Which Authors Were Inspired By The Investiture Of The Gods?

I get a little giddy thinking about how far the ripples from 'Investiture of the Gods' spread. On the most literal level, the book itself is usually credited to Xu Zhonglin (with Lu Xixing often named as a reviser or co-author in some editions), so those two are the origin point — the ones who stitched together folk tales, prophetic lore, and court satire into that sprawling pantheon. But if you look at the next couple of centuries, a whole ecosystem of storytellers and dramatists picked up its scenes and characters and ran with them.

Folktale collectors and Qing storytellers like Feng Menglong and storytellers who fed into Kunqu and later Peking opera borrowed episodes and character-types freely. Pu Songling’s 'Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio' isn’t a retelling of 'Investiture of the Gods', but you can see the same supernatural vocabulary — gods, spirits, vengeance, moral justice — echoing through his weird tales. Fast forward to modern times and the influence becomes cultural background rather than direct sourcing: novelists, playwrights, and screenwriters tap the same myths. I often notice wuxia writers and contemporary fantasy authors folding Nezha, Jiang Ziya, or Daji into their moral frameworks or worldbuilding — sometimes as homage, sometimes as sharp reinvention.

So while Xu Zhonglin and Lu Xixing are the book’s authors, the people inspired by it include a long list of later storytellers — Qing-era collectors and dramatists, modern novelists who use mythic motifs, and countless anonymous folk-adapters. Every time a new retelling or TV series breathes life into Nezha or Jiang Ziya, it’s another author picking at the same rich seam that 'Investiture of the Gods' opened up, and I love seeing the new spins.

When I talk about who’s been inspired by 'Investiture of the Gods', I like to frame it like a family tree of stories. The original narrative — largely attributed to Xu Zhonglin with editorial traces sometimes given to Lu Xixing — seeded a vast tradition. In theatrical and oral culture, playwrights and local storytellers turned its episodes into operatic scenes and folktales that ordinary people sang and heard for generations. That diffusion is why writers a century or two later, such as Feng Menglong and Pu Songling, show thematic cousins in their collections: demons, trickster gods, and mortal hubris that feels like it came out of the same mythic toolkit.

On the modern literary front, the influence is more diffuse but still visible. Wuxia and mythic fantasy authors — the big names who build their worlds using history and folklore — draw on the moral conflicts, the archetypal gods and mortals, and the striking images (I’m thinking of the Nezha rebellion, Jiang Ziya’s bitter brilliance) that 'Investiture of the Gods' popularized. Then there’s the whole wave of web-novel and xianxia writers like Tang Jia San Shao or I Eat Tomatoes who lean on classical cosmology and divine bureaucracy; they don’t always rewrite 'Investiture', but they breathe the same imaginative air. Beyond books, screenwriters and novelists rework those episodes constantly — it’s more of a cultural grammar than a single-source citation, and that’s part of why the work keeps feeling fresh.