Honorable Kings of the Water Immortals
| Shuixian Zunwang | |||||||||
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| Chinese | |||||||||
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| Literal meaning | Honorable King(s) of the Water Immortals | ||||||||
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| Transcriptions | |
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| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Shuǐxiān Zūnwáng |
| Wade–Giles | Shui-hsien Tsun-wang |
The Shuixian Zunwang are five Taoist immortals worshipped as water and sea gods. They have various names in English including the Honorable Water Immortal Kings and the Gods of the Waters. Their worship seems to derive from a misunderstanding of one of Wu Zixu's religious titles. They are believed to protect vessels in transit.
The Chinese title Shuǐxiān Zūnwáng is variously translated into English as the Honorable Water Immortal Kings, the Illustrious, Revered, or Eminent Kings of the Water Immortals, the Noble King Water Spirits, the Shuexian Deities, the Five Water-Gods, and the Gods of the Waters.
The head of the five is Yu the Great, the legendary first emperor of the Xia Dynasty in prehistoric China. Within China, the Xia are now generally associated with the historical Erlitou culture along the Wei and middle Yellow Rivers, while foreign scholarship often continues to dismiss it as legendary. Yu became regarded as a water deity through his involvement with controlling the Great Flood of Chinese myth, which may have preserved aspects of the Yellow River's massive flooding c. 1920 BCE. As Chinese generally fails to distinguish between singular and plural nouns, zūnwáng is sometimes considered to refer to a single Illustrious King. In such cases, it is usually identified with Yu alone.
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