The Stove God is the most consequential deity in Chinese domestic religion and among the cheapest — his image is a printed paper sheet pasted on the wall above the stove, costing very little and replaced annually. His job is surveillance: he observes the household all year and on the twenty-third or twenty-fourth day of the twelfth lunar month ascends to report to the Jade Emperor, whose judgment affects the family's allotted fortune. The household response is unembarrassed bribery. Sticky malt sugar or sweet cakes are offered so that his mouth is gummed shut, or so that only sweet words come out, and in some regions wine is provided so that he arrives drunk. Then the image is burned to send him on his way, and a fresh one is pasted up on New Year's Eve to receive him back. That a millennium of Chinese families have treated their household god as a corruptible official says a good deal about how the celestial bureaucracy was actually experienced.