Halloween has passed, but some monsters stay scary all year. Plenty of them live in The Classic of Mountains and Seas (山海经). It’s part bestiary, part travel guide, with its earliest sections dating to before the 4th century BCE.
Legend credits the book to Yu the Great, the flood-taming hero, and his minister Boyi, who supposedly wrote down everything they saw while traveling the land. In reality, many anonymous authors added to it over centuries. Han dynasty scholars edited it into 18 chapters. They cover hundreds of mountains, rivers, and faraway kingdoms, along with the gods, medicinal plants, and monsters said to live in each one. Early readers treated it as a real atlas. By the Ming dynasty, it was increasingly classed as fiction, and scholar Hu Yinglin called it “the ancestor of all tales of the strange.” It has stayed popular ever since. Writer Lu Xun even remembered an illustrated copy as his favorite childhood treasure.
Meet six of its strangest residents:
Xu (嘘) is a god in the far west who keeps the sun, moon, and stars on schedule. He has a human face, no arms, and legs attached to the top of his head.
Xingtian (刑天) was beheaded while fighting the Yellow Emperor and kept fighting anyway. He used his nipples as eyes and his navel as a mouth.
Xiangliu (相柳) is a snake the size of a mountain with nine human heads. It served the water god Gonggong and turned everything it touched into swamp. Yu the Great finally killed it, but its blood was so toxic that nothing could grow there.
The Xiaoyang (枭阳国) are people with black fur, huge drooping lips, and feet that face backward. They’re always grinning at you. Some readers think they were inspired by real great apes.
Ma Fu (马腹) has a human face and a tiger’s body. It cries like a baby to lure in its prey, which is people.
The Guanxiong (贯胸国) are people with a hole straight through the chest. Their nobles get around on a pole threaded through that hole and are carried by servants. One later legend says the holes came from stabbing themselves in fear of Yu the Great, who revived them with herbs.
All images via Xiaohongshu.
