Caishen

Caishen is less a single fixed personality than a functional title — "God of Wealth" — attached, across different regions, periods, and religious traditions, to several distinct figures who are each independently venerated as bringers of prosperity. The martial deity Guan Yu (better known in his own right as Guandi, god of war and loyalty) is worshipped as a Wealth God particularly by merchants, who prize his associations with honesty and fidelity in business dealings recorded on credit and reputation. In other traditions, Caishen is identified with Zhao Gongming, a figure from the Ming-dynasty novel Investiture of the Gods, depicted riding a black tiger and carrying tools associated with the accumulation and distribution of riches.

Regardless of which specific identity a given household or region favors, Caishen's worship follows an intensely concentrated annual rhythm: he is welcomed on the fifth day of the lunar new year (or, in some regional traditions, at the very stroke of the new year itself) with firecrackers, offerings, and prominently displayed images or statues, reflecting the widely shared cultural expectation that the coming year's financial fortune is meaningfully influenced by how properly and enthusiastically the God of Wealth is received at its outset. His worship exists at the boundary of formal Taoist theology and broad Chinese folk custom, practiced with equal enthusiasm by households with no other active temple affiliation.