Han Xiangzi 韩湘子
Han Xiangzi is usually depicted as a young musician with a transverse flute, by which he is easily recognized among the Eight Immortals. In stories of his youth, his family expects him to study, enter official service and have children. The famous Tang poet Han Yu, his uncle, took charge of his upbringing. Han Xiangzi leaves to study with Daoists, and when he returns home, he himself begins to instruct the people who raised him.
In 819, the official and poet Han Yu was exiled to Chaozhou for speaking out against the veneration of a Buddhist relic at court. At the Blue Pass he was met by his grand-nephew Han Xiang. A poem addressed to him preserves a detail of that winter journey — the horse refuses to go any further through the snow. Han Xiang was born in 793, passed the state examination in 823 and in time obtained a post in the judicial office. According to legend, the relative who came to support Han Yu saved him at the pass and later became his Daoist master.
Han Yu has another poem too — about an extraordinarily gifted distant nephew who visited him in 799. The poet does not name the guest, and Han Xiang was then about six years old. Probably the stories of these two meetings merged over time. As early as the ninth-century notes of Duan Chengshi there appears an unnamed relative whom Han Yu vainly tries to make apply himself to his studies. The youth grows a peony, and on its petals appear lines about the snowy pass from a poem the poet has yet to write. In the Daoist biography by Du Guangting, this same relative meets Han Yu at the pass and subsequently transmits the teachings of the Dao to him. In Liu Fu's collection the miracle-worker is already directly identified with Han Xiang.
In Yang Erzeng's novel The Story of Han Xiangzi, known from an edition with a preface of 1623, the hero was a white crane in a former life. Zhongli Quan and Lv Dong-Bin teach him Daoist alchemy. Han Yu marries his nephew to Lin Luying in the hope that he will settle down, but even on his wedding night Han Xiangzi sleeps apart. Later, having already attained immortality, he returns to his family at the bidding of the Jade Emperor. His wife has had plenty to say to him by then. When Han Xiangzi prepares to take his aunt with him and leave his wife behind, Lin Luying asks how he can be considered an immortal if he himself neglects his duties to those close to him. Even one of his companions, Lan Caihe, speaks up for her.
Han Xiangzi appeared in Cantonese cinema as early as Farewell on a Winter Night (1939), where he was played by Sun-Ma Sze-Tsang. On television he often appears together with the other immortals, as in the Singaporean Legends of the Eight Immortals (1998) with Jerry Chang Cheng and in 8 Avatar (2008) with Roger Kwok Chun-On. His adventures are the subject of The Legend of Hunt Demon (2018), in which the adult Han Xiangzi was played by Guo Tian-Yang.
