Han Zhongli (Zhongli Quan)

Zhongli Quan's legend places him as a general serving the Han dynasty who suffered a severe defeat in battle and fled into the mountains, where he encountered a Taoist master who instructed him in the arts of internal alchemy and the refinement of qi. Over years of secluded cultivation he transformed from a figure of martial failure into one of the tradition's most senior immortals, eventually becoming known by the honorific "Han Zhongli" — the surname of the dynasty prefixed to his name, marking his status. Later legend, building on the Song and Yuan-dynasty literature that consolidated the Eight Immortals as a group, casts him as the teacher who transmitted the essentials of internal alchemy to Lü Dongbin, who in turn taught others — a teaching lineage that gave the loosely assembled Eight Immortals an internal hierarchy and narrative coherence they had not had as isolated regional legends.

He is depicted as a large, bare-bellied, fan-carrying figure, often shown with his signature palm-leaf fan, which in some stories can revive the dead or turn stones to gold and silver. Within the internal-alchemy (neidan) textual tradition, a body of instructional writing was later attributed to a "Zhongli-Lü" dialogue between master and student, giving him a role not just as a legendary figure but as the nominal source of an actual transmitted body of cultivation teaching still referenced in Taoist internal-alchemy literature today.