Bai Ze
mythological creature
Bai Ze (simplified Chinese: 白泽; traditional Chinese: 白澤; pinyin: Báizé) is a mythical creature from ancient Chinese legends. During the Tang Dynasty, it was introduced to Japan with its name unchanged. In the Book of Song (宋書) in China, there is a record related to Bai Ze called the Bái Zé Tú ‘diagram of (the deity) Baize’(白澤圖): Bai Ze, the divine creature, knows all matters concerning ghosts and gods in the world. Entrusted by the Yellow Emperor, Bai Ze drew all the ghosts and spirits he knew into pictures and added annotations, which is the origin of the Bái Zé Tú.
In the Ming Dynasty book SanCai TuHui (三才圖會), Bai Ze’s appearance is described as having green hair on a loong head, with a horn growing on the top and the ability to fly. In the History of Yuan (元史), it is recorded as having the head of a tiger, red mane, loong’s body, and a horn. Bai Ze’s image in China combines features of both the loong and tiger.
The only existing evidence related to Bái Zé Tú in China is an incomplete Dunhuang manuscript. It is said to have been copied in the 9th or 10th century and titled “Baize-jing guai—tu” ‘Bai Ze Diagrams of Spectral Prodigies’ (白澤精惟圖), now kept at the National Library of France (P2682). This Dunhuang manuscript does not contain any drawings of Bai Ze.
“Bai Ze” enters the record as mythological creature. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what mythological and creature can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Bai Ze” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, mythological and creature provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2501210. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bai Ze” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.