Symbolism, colors and the lion's body

How to read the lion

The southern lion is a coded object. A maker chooses each part of the head and body for what it signals, and most of the signals come from three places: Cantonese opera (face paint, tassels, beards), the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三國演義, Mand. Sānguó Yǎnyì), and Chinese word play, where a thing sounds like a wish. A French heritage inventory of lion teams in the Paris region calls the head an "amulet of amulets".¹ China's national heritage register calls the Guangdong "awakened lion" (醒獅, Cant. sing2 si1, Mand. xǐngshī) an auspicious beast (瑞獸, Cant. seoi6 sau3, Mand. ruìshòu) that drives out evil and brings in luck.²

Almost none of these readings is a written rule. They come from makers, masters, newspapers and heritage offices, and they differ by region and lineage, so this chapter flags disagreements instead of choosing a winner. The folk explanations for why the horn exists or why the mirror works are beliefs, and this guide found no dated documents for most of them. A kung fu teacher who explains lion colors on the Neidan Academy channel says it plainly:

There is no exact consensus that a specific color has a specific meaning.

Luis Bei, Neidan Academy, Why Do Lion Dance Costumes Have Different Colors? | Lion Dance Color Meanings Explained @ 00:06³

The head, part by part

A southern head is a frame of bamboo strips (rattan in Malaysia and Vietnam) skinned with gauze and paper, painted, then fitted with eyes, a mirror, beard, pom-poms and a movable jaw.⁴ The eyelids, mouth and ears move, and traditional Fut San heads also had teeth and a tongue that pop up and eyes that swivel.⁵⁶ Chapter 6 covers how the Fut San head is built and Chapter 5 the Hok San head. This section covers what each part is said to mean.

The horn

The horn has the most competing explanations. A Guangzhou Daily explainer says the head derives from the 狻猊 (Cant. syun1 ngai4, Mand. suānní), a lion-like son of the dragon, and that the horn is its magic weapon, able to stab evil dead on sight.⁷ Makers name horn types: eagle, dragon, star, ao-fish, elephant-trunk and bull-calf.¹⁹ The Suixi study gives the Zhang Fei lion iron horns (鐵角, tit3 gok3), CUHK says the surviving Wong Fei-hung lion in Foshan has an iron horn, and a Hong Kong coach describes a black lion with a green nose, an iron horn and a red beard.¹⁷¹⁶²⁰ The Alliance for California Traditional Arts (ACTA) calls the horn the lion's "link to heaven and a source of its power", and says things tied to it add wishes: golden flowers with peacock feathers for high rank, green onions for cleverness (蔥 and 聰 are both cung1).⁸²³ A Cleveland team leader, George Kwan, says in a public awakening that the horn is "a symbol of masculinity from the dragon", balanced by items for the phoenix for harmony.Awakening Ceremony for new lion for Chinese Lion Dance @ 04:32⁹

The mirror

Guangzhou Daily says the forehead mirror works like a bagua mirror (八卦鏡, Cant. baat3 gwaa3 geng3), the mirror with the eight trigrams that feng shui practice hangs over doors, and drives out evil while receiving fortune.⁷ China Daily gives it the saying 鴻運當頭 (Cant. hung4 wan6 dong1 tau4, "great luck right overhead"), a pun on the head it sits on.¹⁰ The Li family of Foshan fits the mirror during assembly "to ward off evil spirits".²⁹ The French inventory says the mirror reflects the sun, stars and moon and repels evil spirits because they take fright at their own image.¹ A Malaysian head maker, Lin Mingguo, adds that he pastes gold and silver paper on every head "for protection", whatever its color.³⁰

Eyes, nose, mouth, beard and pom-poms

ACTA says eye-dotting "opens the eyes and lights the soul", and that older lions had wooden eyes where most now have plastic.⁸³³ Makers sign their work in the eyes: the Li family of Foshan is known for them, and a maker in Huế, Vietnam, says the eyes decide the lion's personality.³⁴ A blink is made with a string inside the head, and pushing the jaw closes the mouth.Secrets behind making a lion dancing headmask @ 00:23¹¹

The face is also read as a set. A speaker in a Resorts World Genting film says the protruding forehead is longevity (壽, Mand. shòu), the big nose is good fortune (福, fuk1) and the mouth, shaped like a gold ingot, is prosperity (祿, Mand. lù): together Fu Lu Shou (福祿壽).JIWA SINGA: Kisah Sebuah Warisan | Resorts World Genting @ 03:01¹⁸ This is one account from one speaker. Nose color matters in the character system: CUHK gives both the Guan Yu and the Zhang Fei lion a green nose, and the Suixi study says the blue nose of a Zhang Fei lion "represents immaturity, rebelliousness, and impulsivity".¹⁶¹⁷ In Chinese, 青 (Cant. ceng1, Mand. qīng) covers both green and blue, so "green nose" and "blue nose" name the same feature across sources.³⁵

The Suixi study reads whiskers as ferocity and aggression.¹⁷ The short, stiff "toothbrush beard" (牙刷鬚, Cant. ngaa4 caat3 sou1) of the fighting lion was traditionally horsehair, and Suixi workshops now prefer wool, rabbit hair and plush.¹⁷ A Vietnamese newspaper calls the beard "the most important part of the head".¹⁴ The pom-poms are "clearly borrowed from the headwear of Cantonese opera characters". Foshan heads carry many, Suixi heads one ring around the forehead to cut cost and air resistance, and older Fut San heads have "a lot of smaller balls" and sometimes eagles.¹⁷Futsan vs. Hoksan - Basic Appearance Differences - Lion Dance @ 01:33³⁶

The body: quilt, spine, tail, bells and legs

The southern lion's body cloth is the lion quilt (獅被, Cant. si1 pei5, Mand. shībèi). Unlike the northern lion's full-body costume, it works like an embroidered quilt that can cover the dancers, flip up, or spread like a cape in a leap.¹⁶ China Daily reads a spine made of interlinked copper coins as luck and wealth, and the People's Daily notes newer quilts in fluorescent fabric.¹⁰³⁷ In the Indonesian reading the spine is the snake, standing for charm and wealth, and the hump at the back of the head is a tortoise shell for longevity.¹⁵

The traditional Fut San tail is very long, with a white underside and often bells, in a squarer design with a diamond pattern down the back. Newer tails are shorter and curvier, without the diamond pattern or bells.⁶ Heshan tails are shorter.²¹ Tail color follows the character: multicolored for Liu Bei, red trimmed with black for Guan Yu, black and white for Zhang Fei, green for Zhao Yun.⁶ The Indonesian reading groups ears and tail as wisdom and luck.¹⁵ The tail dancer's craft is in Chapter 8.

No source found states what bells on a tail mean. A Malay source adds bells to the Zhang Fei lion, and a Malaysian heritage entry lists bells among the items used at eye-dotting.³⁸³⁹ The usual reading of noise as protective (drums, cymbals and firecrackers drive away evil) suggests the bells work the same way, but that is an inference. Korean lion masks may carry bells to frighten demons, which is a contrast and not a southern Chinese claim.⁶

No source found gives a stated symbolism for the lion's legs or pants. What exists is ritual. In a Malaysian heritage entry for the eye-dotting, a mixture is brushed on the lion's eyes, ears, nose, mouth, body, both legs and forehead (lime leaves remove bad luck, ginger removes wind, red powder repels evil spirits, and the white brush stands for purity), although the page's introduction gives a shorter list.⁴⁰ Kwan gives the lion its feet before body and tail because "he's got to be able to walk".⁴¹ For mourning, Hong Kong teams wear white shirts, white trousers and black shoes.⁵ Whether pants should match the lion's color, and what that would mean, is unresolved here.

What you may and may not touch

Parts of the head are also touch points, and practice differs. Zhao Weibin (趙偉斌), a fifth-generation heir of Guangzhou's Zhao family lions, is credited with a list in Chinese web summaries.⁴²¹² Chapter 9 covers the full set of taboos.

The Three Kingdoms lions

The standard southern color system assigns each lion a character from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the novel about the wars after the Han dynasty collapsed. The Foshan system uses three lions for the sworn brothers of the Peach Garden oath: Liu Bei (劉備, Cant. lau4 bei6, Mand. Liú Bèi), Guan Yu (關羽, Cant. gwaan1 jyu5, Mand. Guān Yǔ; also Guan Gong, 關公, gwaan1 gung1) and Zhang Fei (張飛, Cant. zoeng1 fei1, Mand. Zhāng Fēi). The Foshan "Three Saints lions" (三聖獅) are said to stand for loyalty, filial piety, righteousness, courage and respect.⁴⁶ A Suixi inheritor, Huang Tao, says Suixi adds three more: Zhao Yun (趙雲, Cant. ziu6 wan4, Mand. Zhào Yún), Ma Chao (馬超, Cant. maa5 ciu1, Mand. Mǎ Chāo) and Huang Zhong (黃忠, Cant. wong4 zung1, Mand. Huáng Zhōng).¹⁷ A Hong Kong coach, Keung Wai-chi (姜偉池), gives the same six-lion map in a 2018 interview.²⁰

The colors do not come from the novel. ACTA's apprenticeship blog says traditional lion colors "are determined by the colors of the face paint of that general as portrayed in the Cantonese opera", and that each general got his own colors so audiences could tell them apart.⁴⁷ CUHK, the Li family of Foshan and a 2026 state newspaper feature agree that opera face paint is the source.¹⁶200-year-old Shop Still Makes the Best Lion Dance Heads in China | Artisans E4 @ 02:53⁴⁸⁴⁹ The novel describes Guan Yu's face as dark like a jujube, and the red is likely opera convention for loyalty and righteousness.⁵⁰

Which head carries which role also depends on style. Singapore's Chinese Cultural Centre says the Foshan lion personifies Guan Yu and Zhang Fei and the Heshan lion Liu Bei, with a gentler look.⁵³ A Heshan maker says the Heshan Liu Bei head is mainly blue-green and yellow, with a "cat-whisker" face and a five-bat back.²²

What the generals were

Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, Zhao Yun, Huang Zhong and Ma Chao are the Five Tiger Generals (五虎將, Cant. ng5 fu2 zoeng3). Liu Bei is not one of them, because he was their lord, although some practitioner pages and the Malay Wikipedia article group all the lions under that name.⁵⁵³⁸ Zhao Yun saved Liu Bei's infant son at Changban, the basis for "his whole body is courage". Huang Zhong's fame comes from Mount Dingjun in old age, which fits the white beard.⁵⁵ Ma Chao's history does not match the lion: historically he rebelled against Cao Cao in 211, and his father Ma Teng and family were executed in 212 because of it. The novel reverses the order, with the father killed first and Ma Chao riding out to avenge him, which is the picture behind the white mourning lion.⁵⁶ The funeral lion therefore rests on the novel and the opera, not on the record. The Indonesian version adds white cloth tied to his arm in mourning.¹⁵

A 2026 state newspaper feature reads a yellow Liu Bei face as blessing all living things, benevolence, righteousness and royal nobility, red as loyalty and victory, and black as bravery and domineering force, adding that this coding is "rare in other lion-head arts".⁴⁹ One contrast, offered as inference: in Peking opera, the best-documented tradition, white face paint marks a crafty or evil character, red marks uprightness and loyalty and black marks soundness and integrity.⁶⁰ The white lion does not follow that white-face code. Its white comes from mourning and old age.

Other colors

The three-brother colors are the old core, and makers have added many others. A Malaysian maker says old colors had meanings, but now all colors are made, including blue and orange fur.⁶¹ The table collects what the sources attach to each color.

The five-element column follows the wuxing (五行, Cant. ng5 hang4, Mand. wǔxíng) scheme: wood is blue-green and east, fire red and south, earth yellow and center, metal white and west, water black and north.³⁵ Two groups lay it over the lion. The Malaysian "Five Directions" lions, described at the Pao Arts Center exhibit in Boston's Chinatown, pair each direction with a guardian beast: north, the Black Tortoise, water, black or blue; south, the Vermilion Bird, fire, red; east, the Azure Dragon, wood, green; west, the White Tiger, metal, white; and the Yellow Qilin at the center, earth, yellow, as "five armies protecting the heavens and earth".²¹ An Indonesian Confucian paper maps the Three Kingdoms lions onto the same grid: Liu Bei yellow center, Guan Yu red south, Zhang Fei black north, Zhao Yun green east, Ma Chao white west.¹⁵ The Liu Bei five-color lion is itself read as holding all five elements, with five blessings and five directions "meaning unifying the country".¹⁷⁵⁷ CUHK gives the folk reason: a true Son of Heaven has five-colored clouds over his head.¹⁶

White and the funeral lion

White is the one color with a rule attached. Wikipedia says the Ma Chao lion is "never used except for the funeral of an important leader" and is usually burned right after use.⁶ In Hong Kong's New Territories walled villages and martial-arts circles the mourning lion is danced when someone of high standing dies, and it lowers its head and kneel-walks slowly to the mourning hall.⁵ The Neidan Academy presenter says it is burned so the spirit returns to heaven with the Jade Emperor and protects the person honored on the journey.⁶⁴ Chapter 9 covers the rites for a mourning lion.

Vietnamese color customs

Vietnamese lân (southern lion, see Chapter 12) follows the same Three Kingdoms set. A 2024 Người Lao Động feature says lân faces come in white, yellow, red, green and black, with white, red and black most popular. The "Peach Garden oath" set is a yellow face with white beard for Lưu Bị (Liu Bei), red with black beard for Quan Vân Trường (Guan Yu) and black with black for Trương Phi (Zhang Fei).⁶⁶²⁵ Vietnamese Wikipedia names the yellow, red and black trio Tam Tinh (tam tinh, three stars), standing for Phúc Lộc Thọ (Fu Lu Shou: fortune, prosperity, longevity), and a separate Tam Anh (tam anh, three heroes) set for Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei.²⁵

The Vietnamese head layers on a second code, the four sacred beasts (Tứ Linh, 四靈, Cant. sei3 ling4): dragon, qilin, tortoise and phoenix. A Tết lân "must combine" the dragon's jaw (hàm rồng), the qilin's nose, phoenix brows and a tortoise tail at the nape, according to a 2006 Người Lao Động feature, and spines like fish fins at the mouth corners recall the carp that leaps the Dragon Gate and becomes a dragon, a sign of success and promotion.¹⁴ The male qilin is kỳ and the female lân, and its horn never gores, so the horn is a sign of compassion.⁶⁶ Gold-bearded and platinum-bearded lions (lân râu vàng, lân râu bạch kim) stand for gold and silver and go to shop openings before the God of Wealth altar (Thần Tài); Vietnamese beards also work as a rank system (see the age table below).¹⁴ Chinese Wikipedia says Vietnamese heads keep the character 王 (Cant. wong4, "king"), a pair of qilin horns and qilin scales.⁵

Indonesian color customs

Indonesian barongsai (see Chapter 12) takes its colors from the Three Kingdoms with its own spellings. A 2016 thesis at Universitas Multimedia Nusantara, citing Zeng Qing Guo (1997), maps red to Quan Gong (Guan Yu), black to Chang Fei (Zhang Fei), yellow to Huang Cong (Huang Zhong), green to Zhao Zi Long (Zhao Yun), blue to Ma Chao and white or yellow to Liu Pei (Liu Bei), and says yellow, red and black are the colors in practice.⁵² Kompas TV describes a Liu Pei lion as yellow with white neck fur.⁶⁷ The Confucian (Konghucu, Indonesia's term for Confucianism as a religion) paper in SUARGA adds that yellow lions are often owned by a kung fu master or school, red is the most commonly used because Guan Yu stands for courage, loyalty and honesty, and black is used more in competitions because it looks fierce.¹⁵ In a 2023 show at an Islamic boarding school (pesantren) in East Java the troupe used lions in green, yellow, gold, red and dark red.⁶⁸ A study of a Surabaya team says old lion costumes were once burned and are now donated to schools.⁶⁹

How Indonesian sources read the body

The Indonesian Confucian reading treats the lion as a composite of animals. GoodNewsFromIndonesia and Popbela describe five, and the SUARGA paper (an interview with a Konghucu religious figure) gives body-part readings that differ from the Cantonese ones above.⁷⁰⁷¹¹⁵

The name barongsai joins "barong", a Balinese word, to "sai", the Hokkien word for lion (獅), and sources say the name exists only in Indonesia.¹⁵⁷⁰ The SUARGA paper also lists offerings with meanings: mandarin orange for abundant fortune, pomelo for protection and family unity, sugar cane for prosperity and long life, lotus seeds for many descendants, white lily for marital harmony.¹⁵ This is a local Konghucu reading, and the paper's horn label is the Chinese word for trumpet, probably an error.

Telling male from female, and young from old

The clearest sex code belongs to the northern lion: a red bow marks a male, a green bow or green hair a female, and northern lions often appear as a family.⁶ For the southern lion, this guide found no color or accessory rule for male and female in Cantonese practice. The nearest signals are these. In Shenzhen only male lions exist, so locals call the dance 舞獅公 (the "male lion dance"), and a lion that approaches another lion's tail treats it as a female, which counts as provocation.⁷² In Vietnam kỳ is male and lân female, and Huế court pairs use yellow for male and blue-green for female.⁶⁶²⁵⁷³ Claims about the horn's gender conflict (see the horn box above). Age and rank are better covered, mostly through the beard.

The Neidan presenter says the three brothers' lions are called "lion generals" and are usually senior in a school, "but of course this is not a rule".⁷⁶

The ideas behind the blessing

The lion's job in all of these readings is double: it is an exorcist and a bringer of fortune. Chapter 10 covers how a blessing visit works and why each thing is blessed, and Chapter 9 covers the awakening rite. This section gives only the ideas behind both.

Driving evil away. The register says lion dance expresses the wish to "eliminate disaster and harm, seek luck and receive blessing".² Noise, red, the horn and the mirror all belong to this side. A Cleveland host says the drums and cymbals are loud "because that scares away bad luck and evil spirits".⁷⁷ The popular reason is the Nian, a New Year monster that fears loud noise, fire and the color red. English Wikipedia says the earliest written sources for the Nian date to the early 20th century, so it is a modern legend, and its looks vary: a lion with horns in one account, a lion-headed, bull-bodied sea monster in an Indonesian paper.⁷⁸⁶²¹⁵ The Chinese Social Sciences Net names an older root, the door-to-door expelling of pestilence.⁵⁸

The lion's family. Lions are not native to China, and Chinese Buddhism made the guardian lion popular.⁷⁹ Chinese Wikipedia treats the "lion" as a mythical creature from ancient India, like the dragon and qilin, and says that after the Northern and Southern Dynasties the myth combined with dance into a folk Buddhist ritual.⁵ Ming writers listed the suanni among the dragon's nine sons as loving to sit (hence lions on Buddha thrones) and loving smoke (hence lions on incense burners).⁸⁰ The qilin, a hooved chimera that appears with the arrival or death of a sage, is the model in Vietnam.⁸¹ The five-direction scheme is older than the Cantonese lion: Wikipedia describes a Tang court "Lion Dance of the Five Directions" with five large lions of different colors, and Chinese Wikipedia cites the Old Book of Tang for it (origins are in Chapter 2).⁶⁵

Puns and fortune. The fortune side runs on homophones.

Heaven, earth, people. ACTA says lions are "seen as agents of heaven", and that the red used to dot the eyes is mixed with whiskey and ginger, both strong yang elements.²³ The Honolulu instructor says the three bows are heaven, earth and man and the drum is the heart of the lion, and Kwan says "the heartbeat of the lion is actually in the rhythm of the drum".²⁶⁸² A Hong Kong club's dotting chant runs "left eye sharp, right eye spirited, red light everywhere".³⁷ A person of significant standing does the dotting, and Singapore's heritage inventory says getting the "treasures" from the lion's mouth means attaining good fortune.⁸³

Telling male from female, and what the colors mean: one teacher's view

One lesson on the channel of Leroy Lee, a Los Angeles-area teacher, takes both questions in its title: 舞獅怎樣區分公母？南獅不同顏色的獅子分別代表什麼？ ("How do you tell male from female in lion dance? What do the different colors of southern lions stand for?"). What follows is from that lesson as far as its subtitles could be read. They are large yellow captions over mixed archival and street footage, read from sampled frames and only partly legible. Lines marked uncertain are used only where another part of this chapter agrees.¹

Nothing readable covers the other colors or the Three Kingdoms set. The title covers more than the readable captions do, and it is not clear whether the lesson goes on to it. For those colors, use the tables above.

Sources for this section

1. 舞獅怎樣區分公母？南獅不同顏色的獅子分別代表什麼？ @ 0:00 - Leroy Lee, Los Angeles area, Chinese, video (2:29), burned-in captions read in part from sampled frames and paraphrased

What this chapter could not settle

• The meaning of bells and of the lion's pants or legs: no source states one.
• Coin counts for the Zhao Yun, Huang Zhong and Ma Chao lions: no source.
• When mirrors first appeared on southern heads, and whether Cantonese masters call the mirror 照妖鏡.
• Whether any written rule says a black-bearded lion yields to a white-bearded one.
• Whether Hok San heads carry 王 on the forehead, as Vietnamese Wikipedia says. The character is documented on Taiwanese Hakka lions and Vietnamese heads but not confirmed on Cantonese Hok San heads.⁵
• Massachusetts-specific symbolic practice. The exhibit text at the Pao Arts Center in Boston's Chinatown is the one local source used above.²¹