A city keeps a god the way a county keeps a magistrate, and this one still walks his own streets each year with no skin on his face. The sixteenth chapter of Myths & Legends of China, published in 1922, explains that the Ch'êng-huang P'u-sa — "the tutelary god of a city", its guardian in the unseen world — stands to the dead as a district magistrate stands to the living, judging the local spirits and "sending small demons to carry off the spirits of the dying". One such city-god, whose tale Helena von Poseck set down in a magazine in 1904, presides over Yen Ch'êng, the Salt City, and the ruin of his face has a story.

An orphan boy, wrongly accused by his aunt of stealing a gold hairpin, swore before the god's image that his foot might twist and he fall at the temple door if he lied — the oath he framed as "may my foot twist". He fell, and was disgraced. Years later, come home a mandarin, he learned in a dream in that same temple that rats had dragged the pin beneath the floor. Vindicated, he brought his thank-offering and then his reproach: "You made me fall down," he said, and "now you accept my gifts" — before the line that undid the idol, "You have no face!" At the words "all the plaster fell from the face of the idol", and no repair has held: "the face remains skinless" to this day. The record even mounts a defence, that the god "was not at home" that day and a mischievous little demon worked the cruel joke.

Here is a divinity that is civic, accountable, embarrassingly answerable to the people who feed it. What kind of god is it whose own skin will not stay on to cover a wrong he let stand?