Vampires in History: The Jiangshi of China

The vampire did not begin with Dracula.

It did not begin in Transylvania, and it certainly did not begin with the pale aristocrats who came to dominate Western literature and film.

Cultures throughout the world developed their own traditions concerning the restless dead, and China produced one of the strangest.

The jiangshi is sometimes called the Chinese vampire.

That translation isn’t entirely accurate.

It doesn’t normally seduce its victims. It doesn’t transform into a bat. It isn’t necessarily interested in blood. In its most familiar form, it is something closer to a vampire, zombie and possessed corpse combined.

And it has one unmistakable characteristic.

It hops.

The Stiff Corpse

The Chinese term jiangshi (僵尸 or 殭屍) can be translated approximately as “stiff corpse.”

That description tells us far more about the creature than the Western word vampire.

A jiangshi is a dead body that has somehow become animated. Because the corpse is stiff, it cannot move naturally. The familiar image therefore shows it traveling with its arms extended and its body rigid, advancing in a series of hops.

Modern depictions frequently dress the creature in the robes and hat of a Qing dynasty official, often with a paper talisman attached to its forehead.

It is one of the most recognizable monsters in Chinese popular culture.

But the creature of older folklore could be considerably more frightening than its occasionally comic modern descendant.

It Doesn’t Necessarily Drink Blood

Calling the jiangshi a vampire creates another misconception.

Traditional jiangshi were not simply Chinese versions of Dracula.

Some historical descriptions do involve creatures attacking people and consuming blood, but the better-known later tradition holds that the jiangshi drains qi, the vital energy of the living. Western vampire traditions and Chinese supernatural folklore influenced one another in modern popular culture, further blurring the distinction.

The principle, however, is remarkably vampiric.

Something dead requires something possessed by the living.

The victim weakens.

The corpse becomes stronger.

It isn’t drinking life symbolically.

It is consuming life itself.

Moonlight and the Unburied Dead

The original version of this article contained a fascinating claim.

It attributed a Chinese vampire account to an author called Tsze-Chan and a work called Tsachiven, supposedly dating to approximately 600 B.C. The account described moonlight falling upon an unburied corpse, allowing a demon to enter the body, preserve it from decay and send it hunting for blood.

I would remove that attribution.

I cannot find reliable historical support for either the author or the work as given, and the details resemble later jiangshi traditions that have probably been pushed backward in time by modern vampire literature.

But the underlying belief is real.

Much later Chinese sources describe unburied corpses as particularly vulnerable to unnatural reanimation. Sinologist J. J. M. de Groot documented beliefs that bodies left exposed could absorb vital forces from their surroundings and become dangerous animated corpses.

So the old article seems to have preserved genuine folklore while attaching it to a questionable ancient source.

That’s worth correcting rather than throwing the story away.

How Does a Corpse Become a Jiangshi?

Chinese folklore offers numerous explanations.

There was never one universal rulebook.

A corpse might become animated because burial had been delayed.

A spirit could possess the body.

Supernatural arts might deliberately resurrect it.

A violent or unnatural death could prevent the deceased from departing properly.

A corpse might absorb sufficient yang energy to become active again.

And in one wonderfully specific tradition, trouble could begin when a cat jumped over the coffin.

Lightning also appears in some versions.

Death, in other words, was a process that could go wrong.

The body needed to be handled properly.

The dead needed to be buried correctly.

The spiritual components of the person needed to go where they belonged.

If something interrupted that process, what remained might not stay still.

The Hun and the Po

Part of the tradition becomes more understandable when viewed through older Chinese ideas about the soul.

Chinese religious and philosophical traditions could distinguish between different spiritual components of a human being, particularly the hun and po.

The concepts are complicated and changed considerably across Chinese history, but broadly speaking, the hun was associated with a more ethereal spiritual element, while the po remained closely connected with the physical body.

In later jiangshi explanations, a problem could occur when the expected separation following death did not happen correctly.

The corpse remained inhabited by something that should have departed.

The person was dead.

The body wasn’t finished.

And that produced a particularly disturbing kind of monster.

The Corpse That Doesn’t Decay

Failure to decompose also became associated with supernatural danger.

This appears repeatedly in vampire traditions throughout the world.

People open a grave expecting decomposition.

Instead they find a surprisingly intact body.

Something must be keeping it alive.

Of course, decomposition varies enormously depending upon temperature, moisture, burial conditions, soil, embalming and countless other factors.

Earlier communities did not necessarily understand those processes.

China was hardly unique in interpreting unusual preservation as supernatural.

European vampire panics repeatedly involved the same misunderstanding.

A corpse that behaved unexpectedly after death could become evidence that death itself had somehow failed.

The Jiangshi Wasn’t Always Hopping

Here is where popular culture has done something interesting.

Ask someone familiar with Chinese horror to imitate a jiangshi and they will probably stretch their arms forward and start hopping.

Yet older folkloric jiangshi were not necessarily restricted to hopping.

Historical descriptions could make them considerably more agile. Some were capable of running, attacking with tremendous physical strength or even flying. One tradition collected by de Groot described a jiangshi soaring from the hills to prey upon children.

The rigid hopping monster became standardized much later.

In other words, if you encountered one in an old story, climbing a staircase might not save you.

A pity, really.

That was a reassuring weakness.

The Chinese Flying Vampire

My original article also stated that China possessed a separate flying vampire called the Tengu.

That needs correcting.

Tengu are Japanese supernatural beings, not a separate category of Chinese aerial vampire.

The confusion may have arisen because some Chinese jiangshi traditions genuinely describe increasingly powerful corpses gaining extraordinary abilities, including flight.

There is no need to import the tengu into the story.

China’s own undead were quite capable of becoming airborne without assistance.

The Corpse That Traveled Home

One of the most intriguing explanations for the hopping corpse involves an old tradition associated particularly with western Hunan.

For Chinese families, burial in one’s ancestral homeland could be enormously important.

But laborers sometimes died far from home.

Transporting a corpse over enormous distances was difficult and expensive.

This gave rise to stories about “corpse driving,” in which specialists supposedly transported bodies back to their home villages for proper burial.

One explanation holds that corpses were fastened upright along flexible bamboo poles and carried by men. Viewed from a distance, particularly at night, the movement of the poles could make the bodies appear to be bouncing or hopping along the road.

Whether this practice actually produced the jiangshi legend is debated.

But imagine encountering such a procession without knowing what you were seeing.

It is night.

Several dead men appear to be traveling upright along a mountain road.

They rise.

They fall.

They rise again.

Perhaps the legend didn’t require much additional help.

Traveling After Dark

The corpse-driving tradition also contains the kind of practical detail from which supernatural folklore thrives.

Such journeys were supposedly made at night.

That avoided crowds and protected the sensitivities of people who might not appreciate encountering a procession of corpses on the road.

But nighttime travel naturally made the practice considerably more mysterious.

A traveler glimpses figures moving through the darkness.

Nobody wants to approach closely enough to investigate.

Later he tells someone what he saw.

The dead were walking.

Or hopping.

Give a story like that several generations and it becomes difficult to determine where transportation practice ends and supernatural tradition begins.

Pu Songling and the Animated Corpse

We do not need a questionable source from 600 B.C. to establish that animated corpses have deep roots in Chinese supernatural literature.

Pu Songling, born in 1640, assembled one of China’s great collections of strange tales, Liaozhai Zhiyi, usually translated as Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio.

Among its hundreds of stories are tales involving animated corpses, including “The Corpse’s Transformation.”

And the tradition continued.

The eighteenth-century scholar Ji Xiaolan, or Ji Yun, discussed different ways in which corpses might become reanimated, while Yuan Mei also recorded supernatural tales involving the restless dead.

By the Qing period, the idea of the animated corpse was thoroughly established.

The Paper on the Forehead

Perhaps the most famous visual feature of the modern jiangshi is the strip of yellow paper attached to its forehead.

This represents a fulu, a type of Daoist talisman.

In popular representations, a Daoist priest can use such a talisman to control or immobilize the creature.

The symbolism fits the larger folklore perfectly.

The corpse has violated the proper order between life and death.

Ritual authority restores that order.

As long as the talisman remains in place, everything is fine.

Naturally, horror stories know exactly what needs to happen next.

The paper falls off.

Don’t Breathe

Another wonderfully eerie piece of modern jiangshi folklore concerns breathing.

Because the creature seeks the life force of living people, some stories claim it can detect victims through their breath.

The solution is beautifully simple.

Hold your breath.

The jiangshi cannot find you.

This naturally creates the perfect supernatural predicament.

A dead thing is standing only inches away.

You cannot run.

You cannot scream.

You cannot even breathe.

Whether this belongs to ancient belief or later entertainment matters less than how effectively it expresses the central idea behind the creature.

The living possess breath.

The dead do not.

And the dead thing is searching for what it has lost.

Hong Kong Reinvents the Jiangshi

For many people today, the definitive jiangshi comes not from ancient folklore but from Hong Kong cinema.

The creature became enormously popular during the 1980s, particularly following the success of the 1985 horror comedy Mr. Vampire.

The films established many of the conventions now inseparable from the creature: Qing official clothing, rigid arms, hopping movement, Daoist priests, magical talismans and elaborate methods for controlling the undead. The resulting craze spread throughout East Asia.

The movies were often funny.

That should not obscure how unsettling the underlying creature actually is.

Strip away the comedy and what remains is a dead human body that has refused to remain dead.

Vampire or Zombie?

Trying to classify the jiangshi using Western categories may be the wrong approach.

It resembles a zombie because it is an animated corpse.

It resembles a vampire because it feeds upon the vitality of living people.

It resembles a ghost story because improper death and disturbed spiritual forces are central to its existence.

And it resembles none of them perfectly.

Calling it the Chinese vampire is convenient.

Calling it the hopping vampire is irresistible.

But jiangshi is probably best understood on its own terms.

It belongs to a different cultural understanding of death.

Why the Jiangshi Matters

The most interesting supernatural creatures usually tell us something about the people who created them.

European vampires reflected fears surrounding death, disease, decomposition and the possibility that the dead might return.

The jiangshi reflects many of the same anxieties, but through distinctly Chinese traditions concerning burial, ancestors, spiritual energy and the relationship between body and soul.

A corpse left far from home was a problem.

Improper burial was a problem.

A body that refused to decay was a problem.

A soul that failed to depart was a problem.

The jiangshi combined all of those fears into one terrible possibility:

What if the dead person couldn’t complete the process of dying?

Something Is Moving Outside

Perhaps no jiangshi ever traveled down a moonlit road.

Perhaps the hopping corpse developed from a mixture of burial beliefs, stories about unusual decomposition, nighttime corpse transportation and centuries of supernatural literature.

That would explain a great deal.

But folklore rarely survives because it explains everything.

It survives because it leaves an image behind.

A traveler is making his way home after dark.

The road is empty.

Then he hears something.

A dull impact.

Silence.

Another impact.

Silence.

Something is approaching along the road.

It isn’t walking.

It comes closer.

Thump.

Closer.

Thump.

Then a human figure emerges from the darkness.

Its arms are stretched before it.

Its body is rigid.

Its face belongs to someone who should already be buried.

Perhaps it wants blood.

Perhaps it wants your qi.

At that particular moment, the distinction probably isn’t terribly important.

The important thing is remembering the old advice.

Don’t let it touch you.

And whatever you do—

don’t breathe.