(host) Often depicted in popular culture wearing Qing Dynasty traditional robes with long nails and fang teeth, these hopping corpses with outstretched arms are hungry for the qi, or vital energy, of the living.
With a name that literally means "stiff or rigid corpse," tales of the Chinese jiangshi and Geung Si go back centuries.
They are physical, tangible, and belong to the material world.
They rely on smell and sound to locate their victims, having lost their eyesight and ability to speak.
They cannot bend their limbs, so their movements are stiff and mechanical.
Jiangshi are required to continue to feed on qi to maintain their undead status, but are fully unconscious of their actions.
While many horror fans and enterprising marketing agencies alike identify these monsters as vampires or zombies, they're in fact neither.
While the jiangshi may share similarities with both these undead beings and even adopted some of their characteristics over time, they're uniquely tied to Chinese tradition and occupy an undead space all their own.
[compelling music] I'm Dr. Emily Zarka, and this is "Monstrum."
Technically, jiangshi are a type of ghost.
In Chinese folklore, ghosts can appear in physical form, but these spirits are often motivated by something more than hunger.
They retain human consciousness and intelligence, something the jiangshi do not have.
They're also different because of their grotesque appearance.
They may be covered in long white hair or have black, green, or purple-colored skin.
They are thin, but possessed protruding stomachs, likely a reference to the gases produced during decay.
They may have bad breath or blood pouring from their eyes, but in the earliest Chinese texts, jiangshi merely denotes an inanimate exposed dead body, a stiff corpse.
In a few of these texts, the jiangshi were said to have medicinal properties.
It is only in the Qing Dynasty period that the stiff corpse becomes malevolent and able to move autonomously.
So what changed?
While Taoist spiritual practices predated the beginning of the Qing period in the 17th century by thousands of years, the new imperial monarchy actively turned away from Taoist tradition in favor of Confucian beliefs.
Shifts in religion often lead to conflict between older beliefs and folk traditions.
In Taoist tradition, the soul could be split into parts, the hun soul, which ascended to the afterlife, and the po soul, which controls bodily functions and is associated with animality.
When the po soul fails to rest, going into the earth, the jiangshi can rise, especially if exposed to a large amount of qi.
This is why jiangshi must continuously feed on the qi of the living.
According to the original lore of the monster, the body's po could also be animated by a spell written on a piece of paper that was then attached to their forehead.
Taoists used yellow scrolls with power spells written on them to ask the gods for favor.
Ritual hand movements or spoken incantations are also a major component of Taoism and are also said to control jiangshi.
Another inspiration for the shift may come from the already rich tradition of Chinese folklore like the 12th century corpse chase tales, where a reanimated body chases after victims who seek shelter in a temple, which houses an unburied coffin.
In these corpse chase stories, the undead have long claws and may mimic the living, two things that would become characteristic of the jiangshi.
In the 17th century, after the increase in labor migration, it would be more common to see a coffin in a household, and therefore, one was more likely to encounter a ghost or reanimated corpse at home.
That's another reason for the dark twist on jiangshi's stories during this time, the increased presence of unburied corpses in regular households.
Various traditional Chinese spiritual practices dictate that treating the deceased well in death aids the souls of the living and the dead.
If proper burial rights are not received, the person cannot become an ancestor.
For this reason, cremation was considered taboo by many.
In fact, during the Qing period, burning a body was a serious illegal crime.
It also happens to be one of the surefire ways to destroy a jiangshi.
Feng shui, also known as geomancy, dictates that a body should be buried in proper ancestral ground.
Sometimes the family needed to wait for the correct auspicious date to inter the corpse.
This meant the funeral process was expensive, especially since more and more people were working in city centers rather than rural towns.
But how did families get the bodies of the deceased to where they needed them?
Families would hire Taoist priests to transport the corpses of their loved ones great distances.
According to the lore, these priests reanimated the corpses, guiding them as they hopped along to their auspicious burial grounds.
Called "corpse drivers" or "corpse walkers," they were believed to control the movement of the corpse with a bell, hand signs, or paper amulets.
One theory that explains the stiffness of movement that causes the hopping vampire aspect of the jiangshi is directly inspired by the corpse driving tradition.
Narrow mountain roads made transport of bodies via vehicle impossible.
Taoist pallbearers would tie the bodies upright to bamboo rods.
A corpse would be tied a few feet apart, and the rods would be carried on the shoulders of the pallbearers.
The bouncing movement produced as the bamboo rods moved made it look like the bodies were jumping along.
Another theory is that the priest carrying corpses on their backs would be hard to see under the folds of the black mourning shroud, making it look like the deceased was walking or hopping.
Instead of being just stiff corpses anymore, jiangshi became defined by their undead and malicious nature.
Two kinds of these creatures emerge-- one, the unburied, newly deceased who will suddenly attack people; and two, entombed corpses who do not decay and turn into demons, wandering at night for victims.
Both types of jiangshi are described in detail in a popular collection of supernatural tales published for the first time in 1788.
Written by Yuan Mei, the text features over 700 stories, 30 of which include jiangshi.
They fly, run, talk, hop, drink blood, and terrorize the living.
In some of these stories, jiangshi movements are limited to mimicking the living.
In a way, jiangshi promote two things, have children, so you have someone to properly mourn you, and make sure you give your loved ones proper burials in the correct places.
Driven by unconscious hunger or led by a malevolent priest, the jiangshi is a body controlled, a reality many non wealthy and non aristocratic individuals faced during the Qing Dynasty.
During the 19th century, Western translations of Chinese supernatural tales became more popular in Europe.
George Soulie De Morant, for instance, took a 17th century story and not only translated it, he kind of rewrote it.
The biggest change, the restless or resuscitated corpse became "the corpse, the blood drinker."
He makes the jiangshi more like a vampire, going as far as to add glowing red eyes and sharp teeth.
Instead of draining the victim of its qi, she gives a long kiss to suck the victim's blood from their neck.
He might've been one of the first to incorrectly conflate the vampire with the jiangshi, but he would not be the last.
When the jiangshi made it into Chinese motion pictures in the early 20th century, other liberties were likewise taken.
"Midnight Vampire" saw the monster hop onto the big screen.
In the 1936 movie, two jiangshi brothers returned to act revenge on the brother who killed them.
It's a deviation from traditional lore, a change that could have been influenced by other Chinese supernatural figures or as an homage to the successful vampire film "Nosferatu" or both.
Other films from the 30s like "Vampires of the Haunted Mansion" and "3,000 Year Old Vampire" also merged Western ideas of the vampire with the stiff corpse tradition, but it would be decades later before the modern traits of the jiangshi would be established.
The Hong Kong vampire film emerged as a popular genre in the 1980s and 1990s.
The reanimated corpses in these movies represented a modern confrontation and fascination with ancient funerary practices and shifting cultural views as Hong Kong exited British rule, blending Older jiangshi folklore with antique Chinese customs and Western concepts of the vampire.
Two films in particular, "Mr. Vampire" and "Encounters of the Spooky Kind" are widely cited as establishing the common portrayal of the jiangshi in popular culture.
In 1980, "Encounters of the Spooky Kind" was released as a supernatural comedy martial arts film.
The bumbling protagonist is made to sleep next to a coffin, which at night, reveals a jiangshi.
Clinging to a ceiling beam in terror, the man watches in horror as the eyeless, fanged, clawed corpse dressed in a traditional Mandarin robe with a black and red velvet cap hops around the room in search of his prey.
Released in 1985 and spawning multiple sequels, "Mr. Vampire's" plot centers around a misguided reburial attempt.
It contains not only jiangshi, but a Taoist corpse driver and traditional temple.
These jiangshi likewise appear dressed in Qing Dynasty clothing, including a hat, black robes with an embroidered crest, and striped undergarments.
They have fangs, pale skin, and rigid outstretched arms.
Oh, and they're controlled by yellow paper amulets attached to their foreheads.
These films fall into a sub-genre called wuxia cinema, which is defined by combining comedy, martial arts, and religion in a historic imperial setting.
The jiangshi in these movies wear traditional clothing, which marks them not only as being from the past, but denotes their status as ancestors.
This ensures that they are not defeated, but put to rest.
The rise in jiangshi in film closely predates what is called the handover of 1997 when Hong Kong was finally released from British colonial rule.
Hong Kong, like the jiangshi, seemed between worlds, ancient and modern, Eastern and Western.
Would the colonial culture of Hong Kong metaphorically be put to rest and result in a fantastic rebirth of traditional Chinese cultures, or would the body of the territory be restless, unable to move on?
Post 1997, new national film distribution censorship laws forced directors to take more creative directions in incorporating the now familiar hopping vampire.
Overt religious or superstitious content, something many films with jiangshi contain, was banned.
Not calling the monster by its proper name was one way to avoid censorship as was having the jiangshi make only a short appearance.
What really helped, though?
The internet.
Many jiangshi films are only available via the internet or various streaming services, but those aren't the only places they appeared.
By the start of the 21st century, jiangshi could be found in video games, on TV and in manga and anime.
They continue to evolve in response to popular trends.
The 2013 movie "Rigor Mortis," for example, centers the jiangshi firmly in a modern setting, the overcrowded urban space.
Set in a dilapidated high-rise, the jiangshi at the center of the story is the building's caretaker who, in killing his victims, adds more ghosts to the already overly populated hallways.
This iteration is mindless and malevolent like its earliest literary predecessors, but it rips its victims into pieces, an added layer of violence.
Then there's the "Vampire Cleanup Department" in 2017.
In what might be a nod to other reanimated corpse rom-coms and the popularity of Korean dramas, we get Summer, a young, cute jiangshi who learns to live and love again by mimicking the actions of the man who rescued her from her more traditional and terrifying jiangshi husband.
In 2019, a jiangshi made a brief but memorable appearance in the "What We Do in the Shadows" television series.
They even made it to Disney.
The 2020 "Shang-Chi" comic series see the Marvel superhero not only fighting an army of jiangshi, he's at risk of becoming one after the disembodied hand of one of the undead corpses stabs him.
These jiangshi are quick and cunning and must have an unavenged grievance upon death.
For many in China, the supernatural and the human occupy the same realm.
Portrayed as humorous or horrific, the jiangshi show that not all audiences have dismissed supernatural beings in lieu of scientific rationale.
Religion, spirituality, and magic have always been a part of jiangshi's history and Chinese culture.
I have to say that again.
Think I said "pole," not po.
Jiangshi.
Jiangshi.
Jiangshi.
Jiangshi.
-(crew) Start from the top.
-The 2020 "Jiangshi" comic series see the Marvel super-- Oh, I have to go back.
"Shang-Chi."
That's the Shang, not the Jiang.
[snaps] Yay.
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