"You hear him before you see him, and between hops you hear nothing at all," says a pickled-mustard seller on Umbrella Row, wiping down her board at dusk with the shutter already half closed. That is how the southern hill country tells it. The jiangshi comes up the road as a gap in the sound: a soft double knock of feet, then quiet, then the knock again. He stands about six feet and is narrow as a door post. His skin is waxy jade green and cracks at the knuckles, and his eyes are half open, clouded amber, with no pupil in them. He wears the faded plum robe of a Qing official with a gold crane on the chest square and a black cap whose coral button has split. A yellow talisman with cinnabar strokes is stuck to his forehead, its lower corner torn and curling in any breeze. His arms stay straight out in front. The long sleeves cover his hands.
Near Lacquerers' Climb, the naturalist dusted a stretch of road with lime and measured forty hops with a carpenter's folding rule. They averaged three feet eight inches, and no hop ran more than an inch off the others. Both heels land together, so the track is a line of paired dents, round and shallow, almost four feet apart. Farmers learn to read it the way they read deer sign. The jiangshi feeds on the breath of sleepers. He stops at a shutter, leans in, and leaves a cold, damp patch on the quilt and a smell of camphor in the room. The sleeper wakes tired and does not know why.
A trade exists here only because of him. Innkeepers on the Climb pay a sill-sower to scatter raw rice across the threshold at dusk. Tan Guo, who has sown the sills of three inns for longer than he will say, tells guests that he is not building a fence, only giving the dead something to do until the rooster. The jiangshi is single-minded and easily led off. He halts at every scattered grain and tilts his head over it, arms still out. A swinging lantern or a dropped spoon will turn him from a door he has already reached.
The locals credit the talisman with holding him. They say a torn paper means a loose corpse. The naturalist watched one with a ragged corner hop the whole length of the road without a pause and then stand for a quarter of an hour over a split sack of grain. The paper had nothing to do with it. Travelers also say he hunts by sight, though his eyes show no pupil, and he walks into walls. Sleep with a damp cloth over the mouth and nose. Have the rice sown across the sill before dark. If he stands at the shutter, throw a handful of grain into the yard and keep still.
- Classification
- Undead, hopping corpse
- Habitat
- Hill roads, inns, village outskirts
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- About 6 ft tall, narrow framed
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Eastern Legends, southern hill country
- Binomial
- Cadaver saliens
- Diet
- Breath of sleeping people
- Temperament
- Single-minded, easily distracted