西王母 Xīwángmǔ

In reconstructed pronunciation, Xīwángmǔ is /ɕi˥ waŋ˧˥ mu˨˩˦/ — approximately shee-WAHNG-moo — Xī held high and level like a sustained note, wáng rising from mid to high as in a question, mǔ dipping low and turning up again..

Xīwángmǔ means Western queen mother in the taoist tradition.

Xīwángmǔ is associated with The shèng headdress (Her ancient insignia of authority — the distinctive headdress she wears even in her oldest, wildest images), Tiger's teeth and leopard's tail (The zoomorphic vestiges of her primordial form, marking her dominion over plague and calamity), The Peaches of Immortality (Sovereignty over death itself — fruit that ripens once in three thousand years and frees the eater from mortality), Mount Kūnlún (The western paradise at the edge of the world, where her palace and orchards stand), The tallies (The tokens her Han-era devotees carried from commandery to commandery as pledges of her protection and long life).

Plain ASCII xiwangmu strips the stress, length, and script that make the name specific. Unicode restoration returns the name to its original written dignity.

In the Classic of Mountains and Seas, the oldest surviving description, the Queen Mother is not a queen at all in the courtly sense. She has a tiger's teeth and a leopard's tail, her hair unbound beneath the shèng headdress, and she presides over plague and calamity from Mount Kūnlún. She is the personified danger of the far west — the lands beyond the pale of the settled world, where the sun goes down into mystery. Later ages would clothe her in silk, but the earliest text keeps her wild.