Zhao Lu analyses the eclectic, fictitious representations of Confucius that have been widely celebrated by communities of people throughout history, from antiquity until the present.

While mainstream scholarship mostly considers Confucius in terms of his role as a celebrated man of wisdom and as a teacher with a humanistic worldview, in this book Lu addresses his weirder representations. He considers depictions Confucius as a prophet, a fortune-teller, a powerful demon hunter, a shrewd villain of 19th century American newspapers, and as an embodiment of feudal evils in the Cultural Revolution.

In doing so, he asks why different communities of people would risk contradicting the well-accepted image of Confucius with such representations. To answer this question, Lu shows that these representations reflect the specific anxieties of these communities. He reveals not only how people across history perceived Confucius in diverse ways, but more importantly how they used Confucius in daily life, ranging from calming their anxiety about the future, to legitimizing a dynasty, to stereotyping Chinese people, and even to forging a new sense of history.