Interesting paper about jiangshi

[sekibanki]

I just came across a recently-published paper about jiangshi in Chinese culture which I think is worth a read. It's an analysis of a recent popular Chinese novel and manhua series by Xu Lei entitled "Tomb Notes" or "The Grave Robber's Chronicles" or something like that (the paper calls it "Note of Ghoul"). The first volume seems to have been translated into English as "Cavern of the Blood Zombies". The paper cites a number of Chinese academic sources that are not available in English.

There's nothing really groundbreaking in it but I thought that the parts of it that deal with traditional and modern depictions of jiangshi were interesting and worth reading. Here's what I got out of it that might shed additional light on Tojiko and Seiga:

• Jiangshi suck in the jingqi ("living soul") of their victims, although they sometimes also drink blood. Sometimes the killing seems to be done by breathing onto the victim instead of sucking.
• Souls are comprised of hun (good, intelligent aspects) and po (evil, stupid aspects). Living people have both, dead people have neither, ghosts only have hun, and jiangshi only have po. I don't know how all these spirits and souls correspond to the divine souls/desires in TD.
• Jiangshi fingernails continue to grow after death. Yoshika doesn't have visible nails in her portrait from TD but her nails are very long in WaHH (not as long as Chen's or Mystia's, though.)
• Taoist priests (daoshi) are often depicted as being experts at destroying jiangshi. Apparently brooms are very effective- too bad nobody in TD knew this, since Reimu, Marisa, Sanae, Youmu, and Kyouko are all seen with brooms pretty much all the time. However, there is a parallel tradition of Taoist priests animating bodies of people who die far away from home and compelling them to walk back to their families. I'm not sure if it would be appropriate to call Seiga a daoshi; she is certainly interested in alchemy and magic which are traditional Taoist arts. That said, some people say that she is not really a Taoist herself despite having taught the Tao to Miko. In any case her master/servant relationship with Yoshika certainly seems to be modeled after the second case.
• The characters in Xu Lei's novels use a tool that I had never heard of before: the Luoyang shovel (洛阳铲). This is a shovel with a very small head invented by grave robbers in China hundreds of years ago; they are now used by Chinese archaeologists. The shovel is  jammed into the ground, creating a very small hole from which a scoopful of deep dirt is pulled up (kind of like a core sampling device).  Grave robbers used them to find subterranean earthworks, walls, pottery, etc. which can indicate the presence of buried treasure. I'm not sure how this maps onto Seiga's hairpin and wall-passing ability. I've read that her hairpin is modeled after some sort of herbalist's trowel for digging up plants, but a Luoyang shovel seems like it would be a more logical interpretation since Seiga likes to make holes, steal treasure, and hang out with dead bodies. I've also read that her hairpin is modeled after some sort of magical tool that appears in the story Qing'e in Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, but this particular story doesn't appear in any of the incomplete translated editions that I've read (Herbert Giles's old translation and the new Penguin edition).
• This isn't directly from the paper, but I just wanted to note that the story "Living Dead" from Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio is usually cited as the most direct inspiration for Yoshika. The jiangshi in this story is the body of a recently dead woman; the reason that the body becomes a jiangshi is unknown. This jiangshi apparently blows on people to kill them; the protagonist of the story covers his face and holds his breath and something about this prevents him from getting killed. His sleeping friends are all killed but do not turn into jiangshi. The jiangshi has stiff, outstretched arms; it ends up getting trapped when a tree trunk gets jammed between them. However, there are a lot of Chinese stories that talk about jiangshi and they don't all agree on the defining characteristics of jiangshi. Some jiangshi hop instead of walk or run; some can even fly.

As an aside,  the paper also notes that  Xu Lei's novels are popular with the Chinese equivalent of fujoshi, who like to ship the two male protagonists.

[Prime32]

• Souls are comprised of hun (good, intelligent aspects) and po (evil, stupid aspects). Living people have both, dead people have neither, ghosts only have hun, and jiangshi only have po. I don't know how all these spirits and souls correspond to the divine souls/desires in TD.

They're known in Japanese as kon and haku. Or, when taken together, konpaku. Youmu Konpaku's "ghost half" is her kon existing outside her body. Sometimes you're said to have more than one of each, and it's likely that to maintain the link her kon has one or two haku mixed in and vice versa. Incidentally this would mean that the ghost half is the real Youmu, controlling her body like some kind of reverse Stand (something which Marisa has hinted at).
Though the po seems to be less "evil and stupid" and more like the id.

Bleach has ghost characters using "artificial kon" to inhabit their bodies while they're not using them, one of whom ends up being actually named Kon.

Log Horizon makes the distinction between them a plot point, where they're generally translated as Spirit and Animae.

[sekibanki]

Sometimes you're said to have more than one of each, and it's likely that to maintain the link her kon has one or two haku mixed in and vice versa.

Sounds kind of like the yin-yang, where the white portion has a dark spot and vice versa.

[Prime32]

Well hun is yang and po is yin, but Youmu isn't exactly a typical case. I'm just going by how her ghost half supposedly feels "less dead" than normal and her human half "less alive".

IIRC the normal list of combinations is: living person (hun+po+body), ghost or celestial (hun), evil spirit (po), jiangshi (po+body), fully-transformed hermit (hun+body).