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Hopping corpse Wikipedia

In popular Chinese mythology, hopping corpses (僵屍 Pinyin: Jiangshi, literally "stiff corpses") are corpses whose touch can kill a living person instantly. They are said to be created when a person's soul (魄 Po) fails to leave the deceased's body.

It came from the myth of "The Corpses who Travel a Thousand Miles" (千里行屍), which describes wizards who transport corpses over long distances to hop on their own feet back to their hometown for proper burial.

Some people speculate that hopping corpses were originally smuggling|smugglers in disguise who wanted to scare off the law enforcement officers.

Jiangshi is also pronounced Geung si, which is the Cantonese (linguistics)|Cantonese name for vampire (it is usually translated as xi xue gui (吸血鬼) or "blood-sucking ghost" in Mandarin (linguistics)|Mandarin). Hence, a hopping corpse is also called a Chinese vampire. To distinguish between a Chinese vampire and a vampire|Western vampire a Cantonese speaker may use 吸血僵屍 (Cantonese Yale Romanization|Yale: kap1 hyut3 geung1 si1) for a "blood-sucking geung si". Chinese vampires were a popular subject in Hong Kong movies during the 1980s; some movies even featured both Chinese vampires and "Western" vampires. In the movies, hopping corpses can be put to sleep by putting a piece of yellow paper with a spell written on it (Chinese talisman or 符 pinyin fu2) onto their foreheads. Also in the movies, the hopping corpses are generally dressed in imperial Qing Dynasty clothes with their arms permanently outstretched to catch and strangle victims. The general appearance of these Chinese vampires are with an outrageously long tongue and long fingernails like those depicted in Western movies. However, they can be evaded by holding one's breath as the hopping corpses track living creatures by detecting their breathing. This myth of depicting those Qing Dynasty officials in such horrific poses are common stereotyping by the Han Chinese that the Manchu people, who started the much-depised Qing empire, are foreigners who are bloodthirsty creatures with little regard for humanity and such a depiction was seen as an outlet of labelling these "foreigners" as such.

It is also conventional wisdom of feng shui in Chinese architecture that a threshold (Chinese language|Chinese: 門檻), a piece of wood approximately six inches high, be installed along the width of the door to trip the hopping corpse so that it cannot enter the household.

"Kyonshii", a word based on the Japanese language|Japanese pronunciation of jiangshi, is used in some obscure games and trading card games as a term for creatures that combined the characteristics of Chinese and "Western" vampires.

The hopping corpse has recently appeared in a handful of Hong Kong cinema|films from Hong Kong that have seen Western release, including Geung si sin sang (Mr. Vampire) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089371/.

In the fighting game Darkstalkers, the character Hsien-Ko (Lei-Lei in the Japanese version) is based off the Jiang Shi.

In the anime and manga Shaman King, the Tao family has a massive army of Jiangshi at the family's call. One certain Jiangshi the show focused on was Lee Bailong (a.k.a. Lee Pai-Long), who is a thinly veiled reference to Bruce Lee.

Last Modified:   2005-04-13