The Wu-Yin Tai Sui: General Lu Xian

A tiger on the mountain

Wu is yang earth, a great mountain that can hold anything. Yin is the tiger, most alive in early spring just before dawn. Earth feeds wood, so the mountain gives the tiger's courage something solid to stand on.

General Lu Xian guards this year. People born in Wu-Yin years are often kind and generous and do not keep score. When trouble comes, they may not speak first, but they are the first to quietly carry the load.

Like a neighbor you trust

He wears no grand hat or helmet, just a small knot of hair. His round, warm face looks like a kind uncle next door, the person you would call first in a crisis.

He wears a simple green robe and a bright red cloak, hands resting on his knees. He does not need a pose to look strong. The strength is already in him.

Same rules for everyone

According to legend, he was Lu Xian, an ordinary village headman in the Ming dynasty with no schooling or rank. Taxes were heavy, and many headmen pushed the hardest work onto the weakest families while sparing their own relatives.

Lu Xian made one rule everybody could see: work and taxes were shared by each family's real number of people and land. No more, no less. Anyone who came with a gift had it returned untouched. When a bully came to shout at him, he set a chair in his doorway and said loudly, "Everyone's watching. You tell me what's fair."

After a few times, nobody came to make trouble anymore.

Twenty quiet years

He served for twenty years, and no family in his village was crushed by an unfair load. At his funeral, someone said, "He never did anything big." Another answered, "But we lived in peace for twenty years. Isn't that the biggest thing?"

Heaven named him the Tai Sui of the Wu-Yin year. A plain robe and a steady step: that is his gift to everyone born in the Year of the Tiger.