page_title: Marquis of Sui's pearl
section_title: Mythology
hierarchical_section_title: Marquis of Sui's pearl / Mythology
context_page_description: The Marquis of Sui's pearl or Chinese Suihouzhu was a famous gemstone in a Warring States period folktale about a ruler of Sui state who was given an amazing luminous pearl by a grateful snake whose life he had saved. In the history of folkloristics, this legend is the earliest known example of the "Grateful Animals" motif. The Marquis of Sui's pearl, which is frequently paired with another famous regalia, the Heshibi, became a literary Chinese metaphor for underestimating a valuable person or thing.
context_section_description: Chinese mythology and folkore associate snakes with dragons. Marquis of Sui's snake with a glowing pearl in its mouth is echoed in later Chinese depictions of dragons with a flaming pearl or gem under their chin or in their claws. According to the German anthropologist Wolfram Eberhard, the long dragon symbolizes clouds and rainstorms, and when it plays with a ball or pearl, this signifies the swallowing of the moon by the clouds or thunder in the clouds. The moon frequently appears as a pearl, and thus the dragon with the pearl is equal to the clouds with the moon. The pearl-moon relationship is expressed in the ancient belief that at full moon pearls are solid balls and at new moon they are hollow (1968: 239, 382). Li Shizhen's 1578 Bencao Gangmu pharmacopeia describes a shenlong Divine Dragon holding in its mouth leizhu (雷珠, "thunder pearls/beads") that would "light the entire house at night" (tr. Laufer 1912: 64).
  The grateful snake kills its benefactor in some later iterations of the Marquis of Sui's theme (Eberhard 1968: 381). For instance, the Chinese folktale of "The Greedy Minister and the Serpent" concerns a schoolboy who found a snake egg and lovingly cared for his pet serpent until he was a young man preparing to take the imperial examination in the capital. He asked the snake for a present in exchange for his kindness and it spat up a huge pearl that brightly shone in the dark. After receiving the highest jinshi degree in the exam, the man was appointed to a prestigious position, but he was dissatisfied and cunningly presented his marvelous pearl to the emperor, who was so delighted that he appointed him grand chancellor. Yet the covetous minister still wanted more wealth, so he went into the mountains where the snake lived, and demanded more pearls, whereupon the snake opened its mouth wide and swallowed him (McNamee 2000: 26-28; cf. Bashe).
  Legends about animals that carry a marvelous jewel either in their forehead or in their mouth are found almost worldwide. In only a relative few of these legends is the stone luminous, this variant being known in ancient Greece, India, Ceylon, and Armenia (Ball 1938: 502), see luminous gemstones for details.
  In Western mythology and folklore, there is a theme of injured animals presenting magical gems out of gratitude to people who helped them. This is a subcategory of Grateful Animals folktale motif (Aarne–Thompson classification systems 554), for example, The White Snake or The Queen Bee. The Chinese Warring States period legend of the Marquis of Sui's pearl is the earliest known example of a Grateful Animal story about repaying a debt in gratitude to a human being (Zhang 2014: 101).
caption: Qing dynasty plate with two dragons and a flaming pearl
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