Jiangshi

The Chinese revenant. Literally, the stiff corpse. The figure is recorded principally in Qing-dynasty sources, where it is associated with the practice of returning the bodies of migrant workers across great distances for burial in the ancestral village. The corpses were lashed upright to bamboo poles and conveyed by night, in single file, by professionals known as corpse-drivers. From a distance the procession appeared to hop. The folkloric account explains the appearance otherwise. The Qing scholar Yuan Mei recorded that when the *hun* soul departs but the *po* remains, the body rises and walks. The talisman pasted to the forehead seals the mouth.

The figure wears the round-topped Qing official’s cap and the long mandarin robe, frozen at the moment of last appearance. The corpse-driver tradition was a practical one, well attested by historical record. The folklore arose alongside the practice rather than independently of it. The archive notes that the mouth is, in every recorded account, the surface that must be sealed.