The Jiangshi: The Stiff Corpse the Driver Leads Home to Rest
Of all the undead this chronicle has raised, the Chinese jiangshi — the "stiff corpse," rendered in the West as the hopping vampire — is the one whose horror is most precisely a matter of unfinished travel . The jiangshi is a corpse that has not been laid to rest in the right ground: rigid, arms outstretched before it because rigor mortis has locked them so, unable to bend its stiffened joints and therefore hopping — bounding forward on locked legs, stiff and dreadful, in the one gait a rigid body can manage — its face greenish-white with the mould of the grave, its breath a killing cold, hunting the living for the qi , the life-breath, that it drinks to sustain its own unnatural motion. But behind the hopping horror that later ages made into comedy and cinema lies one of the most poignant institutions in the whole world's dealing with its dead: the xiangxi ganshi — the "corpse-driving of western Hunan," the tradition of the men who walked the dead home . D...