Before jiangshi hopped, they ran

In the opening scene of Mr. Vampire, a line of corpses stands in a funeral home, kept quiet by paper talismans stuck to their foreheads. An oil lamp goes over in a scuffle, the talismans flutter loose, and the corpses begin to hop.³ The Hong Kong Film Archive files these films as jiangshi, “(hopping vampire) films”, and the paper spells as one of the genre’s staples.³ The hop gives the creature its English name. The Qing books that tell jiangshi stories say very little about it.⁷

Golden Harvest, 1985

Mr. Vampire (殭屍先生) was made by Golden Harvest in 1985, directed by Lau Koon-wai (Ricky Lau) and produced by Sammo Hung, with Lam Ching-ying as the priest.¹ It was nominated for best film and best director at the fifth Hong Kong Film Awards and won for its score.¹ The Film Archive credits it with setting off the jiangshi craze of the 1980s.² Its own notes differ on how big a hit it was: seventh at the 1985 box office in a note of 2017, “among the five highest-grossing films of 1985” in the English note of 2026, which the Chinese version puts at over HK$20 million, after an unexpected success in Taiwan.⁹

The Archive says the film took the western Hunan legend of corpse-driving (湘西趕屍) and blended it with Western vampires and zombies.⁴ Katarzyna Ancuta, writing on jiangshi in The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire (2024), describes the screen jiangshi being reshaped over the years “to align it with Western vampires”.⁴ Both point back to older Chinese material. The table below lists what that material makes the dead do, oldest text first.

What the corpse does, text by text

Pu Songling’s runner

The oldest of these is a story Pu Songling (1640 to 1715) called “Shibian” (尸變), “The corpse that changed”. His collection of strange tales has a preface dated 1679 and circulated in copies until 1766, when the Qingketing edition was printed in sixteen juan.¹⁰ In the Shanghai Library’s Qingketing copy, “Shibian” is in juan 13.¹⁰

Four carters, finding the inn full, are put up in the room where the innkeeper’s daughter-in-law lies dead. One of them, still awake, watches her sit up, come to the beds and blow on each sleeper. Her face is a pale gold and her forehead is bound with raw silk. He runs for it barefoot, and she runs after him all the way to a temple outside the town, where he dodges her round a poplar.¹¹ Then:

At dawn the magistrate’s men find her fingers curled like hooks and sunk into the wood up to the nails; the holes look chiselled.¹¹ The whole story is transcribed and translated. The verb for her pursuit is 馳, to race. The outstretched arms are there, once, to reach round a tree. The band across her forehead is silk, part of the laid-out body, and not a charm.

Pu did not invent the rising corpse. Feng Yichao, in a 2007 study of the jiangshi stories of Zibuyu, finds records before and during the Tang and Song few and scattered, and many from the Ming on, above all in the Qing.¹⁹ Wang Shengyu, in T’oung Pao (2022), places “Shibian” in a group of “House of Death” accounts and argues that Pu also borrowed from a “Temple of Horror” tale of the same kind.¹⁹ The magazine ArtReview, writing on Mr. Vampire in 2020, gives Pu’s book the date 1740, which matches neither the preface nor the first printing.¹⁰²⁰

A slap outside Yifeng Gate

Yuan Mei (1716 to 1797) called his collection Zibuyu, “What the Master would not discuss”, then renamed it Xin Qi Xie; it runs to twenty-four juan with a sequel of ten.¹² Feng Yichao works from an edition based on the Suiyuan print of the fifty-third year of Qianlong, 1788. Matsumura (松村昂), in the Heibonsha encyclopedia, notes that the newest story in it dates from 1791, so the book kept growing after that first print.¹²

Feng counts thirty-four jiangshi stories in the two books.⁷ Nakano Kiyoshi, who went through the same stories in a series of articles ending in 2014, puts the number at about thirty.²¹ His finding on how they move is plain: a corpse that travels by leaping turns up in only one of them. Chasing and running are what the stories mostly show, and the corpses’ stiff joints keep them from climbing walls, trees or ladders, or crossing water, which is how the living escape them.⁷

The one leaping corpse belongs to a man named Qian, from Tongcheng, who lived outside Yifeng Gate.¹³²² Riding home drunk at the second watch, past a stretch of dense graves, he saw something come out of the trees:

Qian slapped it. Its head swung round with the blow and came back, “like a puppet on strings”, and it retreated into the trees when other travellers came up. His hand stayed black for three or four years. The locals told him it was a jiangshi just starting out, “not yet fully made”.¹³ Nakano Kiyoshi (2011) singles out the swinging head: a jiangshi is supposed to be stiff, and this one gives under the hand like a hanging puppet, which he finds oddly true to life.²³

In the sequel, a corpse that goes out at night comes home to find its coffin filled with tiles and sees the man who did it up in a loft. Its legs are “hard as dry wood” (腿硬如枯木) and it cannot climb the ladder. When he escapes across a river, it paces the bank, howls, “leaps three times and jumps three times” (三躍三跳), and goes off in the form of a beast.¹⁴ The storyteller explains that a jiangshi first becomes a drought demon and then a hou, the beast the Buddha rides.¹⁴²⁴ Here the stiffness and the leaps sit in one story, but the stiffness is what stops the corpse, and the leaps come as it changes into something else.

Ji Yun’s leaping dead

Ji Yun (1724 to 1805) wrote the five parts of his Yuewei caotang biji between 1789 and 1798; his pupil Sheng Shiyan printed them together in 1800.¹⁵ The part called Rushi wowen opens with Ji Yun’s note dated the twenty-first day of the seventh month of the xinhai year, 1791.¹⁵

Its first juan has the story of Hu Gongshan, a physician Ji Yun met as a boy of six or seven, when Hu was past eighty. Hu said that as a young man he had met a jiangshi:¹⁶

Only when a pack train came by with its bells did Hu dare to look down: white hair all over, eyes red as cinnabar, fingers like hooks, teeth sticking out of the lips like blades.¹⁶ The tree, the dawn and the clinging all match Pu’s “Shibian”, written more than a century earlier; that is our observation. The 1925 Shanghai lithograph of the book prints 抱本 for 抱木, which we read as a misprint.¹⁶

In the fourth juan of Rushi wowen Ji Yun sets out a theory.¹⁷

He records a view that the drought demon is this second kind (或曰旱魃即此) and adds that no one can say for certain.¹⁷ Elsewhere in the same part he writes that “the drought demons people talk of nowadays are all jiangshi; they dig them up and burn them, and often rain follows” (近世所云旱魃則皆僵尸，掘而焚之，亦往往致雨), and asks how one corpse’s breath could block heaven and earth.²⁴ Feng finds the same belief, that burning a drought demon brings rain, in Yuan Mei’s stories.²⁴ Nakano Kiyoshi (2012) takes Ji Yun’s “nowadays” at its word: he finds no story tying drought demons to jiangshi from before the Qianlong fifties, 1785 to 1794.²⁵

Ji Yun does not believe the dead know what they do. A corpse that grabs its own parents and children, he argues, cannot be the person it was; “some other evil thing possesses it”. He then quotes Yuan Mei’s Xin Qi Xie, the story of a Nanchang scholar whose walking corpse visits a friend, and its theory that the good hun soul leaves while the dull po soul stays behind.¹⁷²⁶ He finds the reasoning sound but suspects another cause.²⁶ The full passage is transcribed and translated. Neither man explains the corpse’s movements by stiffness; the words for how it moves are 躍起, “leaps up”, and 踴躍, “leaps about”. The popular claim that jiangshi hop because rigor mortis locks their joints does not appear in any Qing text we read.

Timber rafts to Changde

The practice the Film Archive names, sending the dead home on foot, appears in the Qingbai leichao, a compilation of Qing anecdotes by Xu Ke published by the Commercial Press; we read its 1918 printing.¹⁸ Its entry 送尸術, “the art of sending corpses”, is set among timber merchants of Guizhou who rafted logs down to Changde in Hunan each spring and walked home.⁵ When one died, two companions brought him back:

The water in the bowl had to be charged with a charm and spell. Inns kept a room for such parties, and the corpse stood by the door all night, hence the Hunan saying “three stay at the inn, two eat”. At home the water was poured out and the corpse dropped. A man named Yang Kuanfu, the entry says, saw one outside Changsha in the autumn of the jiyou year of Xuantong, 1909.⁵ The next entry has the general Huang Zhonghao, camped on the Sichuan border, watch a man with a cloth banner lead a corpse that “stood upright and followed him, stepping along in a daze” (一尸直立，隨其人，惘惘而步). Hundreds of soldiers came out to look.⁶ Both entries are transcribed and translated.

The corpses in these accounts walk. The charm is on the water, not on the dead man’s face. And neither account is set in western Hunan: the first runs from Guizhou to Changde and Changsha, the second is on the Sichuan border. Feng, pointing to Zhan Yinxin’s quotation of this entry, puts the art between Guizhou and Hunan, “not only western Hunan”.⁵

Coffins left above ground

The Qing stories keep putting jiangshi near coffins that were never buried. Joohee Suh, in a 2019 dissertation on unburied bodies in Qing China, describes how delayed burial (停葬) left coffins above ground across Jiangnan in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and how popular tales of the time turned these bodies into man-hunting jiangshi.²⁷ Feng reaches the same link from the other side: in one of Yuan Mei’s stories, jiangshi seize people in Henan because coffins there were so often left in the open (棺多野厝), which he reads as tying the jiangshi to the unburied body.²⁷

Feng also warns against the idea that jiangshi belong to Hunan. The corpse-driving legend makes people think of Hunan first, but Yuan Mei sets his stories all over China, most of them in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, eight each.²² The man who slapped the leaping corpse lived outside Yifeng Gate; the hou was told by a magistrate from Changzhou.²²

Where the hop is missing

Put the texts side by side and the parts of the film come from different places. The undecayed corpse that rises and kills is in Ji Yun’s second kind.¹⁷ Arms that reach out and fingers that sink into wood are in Pu Songling.¹¹ The escorted dead who stop when their guide stops, and stand by the door at the inn, are in the Qingbai leichao, and so is the charm, on a bowl of water.⁵ The glutinous rice, the inked line and the peach-wood sword we did not find in any of these texts; the Film Archive credits the film with setting them.³

The hop is the gap. Yuan Mei has one corpse that comes leaping out of a wood and another that leaps three times as it turns into a beast.¹³¹⁴ Ji Yun’s dead leap up to seize and leap round a tree.¹⁶¹⁷ The escorted dead of 1909 walk.⁵ We could not find a text, before the films, in which the corpse-driver’s charges hop in file along a road, and we could not find the first text that sticks the charm to the corpse’s forehead.³⁵