Feilian

[2] Wang Yi goes on to explain that in order to ride a dragon through the clouds as the Li sao narrator does, one must borrow the strength of "jifeng" (疾風; jífēng; 'an ill wind').

[11] The Zhou culture had two competing wind spirits: Fengshi and Fengbo, the latter of whom would end up subsuming all these traditions,[12] and lives on in the Taoist pantheon as Fang Daozhang (方道彰).

Emperor Wu of Han (r.  141–87 BCE) believed this sufficiently to order the construction of several buildings dedicated to Feilian worship in pursuit of this gift of eternal life.

This episode is narrated in the Mengzi[18] as well as the excavated text Xinian, part of the Qinghua University bamboo slips collection, a product of Chu provisionally dated around 370 BCE.

[21] Various theories have attempted to explain how the name Feilian was attached both to an individual minister at the end of the Shang dynasty and a Chu cultural wind spirit.

[6] Western Han rhapsodist Sima Xiangru's Shang lin fu (上林賦) mentions Feilian next to another mythical creature, the xiezhi (獬豸).

He went on to claim that several Han dynasty stone mortuary figures from Luoyang and Ya'an, all with wings, horns, claws, and feathers, should be understood as representing the Feilian.