Daji

Historically Daji is recorded in later historiography as the favored consort of Di Xin, the last Shang king. From at least the Southern and Northern Dynasties onward, narrative and folk traditions overlaid the historical woman with a fox‑spirit identity: some tales describe a fox spirit that possessed or impersonated the real Daji, while Ming‑period novels (notably Fengshen Yanyi) elaborate a novelistic origin in which a thousand‑year‑old fox spirit occupies or replaces Daji's body to effect the fall of the Shang. Other variations describe the fox killing and impersonating the woman. The fox‑identification is therefore a later mythic accretion superimposed on a historical court figure.

As human in literary and popular accounts, Daji is presented as extraordinarily beautiful and the favorite consort of Di Xin, rising to become his principal companion. In the fox‑spirit tradition she is variably described: many later sources identify her with a nine‑tailed fox; certain tales (e.g., Wang Fa Zhou Pingua) depict a nine‑tailed fox with a woman's face, while Fengshen Yanyi frames the episode as a thousand‑year fox spirit possessing a human body. Folkloric motifs also attribute etiological elements to her disguise, such as tales that she bound her feet to hide fox‑like feet.

Across the narrative corpus Daji (as fox spirit) is able to enter the human world, possess or impersonate a human person, and use seductive influence to captivate King Di Xin and corrupt court conduct. She is depicted as instigating or facilitating wasteful spending, neglect of state affairs, and tyranny; in some tales she commits or orders violence to conceal her secret. Literary traditions often require special magical means or ritual agents to expose, harm, or remove the fox‑spirit (examples include a peach‑wood sword, a mirror, or exorcism by Jiang Ziya), while historical accounts sometimes report execution or suicide of the human consort—showing variation between historiographic and novelistic layers.