仙

Xiān - Immortals

photography — Eight Immortals crossing the sea. Public Domain.

The Chinese word 仙 (Xiān, Immortal) is often translated by google and other translators with the word fairy. That’s utter nonsense as the Taoist immortals have nothing to do with the western, basically Celtic mysticism. In Taoism and in hinduism immortals exist, and so there is a wide range of immortals, from zombies to gods. So why do we explain Taoism on a website about caves? Because many caves are named after immortals, we have listed three Immortals Caves, number growing continually. The reason is simple: really impressive natural formations like caves or natural bridges were hard to understand, and so people though they were ruins of buildings which were created by immortals. As a result, the cave was named Immortal Cave. Unfortunately this happened quite often and so there are actually dozens of sites which have the same name.

The website collects information about caves in China, and has nine entries with this name in the database. Of course, they list all caves including wild caves which are not open to visitors.

First of all, there are generally five levels of immortals. But even there are different versions. We collected all the different terms and made the following list:

尸解仙 (shī jiě xiān, corpse immortals)
鬼仙 (guǐ xiān, ghost immortals)
人仙 (rén xiān, human immortals) or 仙人 (xiān rén, immortal people)
地仙 (de xiān, earthly immortals)
神仙 (shén xiān, gods)
天仙 (tiān xiān, heavenly immortals)

Actually we have no idea what the exact differences are, but we noticed that there are three show caves named after shén xiān and others named xiān rén. Those cave names are translated as Immortal Cave in guidebooks, which seems slightly off, but without some background info about Taoism it is probably a good compromise. Also, the name tiān xiān is frequently used, unfortunately it is translated fairies.

By the way, the pictures on this page are of Japanese origin, and while they also have Taoism there are actually some differences. The depicted immortals are the eight immortals of Japanese legend. However, the similarities to the Chinese immortals are massive, and we could not find public domain pictures of Chinese immortals of acceptable quality.