In the Chinese record thunder is not a bolt but a drumbeat, and the drummer has a face. Our witness is the 1922 compilation Myths & Legends of China, which sets the whole of the weather under a celestial bureau, "the Ministry of Thunder and Storms", staffed like an earthly office. Its most vivid officer is "Lei Kung, the Duke of Thunder," pictured as "an ugly, black, bat-winged demon, with clawed feet," a "monkey's head, and eagle's beak," who grips a "steel chisel" in one hand and "a spiritual hammer" in the other and "beats numerous drums strung about him". By Chinese reasoning, the text notes, "it is the sound of these drums, and not the lightning, which causes death".

The demon is fearsome but not past rescue. One legend has a woodcutter shelter under a tree in a storm and find a winged, blue-faced being wedged in the split trunk, crying, "I am Lei Kung. In splitting this tree I got caught in it". Freed with driven wedges, the god gives him a book that will let him "bring thunder or rain, cure sickness, or assuage sorrow", and warns that of the five thunder-brothers he is the youngest and worst-tempered — "We are five brothers, of whom I am the youngest" — to be summoned only in true need.

Only this Chinese witness is wired to served text; the record's Livonian and Greenland Eskimo authorities for the thunder-spirit are named but still unread. If the killing power is the drum's noise and not the fire of the sky, what does it mean that the thunderer can be caught, like any bird, in the cleft of a tree?