Jiangshi

What it is

The jiāngshī is a figure from Chinese legend and folklore: a corpse that has come back and moves by itself. Accounts describe it as stiff, either fresh in rigor mortis or far decayed, and never as supple as a living body. Its skin is said to be greenish-white, its hair long, and the jiang in its name carries the sense of hard or stiff. Belief gives it great strength and a ravenous appetite. It can chase a person on foot and, once old enough or filled with yang energy, take to the air. One tale tells of a jiāngshī descending from the hills to devour infants.

Where it comes from

The historian J. J. M. de Groot suggested the belief grew out of several things: the natural horror felt at the sight of a corpse, the many bodies left unburied in imperial China, an idea that the vital energy running through the world could stir exposed remains into life, and the strong taboo against delaying burial. He described these fears as holding superstitious minds in Amoy. Another strand is corpse-driving, the trade of carrying dead labourers home from distant works. Qing scholars took the question up as well. Ji Xiaolan, in Yuewei Caotang Biji, sorted the causes into two groups, and Yuan Mei wrote about the parts of the soul in Zi Bu Yu.

How it is done

Corpse transport is the practice behind the legends. Many workers died in the backwaters of western Hunan during the Qing dynasty, and families wanted the bodies returned to ancestral graves, in part because a soul buried away from home was thought to miss it. Porters tied the dead upright in single file to long bamboo poles, one man at each end, and travelled by night to avoid meeting anyone. The sway of the bamboo made the line seem to jump along together. Legend turned this into something stranger: relatives with no money for transport were said to hire a Taoist priest, who raised the corpse and let it hop home, bells ringing to warn people off the road.

Tools and materials

Many things were believed to turn a jiāngshī away. A looking glass appears among them, and the creature was said to shrink from its own image; Li Shizhen's Bencao Gangmu called such a glass the essence of liquid metal, dark outside and bright within. Peach wood, named the essence of the Five Elements in the Jingchu Suishi Ji, was held to subdue harmful influences. A rooster's crow was thought to drive spirits off. Taoist fulu talismans pasted on the forehead were believed to freeze a corpse, and a handbell went with transport. Glutinous rice, adzuki beans and a wooden threshold at the door are named too.

What it is for

Fear of the jiāngshī did practical work. A body left in the open, people held, might rise, so the dead were buried quickly. Relatives also wanted a person who died elsewhere brought home, since a soul at rest far from family was thought to feel homesick. In the stories themselves the creature is violent: it strikes people with brute force, and anyone it wounds is said to take in a poison and slowly become a jiāngshī too. That idea of infection by a bite or a scratch was taken up again in Hong Kong horror films, where it drives the plot rather than teaching a precaution.

Who does it

In the legends it is Taoist priests who raise a corpse and lead it home, working only after dark and ringing bells so that nobody meets it, since looking at one was thought to bring bad luck. Feng shui practitioners gave advice on doorways. Two Qing officials wrote the tradition down from the outside, as scholars: Ji Xiaolan in Yuewei Caotang Biji and Yuan Mei in Zi Bu Yu. The films add their own specialist, a priest who seals the creatures with talismans.

Peoples and places

The figure is Chinese. The record ties it to China above all, and to western Hunan through corpse transport, while Hong Kong is where the film tradition grew. Neighbouring countries took the same being and kept the Chinese original in mind: it is kyonshī in Japan, gangsi in Korea and cương thi in Vietnam, with khiong-si in Hokkien. Taiwan and Japan were caught up in the vampire craze that followed the Hong Kong films. Costumes of the creature are worn at Halloween as well.

What people believe

Chinese thought holds that a person is guided by three hun and seven po. Yuan Mei wrote that the hun is good and clever while the po is not, and the tales say that when the hun leaves at death and the po stays to take charge, the body rises. Yang qi offers another route: a corpse exposed to sun and moon may draw in enough vital energy to live again. Other explanations include spirit possession, the use of sorcery to revive the dead, a soul trapped by a bad death or a wish to make trouble, a funeral without burial, a flash of lightning, or a cat jumping over the coffin.

How scholars and sceptics see it

De Groot read the belief as dread, taboo and ideas about energy rather than as a record of events. Archaeologists working far from China give a wider frame: deviant burials from 4500 to 3800 BC in Cyprus, and others in Egypt, Greece, Rome and at Drawsko in Poland, where corpses were staked, pinned, laid face down or cut apart. People thought likely to return included illegitimate children, those with abnormalities, the unlucky in birth date, and victims of murder, drowning, suicide, curses or plague. Norse draugar, corpses that leave their graves and are seen far off, are compared with the jiāngshī. Liao Yiwu set down two spoken accounts of corpse transport in The Corpse Walker.

Compare and confuse

The jiāngshī is usually set beside the Western vampire, and the blood-drinking detail came into the Chinese figure from western stories and then the films. Older parallels are drawn with the draugar of Norse myth and with the vampire burials of Slavic tradition and medieval Europe, where suspected revenants were burned or dismembered. Names shift by country while the Chinese being is understood: kyonshī in Japan, gangsi in Korea, cương thi in Vietnam.

Today

Hong Kong cinema carried the jiāngshī round the world. Mr. Vampire and its sequels became cult classics in horror comedy and started a vampire craze that reached Taiwan and Japan. The creature now appears in toys and video games, and its costume turns up at Halloween. The modern look most people recognise, a stiff body in Qing official dress with a paper talisman hanging from the forehead, was fixed by those films rather than by older folklore.

Questions people ask about Jiangshi

Good reading and sources

• Jiangshi on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• Wikidata recordOpen data