Fei Lian

thumb|Gilt hexagonal silver plate with a feilian beast pattern Feilian () or () is a Chinese wind spirit from a southern tradition, later identified with and subsumed under the primary wind deity Fengbo. Feilian has also been identified with a late Shang dynasty minister as well as with the mythical phoenix bird, and retained a separate identity as a mythical creature after losing its status as master of the wind.

==Concept== ===Southern origin=== Feilian is first attested in the influential poem Li sao by Qu Yuan, wherein Feilian assists the poet in part of his mystical journey. This work comes from Chu, a Zhou dynasty state which was on the periphery of the Zhou cultural sphere, and is typically dated to the 300s or 200s . Wang Yi, who collated and annotated the transmitted Chu ci collection centuries later, annotates this mention of Feilian with the text "Feilian is Fengbo", which demonstrates that the various wind spirits were already being systematised under a single identity. Wang Yi goes on to explain that in order to ride a dragon through the clouds as the Li sao narrator does, one must borrow the strength of "jifeng" (). This term jifeng acts as a gloss for Feilian in the Shiji. According to Deng Xiaohua (), (Old Chinese: ZS *pɯl-ɡ·rem; B&S *Cə.pə[r]*(k-)[r]em), might be a dialectal variant of (OC: ZS *plum; B&S *prəm) "wind". This same relationship was explored by Tôdô in 1959. Sun Zuoyun's () influential 1943 study of Feilian argues that the term feilian was an alternative written representation of the sound in Old Chinese that was the pronunciation of . Feilian appears twice more in the Chu ci collection: once in Jiu bian and once in Yuan you, each time as a helpful spirit assisting the narrator.