Who are the Lords of Pestilence?





The Wen Wang Ye/瘟王爷 or Gods of Pestilence control diseases and epidemics, and are worshipped in order to ward these off. The Wang Ye are traditionally described as a group of five, surnamed Ci/池, Wu/吳, Fan/范, Zhu/朱 and Li/李.

As the story goes, the five were a group of scholars who met while journeying to the capital to sit for the Imperial examinations and befriended each other. After failing the exams and finding themselves stuck in the capital with no money to go home, they decided to eke out a living as musicians. So good were they that the Emperor hired them as his personal band.

The Taoist mystic, Heavenly Master Zhang, happened to be in the capital one day. Harbouring an intense dislike of Zhang, whom he thought of as a huckster, and wishing to make a fool out of him, the Emperor devised the following scheme. He constructed a secret cellar beneath the throne room, where the five scholars were hidden. By means of a hidden rope, he could signal for them to start and stop playing eerie music. He then summoned Zhang to the palace, stating that demons were haunting the place, manifesting as eerie music, and that he needed Zhang to eliminate them. Of course, since there were really no demons, the Emperor predicted that Zhang would not be able to deal with the problem and therefore be exposed as a fraud.

When Zhang arrived at the palace, the Emperor pulled on the hidden rope and made the music play in order to demonstrate to Zhang that the palace was 'haunted'. Zhang was unperturbed. He made his ritual flourishes and chanted his ritual chants, upon which the music suddenly ceased. Zhang told the Emperor that the problem was solved, and left without any further explanation. The Emperor ventured into the cellar and was shocked to find the five scholars stone dead. Unable to reveal their deaths due to the fact that doing so would expose his scheme, the Emperor covered up their deaths. He felt extremely guilty, however, and could not so much as get a decent night's sleep.

Not long afterwards, the five scholars, eager for revenge, returned from the dead as five plague spirits. They swept the land with disease and pestilence, which caused thousands to sicken, including the Emperor himself. In desperation, the Emperor summoned Zhang, who managed to placate the scholars and persuade them to stay their wrath by offering them positions in the Celestial Bureaucracy as part of the Ministry of Epidemics. They have been worshiped as such ever since.