Emperor Jiangshi

Chinese folklore does not leave the reanimated corpse in a single form: it makes it climb by grades. The Zi Bu Yu of Yuan Mei (1788) records that ladder and reserves the term jiangshi wang (殭屍王), «king of the jiangshi», for the most powerful specimen, the one that no longer yields to the ordinary remedies. Higher still, the same tradition places two forms that cease to be corpses in any usual sense: the hanba (旱魃), which retains the yang and keeps the rain from falling on the district where it lies, and the hou (犼), which spews fire and smoke and can contend with dragons.

That summit is given an imperial face for a concrete reason. Tradition ascribes an especially intense qi to powerful dead, and the great Chinese mausoleums, that of Qin Shi Huang at Xi'an among them, concentrated at once the wealth that drew looters and the dread of what their desecration would wake. From the conjunction of the two, a rich tomb and a violated one, arose the legends of undead guardians in the sealed chambers.

What separates a high-grade jiangshi from the common form is not so much strength as will. It keeps part of the memory of who it was and acts with cunning, while the lesser forms move by pure instinct and recognise no one. Hence it is the only one to which tradition ascribes anything like a purpose: it guards what was buried with it and falls upon whoever opens the chamber.

Its qi is so dense that it drags along the lesser corpses of the surroundings, drawn to it as filings to a magnet; popular telling reads that attraction as command, and from there comes the image of the dead man who disposes of other dead. It also resists ordinary Taoist talismans: the yellow paper that suffices to paralyse a hopping corpse falls short here, and only seals and rites of higher rank manage to subdue it. Its flesh, incorrupt after centuries, is what sustains all the rest, and that is why the traditional remedy against the high grades is not a paper on the forehead but exhumation and fire.

Its symbolism combines the emblems of Chinese royalty with the signs of death and corruption: the longpao embroidered with dragons, the jade seal, the pendant of rank, blackened or profaned. It embodies a disturbing inversion of the Confucian order, in which the sovereign, who was to guarantee harmony and receive the cult of his descendants, becomes a danger to the very people who venerated him.

It stands conceptually opposed to the celestial fox (huli-jing), which ascends through Taoist cultivation towards the divine: the jiangshi of imperial rank represents the contrary path, that of earthly power which, instead of being refined, is corrupted into undeath. One rises by discipline and the other stays below by accumulation, and that symmetry is what makes the two of them the opposed summits of the Chinese supernatural imagination. As the crest of the jiangshi cycle it expresses, besides, a very concrete dread: that not even the greatest escape a «badly closed» death, and that the greater the deceased was, the worse whatever rises from his tomb.

It is worth dating what this figure shows today. The undead emperor who drinks blood by biting and commands disciplined armies of corpses does not come from Qing folklore: it is an elaboration of Hong Kong cinema of the eighties, beginning with Ricky Lau's Mr. Vampire (1985), and of the later video-game culture, which fixed the jiangshi as a vampire and gave it a chain of command of military cut.

The traditional basis of the jiangshi, its highest grades included, is the absorption of qi, not of blood; and command over other dead is, in the texts, attraction rather than obedience. None of this invalidates the modern version, which is the one nearly everyone recognises and the one that has given the figure its contemporary life in film, comics and games. But it is worth knowing what belongs to the eighteenth century and what to the twentieth, because the entry brings both layers together and only one of them is in the Zi Bu Yu.