Master Gao

At dusk, a servant with a bundle on his back and an umbrella pole over his shoulder hurries down the road.

His name is Gao Cai, a hired hand at Master Gao's estate in Gao Manor. For months now he has run back and forth without rest, visiting nearby temples and village shrines, bringing home three or four different "masters" in succession, monks and Daoist priests alike. None of them has done a thing. The old master has scolded him again, pressed a few more cash coins into his hand, and sent him out once more. By the time Gao Cai reaches the village gate, he is carrying not just the bundle but his own resentment: cursed by his master, cursed by the fake ritual specialists, cursed by the luck that has made him the go-between in this miserable household.

He does not expect that, on this very evening, two men will be standing at the gate: one a monk on a white horse, the other a short, ugly little fellow with a face no one would forget. The little man grabs him by the arm and asks, "Where are you going? I want to ask you something."

That tug alters the fate of everyone in Gao Manor.

In Chapters 18 and 19 of Journey to the West, Gao Manor is one of the places where the mortal world collides most violently with the logic of gods and demons. Through Master Gao, Wu Cheng'en shows us a common country gentleman struggling under the weight of an unwanted pig-demon son-in-law, trying every earthly remedy before finally stumbling into the one force strong enough to break the spell. He is no hero, no villain, only a father caught between worlds.

The Geography and Human Texture of Gao Village

A Village Deep in Wusang

Geographically, Gao Manor lies on the border of Wusang. In Ming-dynasty geography, Wusang roughly meant the western lands associated with Tibet, a distant frontier beyond the reach of central ritual order. In Journey to the West, once the pilgrims leave Tang territory and enter Wusang, they step into a liminal zone: neither fully under the rites of the Middle Kingdom nor yet inside the Buddha's own domain. It is precisely the sort of place where demons thrive.

The name Gao Village is simple enough. Gao Cai explains that most of the households there share the surname Gao, so the settlement came to be called Gao Manor. It is a kinship village, a place of shared name and shared custom, with its own unspoken rules about how to receive travelers and how to judge strange outsiders, whether they be wandering monks or pig-faced demons.

Master Gao is the man of means in that village. When he comes out to meet the pilgrims, the original text dresses him in a black silk cap, a pale green brocade robe, and rough calfskin boots. This is not the garb of a peasant. It is the dress of a Ming local gentleman: money in hand, leisure to spare, and an eye for propriety. He keeps hired labor, he can send Gao Cai around with silver in his pocket, and he can pay one batch of ritual specialists after another. His wealth is real.

A Country Gentleman in Ming China

Master Gao is a very Ming figure: the rural gentryman, neither official nor peasant, a man with land, labor, and local authority but no title and no protection from above. He stands above ordinary villagers, yet he is still helpless when faced with powers greater than his own. That is precisely why Wu Cheng'en uses him so well. He has just enough status to worry about reputation, and just enough ordinary human limitation to be crushed by what he cannot control.

A Daughter Occupied: A Father's Three-Year Ordeal

The Marriage Bargain

To understand Master Gao's suffering, we have to begin with his family problem.

He tells the story plainly: he has no son, only three daughters. The elder two were married into local families, while the youngest, Cuilan, was kept at home so that she might take in a son-in-law who would live with the family, support the old man, and preserve the household line. That is the old Chinese bride-service arrangement: not romance, but survival.

From a practical standpoint, his choice makes sense. Without a son, the house has no heir, no one to continue the line, no one to care for the old age of the father. So he turns his youngest daughter into a family solution. The cost, of course, is that she becomes a piece in his household strategy.

Zhu Ganglie Moves In

Zhu Ganglie, the earlier, pig-faced form of Zhu Bajie, arrives as a man with no parents above and no brothers below. Master Gao sees him as rootless, and therefore trustworthy. A man with no outside obligations seems, at first glance, ideal for this kind of arrangement.

At first, Zhu Ganglie appears almost perfect. He plows without oxen, harvests without sickles, and works like a brute force miracle. For a while, he is everything a bride-service son-in-law is supposed to be: useful, obedient, and contained.

Then the cracks begin to show.

He changes his face. At first he is merely a dark, stout fellow, but little by little his features slip toward the pig he really is: a long snout, large ears, coarse skin, a strip of bristles down the back. He eats like a starving army, sometimes needing three or five pecks of rice in a sitting. And then comes the worst of it: he can stir wind, raise fog, and make the whole manor and its neighbors miserable. Master Gao's dream of a good son-in-law is torn apart by pig snout, storm cloud, and terror.

What finally breaks him is the way Zhu Ganglie locks Cuilan away in the back courtyard. For half a year he cannot see his own daughter, and no one knows whether she is safe or even alive. That is the true wound. He is no longer merely a father with a bad son-in-law. He is a father shut out of his daughter's room in his own house.

Three Years of Endurance

Master Gao knows very well that the son-in-law is a demon, yet he endures him for three full years. Why?

First, there is reputation. When Zhu Ganglie is finally driven out, Gao Gao blurts out the thing that has been eating him alive: people in the neighborhood have been saying, "The Gao family took in a demon as a son-in-law." In a kinship village, that kind of gossip is poison. It ruins a household's face.

Second, there is calculation. Zhu Ganglie really does work. He really does increase the estate's wealth. He is a demon, yes, but he is also labor. Master Gao is not simply rejecting evil; he is rejecting an arrangement that has become morally and socially unbearable.

Third, there is helplessness. He has already hired three or four ritual specialists, monks and Daoists both, and every one of them has failed. He has spent money, time, and hope. The circle of helplessness keeps tightening.

Meeting the Pilgrims: The Turn in Fate

Gao Cai's Chance Encounter

The turning point comes when Gao Cai, sent out yet again to find a capable master, runs straight into the pilgrims at the village gate.

This is one of Wu Cheng'en's neatest narrative tricks: the story does not begin because Master Gao planned it that way; it begins because chance delivers the right people at the right moment. Gao Cai sets out to hire a priest and instead meets a true exorcist. That is the kind of coincidence Journey to the West likes best: an accident that feels like fate.

Master Gao receives the news cautiously. He has been fooled too many times to believe at once. But when he sees the pilgrims arrive, he still dares to hope.

First Sight

He comes out to greet Tang Sanzang properly, but when he sees Sun Wukong, his face tightens. The Monkey King's appearance is so strange, so close to the monster already in his house, that Gao Gao flinches. He mutters to Gao Cai: "You little fool, are you trying to kill me? I already have one ugly, beast-faced son-in-law at home. Why did you bring me this thunder spirit?"

Wukong answers with his usual bluntness: he may be ugly, but he has real ability. He can seize the demon, drive off the ghost, and return the daughter. Why, then, should anyone care only about his face? It is one of the novel's gentlest rebukes of superficial judgment.

Master Gao can only swallow his fear and invite them in.

A Father's Testimony

Once they are seated, he tells the whole story. And in that story, what stands out most is his concern for face and lineage. He worries that the daughter's disgrace will damage the family name, that there will be no proper affinal ties left to preserve the household, that the manor's standing in the village has already begun to crumble. The father speaks as head of a house; he is trying to save the family, not merely the girl.

At the same time, he is not lying about Zhu Ganglie. The pig demon did help the household. He did work, he did build wealth, and he did avoid killing Cuilan. Master Gao's account is not demonizing in the cheap sense. It is a man trying to tell the truth as fully as he can, because only truth can get him out of the trap.

The one thing that finally pushes him into action is Cuilan's disappearance into the back courtyard. Once he can no longer see his daughter, once he no longer knows whether she lives or dies, he is done with hesitation.

Wukong's reply is brisk: "This is no great matter. Tonight I will catch him for you, make him write the divorce document, and return your daughter."

Master Gao's answer is even sharper: "I don't care about the document. I only want the root cut out."

That is the heart of his fury. He does not want a compromise. He wants the disease gone.

The Night of the Exorcism: The Father's Watching Eye

Kept Out of the Action

Wukong asks Gao Gao to bring him to the back courtyard and tells Gao Cai to look after the horse. Then he sends the old man away from the center of the action with perfect courtesy: just sit with Tang Sanzang and the elder guests, drink tea, and wait.

That means Master Gao is not a participant in the exorcism. He is a witness. The one thing he has wanted for years is now being handled by somebody else, and all he can do is sit still and listen for the result.

Cuilan Returns

When Wukong breaks the copper lock and calls for the daughter, Master Gao has to force himself to speak. "Third Sister!" he calls, with all the shaking courage he can muster. It is a raw, frightened father's voice, entering a room he has not been allowed to enter for months.

Cuilan hears him at once. "Father, I am here," she answers.

Those six words carry the emotional center of the whole Gao Manor story. She recognizes his voice after months of confinement. He hears her, and the years of worry collapse into a single moment. He reaches her, grabs her, and breaks down weeping.

There is almost no dialogue in the embrace, only crying. That is enough.

A Night of Waiting

Wukong is practical to the end. He wants to know where the demon has gone. He sends father and daughter back to the front hall to talk slowly, while he remains behind to keep watch.

The old man sits with the pilgrims and a few local elders, talking through the night without sleep. The text gives us only that brief line, but the silence around it is loud. What is he thinking? Relief? Fear? Hope? Shame? We are not told. We are simply left with a father waiting in the dark.

At dawn, when Wukong returns and says the demon has fled back to his mountain lair, Master Gao falls to his knees and begs that the monster be cut down to the root. He is ready to give away land and property if only the manor can be saved and its clean name restored.

Zhu Bajie Is Taken In: An Absurd Curtain Call

The Return of the Son-in-Law

Wukong pursues Zhu Ganglie again and, after a struggle, brings him back bound and bruised. At first this looks like the perfect ending: the demon son-in-law has been captured, and the whole household can finally breathe.

Then the turn comes. Zhu Ganglie reveals that Guanyin had sent him here to await the pilgrims. Tang Sanzang is delighted, ordains him, and gives him the religious name Zhu Wuneng. The pig demon becomes a monk. He becomes Zhu Bajie.

For Master Gao, this is the kind of ending only Journey to the West could produce: the monster does not die, the threat is not simply destroyed, and the son-in-law becomes a holy man instead.

Father-in-Law and Son-in-Law

Zhu Bajie still acts like a son-in-law. He asks whether his wife should come out to greet him, and he bids farewell to Master Gao in the old married style before departing west with the others. He even shouts back that if the journey fails, he may one day return and live as a son-in-law again.

Wukong scolds him for the remark, but it is pure Pigsy: earthy, sentimental, and forever half-turned toward the life he has just left behind.

Silver, Clothing, and Courtesy

Before the pilgrims leave, Master Gao offers two hundred taels of silver and several outer garments as a travel gift. Tang Sanzang politely refuses the silver; Wukong pockets a handful for Gao Cai. Bajie, practical as always, asks for a pair of new shoes and a blue brocade robe. Gao Gao, though rattled, does not refuse.

The scene is warm, comic, and faintly sad. The old son-in-law has become a monk, but the old family emotions do not vanish in a single stroke.

Gao Cuilan: The Silence at the Center of the Story

A Daughter Without a Voice

Gao Cuilan is the center of the Gao Manor story and yet, in narrative terms, she remains largely silent. Her one clear cry to her father is, "Father, I am here." Beyond that, the novel gives us very little direct access to her interior life.

That silence is not an oversight. It is one of the ways Journey to the West tells its world. The novel is mostly a male, heroic, and demon-centered story. Fathers, monks, gods, and monsters speak; daughters are often heard only as part of other people's accounts.

And yet the silence creates a charge. What was the three-year marriage really like? Did she fear Zhu Ganglie? Did she ever accept him? Did she hate the arrangement from the start, or did she grow into a complicated kind of endurance? The novel does not say. It leaves the space open.

The Limits of a Father's View

Master Gao can only see the family through the lens of a father and householder. He worries about face, kinship, and the stability of the manor. He loves his daughter, but that love is always filtered through household logic. When he asks Wukong to "return your daughter," the wording itself reminds us that the daughter is still being spoken of as if she were property. That is the limit of his love: real, but bounded by the habits of a patriarchal world.

The Exorcism Market: Popular Religion and Ritual Specialists

Three or Four Masters, All Useless

Gao Cai's repeated trips to find a master point to a whole social economy of exorcism. In Ming China, religion was not abstract. It was transactional. People paid monks, Daoists, and wandering ritual specialists to deal with strange events. Some were sincere, some were frauds, and some were just inadequate.

Master Gao hires three or four of them, and all fail. That failure is not just his bad luck. It is the entire market's failure. Ordinary ritual specialists can deal with ordinary fears. They are useless against a being who was once a celestial marshal.

The Limits of Local Gods

Even the local earth god cannot help here. A tu-di is not on the same level as a demon of Zhu Ganglie's class. In the novel's hierarchy, that gap matters. The lowest gods are as helpless as mortals when a superior power slips out of its proper place.

Wukong as the One Outside the Market

Sun Wukong breaks the pattern because he is not a hired hand in the exorcism market. He arrives by chance, not contract. And once he acts, he solves what money could not. That is one of the novel's quiet critiques: the real force that changes things often lies outside the transactional system.

Other Mortal Fathers in Journey to the West

The Common Thread

Journey to the West gives us several mortal father figures, but Master Gao is one of the fullest. What these fathers share is helplessness before the supernatural. They have household authority, but that authority dies the moment a demon walks through the gate.

Among them, Master Gao stands out because he is so ordinary. No throne, no cultivation, no divine backing. Just a country gentleman with a daughter, an estate, and no way forward.

Gao Manor as a Mirror of the Mortal World

Gao Manor functions as a mirror of the mortal world. Here, the sequence is clear: mortals fail, local gods fail, ritual specialists fail, and only the pilgrims, as a higher order of sacred power, can restore balance.

Master Gao therefore becomes the spokesman for ordinary life. He is the one who tells us what helplessness feels like when the supernatural is not a metaphor but a house guest.

Deeper Readings of the Text

The Irony of "Gao"

The name Gao carries a small, wicked irony. It means "high," elevated, respectable. The household prides itself on its standing. And yet that same house is embarrassed by a pig-faced son-in-law. The lofty manor is dragged down by the lowliest kind of scandal.

The Copper Lock

One of the best visual symbols in the Gao Manor story is the copper lock on the back courtyard. Wukong tells Gao Gao to fetch the key, and Gao Gao replies that if a key could open it, he would not have called for help in the first place. When the lock is examined, it turns out to have been cast in copper. Ordinary tools do nothing. Only the Monkey King's staff can break it.

This is the story in miniature: mortal tools fail; higher power is required to break supernatural confinement.

Cuilan's Wasted Beauty

When Wukong looks at Cuilan through his golden eyes, the text gives us one of the novel's most delicate descriptions of a woman in distress: disordered hair, unwashed face, a body spent by confinement, a voice lowered by weakness. Beauty is still there, but it is bruised. Her "orchid heart" remains, the text says; only the body has been worn down.

That image belongs to the reader more than to the father. He knows she is suffering, but he has never seen her like this. The novel lets us see what he cannot.

Background and Prototypes

The Bride-Service Marriage of Ming China

The arrangement at Gao Manor has a firm historical base. Bride-service marriage was common in rural Ming society, especially among families without sons. The son-in-law came in to live with the wife's family, work the land, and continue the line. In practice, however, such a man could be looked down upon. He was useful, but often not equal.

Zhu Ganglie turns that social arrangement into comedy. A former celestial marshal reduced to a pig-faced son-in-law in a rural house is a perfect absurdity, but the absurdity is also social critique. Wu Cheng'en knows what he is doing.

The Ecology of Exorcism

The line about "three or four masters" reflects the real religious ecology of the time. Monks, Daoists, and wandering ritual experts all competed in a crowded market of spells, talismans, and rites. Some of them may have been sincere. Most were simply outmatched.

Wu Cheng'en's brush is sharp, but not careless. He is showing us a world where religion can be bought, but real power cannot.

Human Sympathy

Master Gao also reveals Wu Cheng'en's sympathy for ordinary people. The author, himself a man who knew frustration and marginality, does not mock the old gentleman. He shows us a father with no son, a daughter trapped, a house damaged by scandal, and no way to fight back.

That is not a comic aside. It is a human wound.

Game Adaptation and Creative Potential

A Quest-Giver with Depth

In game terms, Master Gao is a classic quest-giver NPC. He offers information, lodging, and payment, and he triggers the chain of events that leads to Zhu Bajie's recruitment. But unlike a flat quest marker, he comes with a full emotional life: shame, worry, exhaustion, and a very real attachment to his family's reputation.

Unanswered Questions

The story leaves several rich blanks:

What did Gao Cuilan really feel about the marriage?
What was daily life like between Master Gao and Zhu Ganglie?
What became of Cuilan after Bajie left?
How did Master Gao solve his old-age problem once the son-in-law was gone?
What did the rest of Gao Village think?

Those blanks are not flaws. They are invitations.

The Son-in-Law Arc

The father-in-law and son-in-law relationship between Master Gao and Zhu Bajie has enormous dramatic potential. It can be played as absurd comedy, but it can also be read as tragedy: a heavenly marshal struggling for belonging in the role of a rural son-in-law, then being pulled away by religious duty.

Master Gao is the hinge between those two possibilities.

Conclusion: After Gao Village

Master Gao stands at the village gate and watches three monks walk west, one riding a horse, one carrying a bundle, one bearing a staff. He has just lived through one of the most concentrated supernatural crises in Journey to the West.

Three years of worry are over. The demon has been driven off, then transformed into a monk. His daughter is safe. His land is still his. His reputation can begin, slowly, to heal.

He is one of the most ordinary people in the book, and that is exactly why he matters. He has no magic, no destiny of his own, no road to the West. He is only a father, and a mortal one at that.

The road to the Buddhist scriptures is not his road. He will stay behind, return to the manor, and check on Cuilan. What he does not know is that his former pig-faced son-in-law is now carrying baggage and humming some half-forgotten tune as he follows a white horse toward a distance no mortal will ever reach.

Master Gao appears in the original Chapters 18, 19, and 23, and intersects narratively with Sun Wukong, Tang Sanzang, Zhu Bajie, Sha Wujing, and the earth god.