Jiangshi

The jiangshi, literally a stiff or rigid corpse, is a reanimated body rather than a bodiless spirit, and Chinese folklore gives it a correspondingly physical set of rules. Traditional accounts explain jiangshi as arising from a death in which the hun and po, the two components of the soul in Chinese cosmology, fail to separate properly, leaving an animating force trapped in the body rather than departing it. Causes offered across regional folklore include improper burial, a body left unburied too long, death by suicide or violence, or a corpse struck by a stray bolt of concentrated qi or lightning.

The resulting creature is described as rigid, moving in stiff hops with arms outstretched because rigor mortis has locked its limbs, and it hunts the living to drain their life force or breath, qi, which sustains its own unnatural animation. Unlike the reasoning, grievance-driven onryo or yurei, the jiangshi in most tellings has lost its personality and memory entirely, behaving as an instinct-driven predator rather than a person continuing an old identity, which sets it apart within the wider Chinese taxonomy of the restless dead.

Jiangshi folklore is unusual among reanimated-dead traditions for the specificity of its countermeasures, which are drawn directly from Taoist ritual practice rather than generic exorcism. A jiangshi is classically repelled or controlled with yellow paper talismans, fu, inscribed with Taoist script and affixed to its forehead, and a Taoist priest, daoshi, is the expected specialist for dealing with one, reflecting the broader role Taoist ritual masters played in managing dangerous or improperly settled dead across Chinese folk religion. One well documented regional legend describes corpse-herders, professional handlers hired to walk unburied bodies home across long distances for proper burial, moving them at night in single file bound by talismans and guided by bells, a practical funerary trade that folklore later reimagined as literal hopping corpses being marched under ritual control.

The jiangshi entered global popular culture largely through Hong Kong cinema of the 1980s, particularly the Mr. Vampire film series, which fixed the hopping, stiff-armed, talisman-controlled image now recognised well outside China, though that cinematic version simplifies a folk tradition that Chinese death-ritual scholarship situates within a much broader set of beliefs about what happens when a body is not properly returned to its ancestral ground.