Page 296 - A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols BIG Book

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just king. Confucius is referring to the lack of such signs from heaven (fu-rui) when he
complains that the phoenix appears no more: presumably because the government is bad,
and there is no prospect of improvement.

Male and female phoenix

The feng-huang is the second of the four miraculous creatures, and the ruler of those
which are feathered. Depicted together with a dragon, it symbolises the Empress (the
Emperor being represented by the dragon). Its use as a female symbol is of later date.

Chinese scholars consider it likely that the feng-huang was originally a god of the
winds, as the written character (see above) is derived from the character for ‘wind’
(feng). Some think that the feng in the creature’s name refers to the male, the huang to
the female phoenix: and that together the two words symbolise sexual union. Others take
the bird to be a yang creature (i.e. representing the male principle) and associated
with the South. Its body, it is said, symbolises the five human qualities: its head,
virtue (de); the wings, duty; the back, ritually correct behaviour; the breast, humanity; the
stomach, reliability. Its feathers are, correspondingly, of five colours.
Some texts speak of a cinnabar red phoenix which is supposed to have been born in a
cinnabar-cave at the South Pole; and the creature is then known as the ‘Phoenix of the
Cinna-bar-mountain’. Cinnabar is red – the colour of the South – and is the basic
substance in Taoist alchemy. In Chinese philosophy, it is normal for alchemistic practices
to have a sexual connotation, and this is reflected in the terminology; so the ‘Phoenix of
the Cinnabar-mountain’ may also denote the female genitalia.