Zaojun

The Kitchen God

Domain: Home, Family & Domestic Justice
Alignment: Lawful Neutral
Element: Fire
Relics of Power: Annual Report to Heaven

Speak with Zaojun

The full Codex

5 sections of this entry are open to everyone: the summary, the people, the symbols, the lineage and the sources. The other 9 (Name and epithets, In the ancient sources, The myths, Worship and archaeology, How the god was depicted, What scholars debate, After antiquity, Did you know?, Codex relic) are part of the full Codex: PRO opens the whole study of all 500 deities, and without a subscription you can read one full entry a day, just like in the app.

See PRO Get the app

The People

People

Chinese

Region

China

Period

c. 1600 BC – present

The Chinese deities bring together traditions of Taoism, Buddhism, and folk religion, worshipped for millennia across China. Presided over by the Jade Emperor, they form a vast celestial bureaucracy mirroring the earthly empire. They are honored in temples, at Chinese New Year, and at the altars of homes and ancestors.

Chinese New Year greets the gods with fireworks, dancing lions, and offerings to the Kitchen God, who ascends to heaven to report on the family's conduct. The Dragon Boat Festival honors the poet Qu Yuan, and at Qingming families sweep the tombs and venerate the ancestors.

At a glance

Zaojun is the august Taoist god of the kitchen and the domestic hearth, the unshakable sentinel of family intimacy and the supreme moral watchman of daily life in Chinese civilization. Enthroned on a colored woodblock print pasted on the wall directly above the stove of every traditional home, he silently observes every word, action, virtue, quarrel and act of waste committed by the family members over three hundred and sixty-five days. On the twenty-third day of the twelfth lunar month, at the Xiaonian festival, families hold a farewell banquet with offerings of sticky malt-sugar sweets (tanggua) to sweeten his lips or glue his teeth together, and burn his paper image in ritual fires, sending his spirit to the jade palaces of Heaven to report the family's conduct to the Jade Emperor. He returns on New Year's Eve with renewed blessings of abundance, health and domestic peace.

14 min read · Reviewed on September 28, 2026 · How we research

Sacred symbols

The stove, the portrait in the kitchen, the sweetening honey and the celestial report

Family

Zaojun

Unions

Zaoshen Nainai (hearth goddess)

Genealogy according to Liji, Livro dos Ritos; Baopuzi de Ge Hong; Taishang Ganying Pian; Soushen Ji

Sources and further reading

Primary sources

Confúcio e discípulos, Liji. translation: James Legge, 1885.
Ge Hong, Baopuzi Neipian. translation: James R. Ware, 1966.
Wang Chong, Lunheng. translation: Alfred Forke, 1907.
Anônimo, Taishang Ganying Pian. translation: Teitaro Suzuki e Paul Carus, 1906.

Studies

Arthur H. Smith, Village Life in China: A Study in Sociology. Fleming H. Revell Company, 1899.
Maurice Freedman, Chinese Lineage and Society: Fukien and Kwangtung. Athlone Press, 1966.
E. T. C. Werner, Myths and Legends of China. George G. Harrap & Co., 1922.
Stevan Harrell, When a Ghost Becomes a God. Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society, 1974.

Name and epithets

The sacred theonym Zaojun (竈君 or 灶君) combines the character zao (竈 or 灶, meaning furnace, masonry stove or kitchen hearth) with the classical honorific title jun (君, sovereign lord, noble patron or just magistrate), lit…

In the ancient sources

Liji., 1st century BCE.. Documents the antiquity of the sacrifice to the stove as one of the Five Official Sacrifices of the Zhou royal house. Baopuzi., c. 320 CE..

The myths

Zhang Dan's Moral Redemption and the Sacred Fire of the Hearth.. In the ancient oral traditions of Shandong preserved in the Taiping Guangji and in the folk tales of northern China, it is told that the stove god origina…

Worship and archaeology

The veneration and liturgical worship of Zaojun constitute the most intimate, universal, constant and fundamental religious practice of everyday life in Chinese civilization, in Taiwan, in Hong Kong, in Macau and in all…

How the god was depicted

The plastic and iconographic representation of Zaojun is the warmest, most affable and paternal manifestation of all Chinese popular woodblock art (the famous nianhua New Year posters printed from wooden blocks in Yangj…

What scholars debate

The Panoptic Function of Surveillance and Domestic Moral Cohesion.. Social anthropologists, sociologists and historians of traditional culture such as Arthur Smith, Maurice Freedman and Stephan Feuchtwang examine the fi…

After antiquity

In contemporary China and in the vibrant global culture of the diaspora, Zaojun keeps an irreplaceable, affective and deeply living place in the hearts of hundreds of millions of homes.

Did you know?

The traditional tanggua sweet, made of barley malt and sesame, is sold exclusively in the weeks leading up to the day of the stove god.

Codex relic

Annual Report to Heaven. The record of every deed of the household, which he carries to the Jade Emperor at each year's end.

The rest of this scroll is sealed

The legends, the myth, the cult and relics are part of the full Codex. You can open 1 full entry for free every day; to open all 500 deities with no limits and no ads, subscribe to Codex PRO.

See Codex PRO Get it on Google Play