Jiangshi

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Names & Creature Profile

Jiangshi are dead bodies that move among the living in Chinese tales. Some pursue without speaking; others can explain exactly what they want. In Yuan Mei’s collection Zibuyu, one corpse searches for food and another cannot leave its silver alone. Pu Songling’s related tale, translated by Herbert Allen Giles as The Resuscitated Corpse, makes a recently dead woman rise in the room where travellers are sleeping. What should remain still begins to act, and ordinary shelter becomes unsafe. [2][1]

Tales & Encounters

Four tired travellers ask for lodging after an inn’s ordinary beds have been taken. They accept space in the room where the landlord’s daughter-in-law lies dead while her husband fetches a coffin. Three men fall asleep. The fourth hears the trestles creak and sees the woman rise. She breathes on each sleeper; he draws the bedclothes over his face and holds his breath as she reaches him. When she returns beneath her paper coverings, he tries to wake his companions with his foot. None responds. His first attempt to dress brings her back, and he hides again before finally seizing his trousers and bolting for the door. [1]

He escapes onto the road, pursued by the corpse, and reaches a monastery whose priest does not immediately open the gate. A tree becomes his temporary refuge: he moves around it as the corpse tries to seize him from the opposite side. When she lunges with an arm on either side, he falls backward and avoids her grasp. The body remains fixed around the tree. [1]

After hearing no more sounds, the priest comes out and finds the traveller unconscious. He brings him inside, and by morning the man recovers enough to tell his story. At dawn they inspect the corpse and notify the magistrate. Removing it is difficult: its fingers have driven so far into the tree’s bark that the nails are hidden. A messenger reaches the inn, where the other three travellers have been found dead. Before returning home alone, the survivor asks the magistrate for something he can show his townspeople. He receives a certificate. The chase has ended, but he still has to explain why his companions will never come back. [1]

Yuan’s Ren San sees a figure repeatedly leaving a small temple at night. At first he suspects a monk of a secret liaison and hopes to turn that knowledge into food and drink for himself. A clearer view reveals a corpse. The temple contains an old coffin whose occupant the monks cannot identify. On another man’s advice, Ren San scatters a barrier of beans, iron fragments and grain around it while the body is away. The corpse calls beneath his watchtower, protesting that it has no descendants and must find food because no one brings it offerings. It asks what injury it has done him. Ren San fears that releasing it will let it kill him, and refuses to answer. At the first cockcrow, it pleads and then curses. After a time it falls silent. The body is found below; officials are notified, and it is returned to the coffin and burned.

Homeland & Tradition

Giles’s translation sets Pu’s episode at Ts‘ai-tien in the Yang-hsin district. A highway brings strangers to the roadside inn; a monastery stands far enough away that a fleeing man must survive the journey to its gate. The innkeeper and his absent son are also a bereaved family preparing a coffin. Behind the pursuing corpse stands a recognisable network of work, travel and mourning, and the people within it do not all understand the danger at the same moment. [1]

Yuan gives his two encounters different social settings. Ren San is a watchman near the Qiantang gate of Wulin, following a route at hours when most people are indoors. Wang is a scholar hired to teach by a wealthy family near Shaoxing and given a house in which to lodge. One man notices an interruption to a repeated nightly routine; the other explores an unfamiliar place alone. Their circumstances shape the decisions that bring them face to face with the dead. [2]

Appearance & Signs

Pu’s dead woman has a light yellow face and a silk kerchief around her head. Paper funerary coverings lie over her on the trestles. The lamp lets the wakeful traveller see those coverings lift before she approaches the beds. Sound is equally important: the supports creak when she rises, and the paper rustles when she lies down again. Her return to the place where a body ought to rest briefly conceals the danger, until the sound begins once more. [1]

Ren San recognises Yuan’s other corpse by a dark, dried-looking face, sunken eyes and silver ingots hanging from its shoulders. The body Wang disturbs has a blue-purple face, swollen belly and burial clothing. These details differ from Pu’s recently deceased daughter-in-law, still awaiting her coffin. Yuan’s silver is also more than decoration. In the second story it can fall, scatter and distract the pursuer, making something worn on the corpse a part of the living man’s escape. [2]

Nature & Powers

Pu’s corpse never explains why it attacks. Its breath reaches people who are asleep, and its speed leaves the one wakeful traveller little time to seek help. Yuan’s hungry dead person, by contrast, can name the absence that drives it out: no descendants, no offerings, no food. That speech does not make Ren San trust it. It places a grievance alongside his fear, allowing the same encounter to be heard as a threat by one participant and an injustice by the other. [1][2]

Strength does not free these bodies from every constraint. Pu’s pursuer can drive its fingers into bark but cannot release the tree once it has seized it. Ren San’s corpse cannot return past the obstruction around its coffin. Wang survives because a violent pursuer pauses for its fallen money. Each reversal grows from something the story has made tangible: a fixed grip, a blocked resting place or silver that still commands attention after death. [1][2]

Variants & Kindred Beings

The contrast between Pu and Yuan concerns responsibility as much as anatomy. Pu’s travellers ask for a bed and accept an unsettling arrangement; they do not deliberately disturb the woman. Ren San intervenes in a corpse’s nightly movements, while Wang opens a coffin for what he hopes to steal. These beginnings lead to different kinds of unease. Innocent need, intrusive curiosity and acquisitiveness can each bring a living person within reach of the dead. [2][1]

Nor are the two hungry bodies interchangeable. Yuan’s food-seeker can describe abandonment, whereas the corpse with silver acts out the attachment Wang finally recognises in himself. The latter story allows a moral conclusion voiced by the survivor; the former leaves a plea unanswered before the community burns the body. Their endings make the differences sharper, even though both encounters involve a coffin, nighttime movement and the arrival of dawn. [2]

Meaning & Belief

Pu’s certificate belongs to the fiction’s ending. It gives a survivor a way to face the people who expect four men to return, when only he remains. The magistrate has attended the scene and ordered the body removed, so the document joins his authority to the traveller’s astonishing account. Escape alone is insufficient: the man needs an explanation that can travel home with him. The tale makes credibility a practical need after terror, rather than leaving its protagonist safely anonymous behind the monastery gate. [1]

Historical Record

The Resuscitated Corpse appears as story CVI in the second volume of Giles’s 1880 Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio. Its English title and place-name spellings belong to that translation of Pu Songling. The two Yuan Mei episodes are grouped in juan 13, the thirteenth division of Zibuyu. Their titles identify food-seeking and greed as the matters at stake. The collections preserve particular literary encounters, including the words and decisions that make each body more than a general example of a walking corpse. [1][2]

Fung Yi-Chao’s December 2007 study compares 34 relevant tales in Zibuyu and its sequel, using specified editions. He distinguishes earlier uses of the word for dead bodies from the animated corpses in his study. His discussions of identity and appearance find ordinary people and often unnamed remains; running pursuits also complicate the expectation that every jiangshi must hop. The category encompasses bodies with different capacities, so a movement or costume familiar from one adaptation need not have appeared in every earlier story. [3]

Landscape & Associations

The inn is a threshold between hospitality and death: the place offered as shelter contains a body awaiting proper preparation. The roadside monastery offers possible refuge but has a closed gate, requiring the traveler to act before help arrives. The tree is neither a magic species nor a ritual object; its position allows the evasive movement that saves him. Each location matters because it changes the protagonist’s immediate choices, not because it establishes a supernatural habitat. [1]

Yuan’s temple coffin has lost its owner’s identity in living memory; the neglected body’s repeated departure and eventual demand make that absence consequential. Pu’s inn room contains a recent death whose family is preparing a coffin. His travellers accept shelter rather than searching for treasure or observing a mysterious nightly route. The coffin, lodging room and watchtower give each encounter a different relationship to the living: unfinished preparation, forgotten obligation and a watcher whose intervention prevents return. [2][1]

Later Retellings & Reception

The Hong Kong Film Archive describes Mr. Vampire, released in 1985, through the relocation of a wealthy man’s coffin and the efforts of a Taoist priest and his apprentices. Its programme identifies a mixture of corpse-walking folklore and Western zombie ideas. Breath becomes a comic predicament when characters try to hold it to avoid detection. The audience can anticipate a bodily need that the characters cannot suspend indefinitely, turning concealment into an anxious joke. [4]

The archive also places Mr. Vampire in a production history: Sammo Hung’s successful ghost comedies following Encounters of the Spooky Kind led to Lau Koon-wai directing this film. Its unexpected Taiwanese success prompted a Hong Kong release, where it ranked among 1985’s five highest-grossing films. That reception helps explain the subsequent wave of vampire films. These are the archive’s programme statements, whose cinematic corpse remains distinct from the bodies in the earlier selected tales. [4]

Evidence & Open Questions

What these texts do preserve is the pressure of a body where it should not be. The frightened man at the monastery wants the dead woman to stop following him. The voice beneath Ren San’s tower wants its own resting place back. Wang wants the silver, until its owner stands up. Each demand changes what the living do next. Pu’s survivor finally leaves with a piece of paper: something ordinary enough to carry, charged with the extraordinary task of explaining three absences. [1][2]

Sources & Manuscript Notes

Giles’s translation supplies Pu’s complete lodging, pursuit and certificate sequence. Yuan’s two Chinese episodes give the hungry temple corpse and Wang’s encounter with buried wealth. Fung’s study compares a larger, edition-specific body of corpse tales. The Hong Kong Film Archive documents a later cinematic adaptation and its reception; its synopsis is the basis of the film discussion here. [1][2][3][4]

Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, volume II: The Resuscitated Corpse ↗
Pu Songling; Herbert Allen Giles, translator · Thomas De La Rue / Project Gutenberg · 1880 · Translated by Herbert Allen Giles
Volume II, story CVI
The complete episode is read in Giles’s 1880 English translation; Pu’s Chinese text was not independently collated.
Checked 2026-10-09
Zibuyu, juan 13: 僵屍求食 and 僵屍貪財受累 ↗
Yuan Mei · Wikisource public text · Chinese
Juan13 entries14–15, complete text
The two complete Chinese episodes in juan 13 were consulted in this digital text. No comparison of all printed editions or the whole collection is claimed.
Checked 2026-10-11
The Investigation of Zombie Stories in Zi bu yu and the Sequel Xu Zi bu yu ↗
Fung Yi-Chao (馮藝超) · National Chengchi University repository / Dong Hwa Chinese Studies · December 2007
Printed pp. 189, 191–192, 203–207, 213–216; definitions, editions, identity, appearance, movement and coffin restrictions
Selected substantive pages discuss definitions, the study’s 34-tale corpus, appearance and capacities; the full article was not read throughout.

Artwork

Illuminated folios

Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.

An adult woman with a pale yellowish face and silk head kerchief sits on a draped trestle in a lamplit lodging room, within a dark manuscript border. — Original interpretive illustration selecting the adult woman with a pale yellowish face, silk head kerchief and funerary coverings in Pu Songling’s Resuscitated Corpse through Giles’s translation. It does not make later male-official costume or hopping posture universal.

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