Fox Spirit (Huxian) Worship, Temple Healing, and Vernacular Religion in Rural China: A Dragon King Temple Legend from Jiepai, Jiangsu

This record is a primary-source archival item about fox-spirit folklore, Huxian belief, temple healing, moon worship, sacred-site memory, and local oral tradition in Jiepai, Jiangsu, curated for research use in Chinese popular religion, vernacular religion, animal-spirit folklore, sacred-site folklore, rural China studies, Jiangnan folklore, temple memory, and local healing narratives. It is released as the OA_V1 item-level record for “The Fox Spirit of the Dragon King Temple,” a Chinese narrative text within the Jiepai Jianghu section of the Chuanyue Archive. The text documents a Jiepai fox-spirit legend concerning a former Dragon King Temple beside the Hongdeng ginkgo tree, a fox immortal worshiped by local people, moon worship on the temple roof, and the miraculous healing of a critically ill temple abbot. It preserves a local narrative in which sacred efficacy, temple memory, healing, disappearance, and family oral transmission are closely linked. The record’s value lies in fox-spirit folklore, Huxian belief, Chinese fox worship, temple healing, Chinese popular religion, vernacular religion, animal spirits, sacred-site folklore, rural China studies, Jiangnan folklore, temple memory, and local oral tradition. The text is not presented as evidence for the supernatural reality of the fox spirit. It is preserved as an emic record of local narrative form, sacred-site memory, family oral transmission, healing belief, and place-based vernacular cosmology. Methodologically, this item is based on the Archive Author’s childhood memory, a later re-telling by the author’s father, family oral transmission, author annotations, and provenance notes. The annotations state that the text is entirely organized from the father’s oral account, with no authorial addition or invention in the narrative body. The father is a single source for this item and stated that he had heard the legend from the author’s grandmother. A key feature of the record is the fox spirit’s changing visibility. The fox immortal is remembered as highly efficacious and widely worshiped in the temple, appearing on moonlit nights to bow toward the moon. After the healing of the abbot, the fox spirit is no longer seen worshiping the moon. The item therefore records a local healing legend in which sacred efficacy, temple memory, disappearance, and oral transmission are closely linked. This item belongs to the Jiepai Jianghu Legends and Beliefs Series. The series-level record has been published on Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20834123. This item-level record has DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20849522. The item is also part of the broader Chuanyue Archive, a native-insider emic vernacular multimodal archive. Related records will be released on a rolling basis over the next few months. This public OA_V1 release includes the public narrative text, author annotations, and contextual metadata. It does not include the Dragon King Temple location map, precise spatial materials, raw oral recordings, private videos, or unreleased provenance materials. Those materials are retained in the Author Private Master Archive. Authorship and upload roles are separate. The Archive Author, The Jiepai Archivist, is the creator, archive owner, rights holder, and public contact person. Any uploader, depositor, or curatorial assistant provides deposit and formatting assistance only and is not the author, creator, archive owner, rights holder, or public contact for this archive.