Taotie, the Glutton of Chinese Mythology

What the Shan Hai Jing says

The Shan Hai Jing never uses the name taotie. In the second book of the Northern Mountains it describes a beast on Mount Gouwu called the Paoxiao: a goat's body with a human face, eyes under its armpits, tiger teeth and human nails, and, like several man-eaters in the book, a cry like a baby's.

The link to taotie comes from Guo Pu, the 4th-century scholar whose notes are printed with the book. He wrote that the Paoxiao is so greedy that it eats people and, still not full, turns on its own body, and that this is the creature cast on the ancient cauldrons, the one the Zuo Zhuan calls taotie.

One of the Four Perils

In the Zuo Zhuan, an ancient history, taotie is the nickname people gave to a worthless son of the Jinyun clan who was greedy for food and drink and grabbed wealth without limit. He is one of the Four Perils, four villains that the sage king Shun drove out to the edges of the world. The other three are Hundun, Qiongqi and Taowu.

The taotie on ancient bronzes

Taotie is also the name of a famous design: a symmetrical monster face with large eyes and horns, cast on bronze vessels of the Shang and Western Zhou dynasties more than 3,000 years ago. The Lüshi Chunqiu, a text from the 3rd century BC, says the Zhou cauldrons carried a taotie with a head but no body, eating people but unable to swallow, so that the harm came back on itself.

Scholars from the Song dynasty onward called the bronze motif a taotie mask, and the name stuck, although nobody knows what the original makers called it.

Taotie, the Glutton in Beasts of Shanhai

In our free browser game Beasts of Shanhai, Taotie, the Glutton is a Earth beast that costs 4 Gold. Its skill is Gluttony. Whenever any beast dies, Taotie eats it first: that beast's Last Breath does not trigger, and Taotie heals and gains max HP equal to 25% of the beast it ate. It eats 2 beasts per battle at one star and 4 at three stars.

Play Beasts of Shanhai free