This dissertation is a monograph on Zhong Kui "special characters omitted": a deity who was recruited by the Daoist masters in late imperial China and whose divinity was defined by texts, visual representations, and practice. His divine career is narrated in literature as early as the Tang dynasty, peaked in the Ming dynasty, and continues to be reiterated through different media today. This dissertation is a study of his cult through translating and investigating a set of Ming and Qing plays involving Zhong Kui. While the exorcist appeared in the Song Dynasty New Year's nuo parades, it was in the Ming dynasty that Zhong Kui was incorporated into Daoist liturgies and local pantheons while still utilizing power derived from the ancient exorcistic practice named nuo. As a scholar official, Zhong Kui's uprightness and integrity have been regarded as desired qualities in the Chinese bureaucratic system. Additionally, this dissertation discusses Zhong Kui's minor role as a grand judge in the underworld. In the late Ming and Qing, some literati transformed Zhong Kui's propensity for violence into a political allegory to criticize injustice and express their own career frustrations. As Zhong Kui is a multidimensional deity, his divinity consists of his role as a nuo dancer, an exorcist, a scholar official, and a judge. However, throughout his divine life, the physical prowess of the deity, the playfulness centered on and around him remain an essential dimension of his image. These indispensable features of Zhong Kui were greatly celebrated in the Ming and Qing theater and today's Chinese local theater.

Moreover, the Zhong Kui plays in the Ming and Qing offer a means by which the deity's multidimensionality in Chinese theaters is observed. He became the embodiment of the intersection of high culture and local traditions, in which the former was dominated by the well-educated and the latter by people who were more prone to transmit the stories orally, and where literary movements collided with commercialized printing technology. The multidimensionality manifested in the plays also reveals one of the most fundamental messages attached to the cult of Zhong Kui, which is how the manifestations of people's fears and anxieties, or hopes and wishes through their unique ways of worshipping the deity are necessary to understand Chinese history. The cult of Zhong Kui exhibited through the plays is an embodiment of collective theatrical experience pieced together by all the participants in the community, local and non-local, mundane and divine, elite and uneducated, and actors and spectators. Although people's fears and anxieties, or hopes and wishes may have changed over the course of history, their reflection in the cult of Zhong Kui is essential to understand Chinese culture.