and a human head who drums on his own belly. Thunder is beaten out of both of them, a fitting pair. Kui also lent its name to the kui dragon, a one-footed, side-view dragon motif on ancient bronzes, shown beside the Taotie face on many vessels. The same Great Wilderness: East also describes the winged dragon Yinglong.

Kui in our game

In Beasts of Shanhai Kui is a heavy water beast built around its drum. At the start of a battle it beats out thunder that stops the next enemy attack, and it drums again later in the fight, the way the Yellow Emperor's drum was meant to stop enemies with sound alone. It costs 4 Gold, one of the more expensive beasts, and at three stars each drumbeat also heals the whole team.

Thunder Ox in Beasts of Shanhai

In our free browser game Beasts of Shanhai, Thunder Ox is a Water beast that costs 4 Gold. Its skill is Thunder Drum. At battle start it drums, and the next foe to attack skips its turn; it drums 2 times per battle, again after round 2. At two stars it stuns 3 times, every 2 rounds, and at three stars each drum also heals all allies 10% of their max HP.

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