Clearing Mountains, Quelling Waters: The Visual Narrative of a Soushan tu Painting and Its Textual Afterlife

_Soushan tu_ (literally “painting of a search in the mountains”) is a Chinese narrative painting tradition that derives its name from the central scene of a group of ferocious-looking heavenly soldiers expelling animal spirits led by a commanding deity and his retinue in the mountains. The commanding deities featured in the paintings have been variously identified in previous scholarship as the Buddhist protective deity Vaiśravaṇa, a group of Daoist divinities (_sisheng_), Erlang—a “syncretic” deity capable of controlling floods and subduing mountain ghosts, and Guan Yu, the Chinese god of war. This paper examines one little studied _soushan tu_ painting dated to the Ming era. Through iconographical analysis and close reading of the colophon, the paper demonstrates how the painting constructs a visual narrative without a fixed grounding text, and how it may have communicated new religio-mythological and political messages through a creative reworking of pre-existing visual tropes.