Hanba

The ba already appears in the Shanhaijing and the Shijing as a power of drought, tied in myth to the daughter of Huangdi who dried the fields after the battle against Chiyou and could not return to heaven. In the folklore of the Ming and Qing dynasties the hanba comes to be understood as a corpse that retains yang and keeps rain from the district where it lies buried. This late layer explains the practice, documented in drought years, of digging up and burning suspect corpses, known as da han gu zhuang. Yuan Mei's Zi Bu Yu places the hanba as a superior grade of the jiangshi and adds that the most powerful can transform into a hou (犼), which spits fire and smoke and fights dragons. The hanba's harm is collective and climatic: lost harvests, dry wells and district famines. Unlike the hopping jiangshi, which hunts one by one, the hanba punishes the whole district, which is why its remedy is not a talisman but exhumation followed by fire.

The hanba retains the yang of the corpse and generates a persistent drought zone that affects harvests, wells and the survival of the entire region. Its influence does not require direct contact with individual victims but acts through regional meteorological alteration. The traditional remedy consists of the public exhumation of the suspected body followed by its controlled cremation to restore the rain cycle. This collective response contrasts with the use of frontal talismans that stop the hopping jiangshi. The hanba therefore represents an advanced stage where the undead ceases to be a personal threat and becomes an environmental calamity on a regional scale. Ming and Qing sources document cases in which the burning of the hanba coincided with the immediate return of precipitation. This perceived efficacy reinforced belief in its meteorological nature and in the need for community interventions.

Yuan Mei's Zi Bu Yu orders the reanimated corpses into a ladder of grades and places the hanba above the common jiangshi: the corpse that accumulates enough yang stops hunting men and takes to drying up the whole district. The same source adds the last rung: the most powerful hanba can still mutate into a hou (犼), which spits fire and smoke and is able to contend with dragons. The figure thus joins the two layers of its history, the archaic drought power of the Shanhaijing and the undead of the Ming and Qing collections, united by a single idea: a retained yang that scorches the land instead of animating it. Unlike the lower phases of the cycle, centred on individual hunting, the hanba embodies a collective, meteorological menace that demands a communal answer: it is not stopped with a talisman on the forehead but by unearthing the body and giving it to the fire, and the Qing sources record cases in which the burning was followed by the immediate return of the rains.