Xie Lingyun of the Eastern Jin once wrote a poem, “Climbing the Islet in Mid-River,” which includes these lines:
Long have I wearied of ranging through Jiangnan,
Yet in Jiangbei broad circuits still remain.
Cherishing the new, the paths grow winding;
Seeking the strange, the sights do not delay.
Tumbling waters rush and then cut straight;
A lone islet charms the middle stream.
Cloud and sun shine into one another;
Empty water and sky share one bright freshness.
Wondrous things show themselves, but none may prize them;
Truth lies hidden, and who can pass it on?
I imagine the bearing of Kunshan’s immortals,
Remote beyond all worldly ties.
Only then do I believe in the arts of Anqi,
By which one may fully nourish the years of life.
The rough meaning is that after staying long amid the beauty of Jiangnan, Xie Lingyun still felt there were too many marvelous scenes he had yet to enjoy. Thinking of the immortal bearing of the sage on Mount Kun, he finally came to believe that there truly must exist an Art of Anqi, one by which a person might live out the full span of years.
That “Art of Anqi” refers precisely to the longevity methods of Anqi Sheng. Anqi Sheng was a genuine immortal, the sort who shows the dragon’s head but never the tail. In the Daoist divine hierarchy, which did not fully stabilize until the Song, he held a place among the immortals but never acquired wide fame. Across the long course of history he appeared only in scattered glimpses, and was even at times mistaken for two different people, Anqi Sheng and Master Anqi.
Chronologically speaking, Anqi Sheng first becomes visible during the Warring States era. In 284 BCE, the Yan general Yue Yi swept across Qi, took more than seventy cities, and was enfeoffed as Lord of Changguo. The ruins of Changguo are in present-day Zibo, Shandong, presumably one of those seventy-odd cities. Later history classed Yue Yi among the Legalists. How formidable was he? Think of Zhuge Liang: before he ever entered public life, while still tilling the fields in Nanyang, he boasted of himself as the equal of Guan Zhong and Yue Yi. Shu Han later maintained a state of permanent military mobilization, so it seems Kongming really did see himself as Yue Yi’s heir.
Yue Yi took five years to conquer Qi. He was later driven out by Tian Dan’s counterintelligence scheme, fled to Zhao, and died in frustration. His son Yue Jian, however, inherited the title of Lord of Changguo. Though he served as a general in Zhao, the family kept its people and interests in the Qi region. One descendant of that line was called Yuecheng Gong. When Qin broke Zhao, he fled to Gaomi, next to Changguo, and gained some fame by studying Huang-Lao thought. His teacher was a mysterious figure known only as the Old Man by the River. He had no recorded surname and no known origins. The one thing certain about him is that he excelled at longevity techniques.
More than eighty years later, an old man built the Terrace of Watching for Immortals at Sanmenxia in order to visit another old man. The one who built the terrace was Emperor Wen of Han. And yes, the date is correct: only about eighty years separate Yue Yi from Emperor Wen. The man he went to see was that same Old Man by the River. Emperor Wen found many passages in the Laozi difficult to understand, so the old man presented him with his own two-volume reading notes and said, “I have been writing these notes for seventeen hundred years. Counting you, only four people have ever read them. Do not go showing them around casually.” A godlike being over a thousand years old was, unsurprisingly, very skilled indeed in the art of long life.
The Old Man by the River said he had taught only four students. Yuecheng Gong counted as one, Emperor Wen as another, and a third known by name was Anqi Sheng. Anqi Sheng also lived in the Qi region, at Langya by the sea. He studied under the old man in the proper line of transmission and also sold a little elixir medicine on the side. By the time Yuecheng Gong studied with the Old Man by the River, Anqi Sheng was already an old man himself. How old? Locals called him the Elder of a Thousand Years.
A few years later, the First Emperor had unified the realm and was making his eastern tour along the seacoast. He came specifically to see Anqi Sheng. They spent three days and three nights in conversation and clearly enjoyed one another’s company immensely. It was presumably then that the First Emperor formed his indelible impression of the sea-borne immortal mountains and of longevity arts, for he immediately organized fleets under Xu Fu, Lu Sheng, and hundreds of others to sail off in search of immortals. When Anqi Sheng took his leave, he told the emperor, “For the next thousand years, if anything comes up, send someone to find me on Mount Penglai.” Evidently the First Emperor never had the chance.
Though Anqi Sheng failed to save the Qin, he evidently thought very highly of the First Emperor as a friend. Later, when Xiang Yu of Western Chu invited him out with great rank and riches, Anqi Sheng ignored him completely and brushed his sleeves away. At the time, Anqi Sheng also had a friend who was Han Xin’s chief strategist, Kuai Che. When Han Xin was destroyed by Empress Lü, he uttered the famous last words, “I regret not using Kuai Che’s advice.” That was the very same man. Liu Bang naturally wanted to eliminate Kuai Che as well and cut off any future trouble, but Kuai Che saved himself by sheer eloquence and came safely ashore.
Several decades later, there was another fangshi, Li Shaojun, also an immortal, who won the favor of Emperor Wu of Han, himself endlessly obsessed with longevity. Li Shaojun said, “The last time I wandered by the Eastern Sea, I visited Anqi Sheng on Mount Penglai. The dates he served me were as large as watermelons. This immortal usually dwells in the mountain, though he does not easily show himself. He appears only to those he finds suitable.” Emperor Wu then did as the First Emperor had done and sent out a great fleet to search for Anqi Sheng, but without result. Li Shaojun perhaps found the failure embarrassing, for not long afterward he too departed by shijie, release through the corpse. It was a decisive way to go. Ordinary people escape through water or earth; he escaped through the corpse itself.
After Li Shaojun left, he followed Anqi Sheng in cultivating immortality. Perhaps they had spent too long at sea and grown weary of it, for together they carried off one peak of Mount Penglai and flew south to Lingnan, where they opened a Daoist center. That center later became one of China’s Ten Great Daoist Mountains, praised as the foremost mountain of Lingnan and honored by Sima Qian as the Yue Sacred Peak. This was Mount Luofu. Later, both monks and Daoists thrived there. At one time it was said to contain “nine monasteries, eighteen temples, and twenty-two hermitages.” The most prominent deity there became Earth Mother, who is in fact Nüwa, revered in Daoism as the Boundless Compassionate Heavenly Sovereign, Mother of the Great Void. Whether Nüwa simply took over the place, or Anqi Sheng had actually opened a new branch for Earth Mother from the start, no one can now say.
From that point on, no further news of Anqi Sheng appears in the human world. A true immortal style, one might say.
The famous Shangqing Daoist Du Guangting of the Tang was an extraordinary figure. In official life he served as Grand Master of Splendid Emolument; in withdrawal he was called the Chancellor of the Mountains. The Daoist canon preserves twenty-seven of his works. One especially important compilation is the Record of Grotto-Heavens and Blessed Lands, which gives detailed accounts of the celestial palaces and charts, the Ten Great Grotto-Heavens, the Thirty-Six Lesser Grotto-Heavens, and the Seventy-Two Blessed Lands. Anqi Sheng alone is said to possess two of those blessed lands: the twentieth of the Seventy-Two, Mount An, north of Jiaozhou, “the hidden dwelling of Master Anqi, governed by the Master”; and the fifty-first, Mount Yuanchen in Duchang County, Jiangzhou, now Duchang in Jiangxi, likewise “administered by Anqi Sheng.”