The Shan Hai Jing — the Classic of Mountains and Seas — is a catalogue assembled over centuries, finished more than two thousand years ago, that describes the world as a series of routes: over this mountain, past this river, and here is what lives there. It records some four hundred creatures with the flat, practical tone of a field guide, which is precisely what makes it so strange: it is a bestiary written by people who seem to have expected to meet these things. Ten of its citizens, in rough order of celebrity.
1. The Nine-Tailed Fox (九尾狐)
A fox of the Green Hills country with nine tails and a cry like a baby. The text adds, in its deadpan way, that eating it protects one against bewitchment. History made it the most consequential animal in Chinese fiction: auspice of sage-kings, spirit of the Queen Mother’s mountain, ruin of the Shang dynasty, and finally the great heroine of the fox-tales. Everything begins here.
2. Jingwei (精卫)
The small bird with the patterned head, white beak and red feet, once the drowned daughter of the Flame Emperor, who carries twigs and pebbles from the western mountains to fill up the Eastern Sea. The entry is forty characters long and contains one of the world’s great images of defiance. Her story is in the library.
3. The Taotie (饕餮)
The glutton-mask: a ravening face, all eyes and jaws and appetite. Tradition whittled the text’s goat-bodied, human-faced man-eater down to its essence — hunger without a body to satisfy — and cast it on the ritual bronzes of the Shang and Zhou, where its face still stares from three-thousand-year-old cauldrons. It became the language’s word for greed itself.
4. The Baize (白泽)
The knower of things: a lion-like, many-eyed, horned beast of Mount Kunlun who — the legend grew — knows the name, form and weakness of all eleven thousand five hundred and twenty kinds of supernatural creature under heaven, and dictated them all to the Yellow Emperor as the world’s first monster manual. In a universe where every spirit runs on rules, the Baize is the creature that knows the rules. Every exorcist in the tradition is, in a sense, working from its notes.
5. The Qilin (麒麟)
The gentle chimera: deer’s body, ox’s tail, horse’s hooves, a single fleshy horn, scales that shimmer — and a disposition so mild it will not tread on a living blade of grass. It appears only in ages of perfect virtue: at the birth of Confucius, one came to his mother and spat out a jade book. The qilin is the opposite number of the taotie — the monster as benediction — and proof that in this bestiary, strangeness and goodness are no strangers.
6. The Xiangliu (相柳)
Nine human heads on the body of a serpent, minister to the flood-god Gonggong, whose breath poisoned the land and whose nine heads fed simultaneously on nine mountains. When Yu the Great killed it, its blood made the ground barren for a hundred li; the spot had to be built into a terrace for the gods. It is the closest thing the old catalogue has to a dragon of pure devastation — and the grandfather of every nine-headed serpent in East Asian legend.
7. The Zhuque — the Vermilion Bird (朱雀)
The red bird of the south, sovereign of summer and fire, one of the four directional spirits of the sky. Less a monster than a sector of the cosmos given feathers — but its descendants populate the whole tradition, and its image rides every Han tomb ceiling, leading the dead upward.
8. The Dijiang (帝江)
On the Mountain of Heaven lives a being like a yellow sack, red as cinnabar flame, with six feet and four wings, and no face — no eyes, no mouth — which yet knows singing and dancing. Later readers made it the image of primordial chaos, hundun: the world before it had features. The story of the bored emperors who drilled seven holes in it to give it a face — and killed it in seven days — is the great Taoist parable of improvement as murder.
9. The Lingyu and the Flying Fish (文鳐鱼)
A fish of the western waters with a carp’s body and a bird’s wings, patterned dark, white-headed, red-beaked, which flies from sea to sea in the night with a cry like a luan-bird. Its appearance was a sign of a coming great harvest — and, the text adds helpfully, it tastes sour-sweet and cures madness. The catalogue’s genius is this flat practicality: a flying fish is, first of all, useful.
10. The Xingtian (刑天)
Not a species but a single being, and the finest ending in the book. Xingtian fought the supreme god for heaven, lost, and was beheaded, his head buried on Changyang Mountain. Whereupon he stood up again, made eyes of his nipples and a mouth of his navel, brandished his shield and axe, and dances defiance still. ‘His fighting spirit has not ceased,’ says the text — one line, and a whole civilisation’s image of unbroken defiance.
What makes the Shan Hai Jing inexhaustible is its tone: it never gasps. A nine-headed serpent and a good fish for madness are entered in the same clerkly hand, between the note on the mountain’s trees and the note on its minerals. The marvellous, it assumes, is simply part of the inventory of the world. Every fox-tale, ghost-suit and dragon-lawsuit in this library is downstream of that assumption.