Jiangshi, the hopping corpse

A reanimated corpse in Chinese legend and folklore, sometimes called the Chinese hopping vampire. Hong Kong films fixed its modern image: a stiff corpse in the robes of a Qing dynasty official.

English Wikipedia describes the jiangshi as a corpse brought back to life in Chinese legend and folklore, sometimes called the Chinese hopping vampire. Hong Kong cinema fixed its modern look: a stiff body dressed in the robes of a Qing dynasty official. J. J. M. de Groot discussed the jiangshi in a chapter on spectres with a material body.

Written tales of corpses that rise are older than the films. In Pu Songling's story translated by Herbert Giles as The Resuscitated Corpse, a group of travellers falls asleep near the laid-out body of a girl who has died. One traveller is still awake when he hears the trestles creak and sees her get up and move toward the sleepers. De Groot, in The Religious System of China, wrote that the kiang shi ate human flesh and drank blood, and he compared them with the vampires of eastern Europe. He said he had found no Chinese tale of blood-drinking corpses older than the eighteenth century, and knew of only one work that contained them.

Corpse herding was a real practice for the dead. The South China Morning Post, in a 2024 report headlined on moving bodies to their home towns for burial on long bamboo poles, said the tradition in the Xiangxi region of Hunan province goes back centuries. No one practises it now, and the paper says the region counts it as part of its cultural heritage.

In 2012 the Hong Kong government's Leisure and Cultural Services Department, screening a vampire film in its 100 Must-See Hong Kong Movies series, wrote that the film used Maoshan Taoist rites for catching vampires and a female ghost. The department said the film treated the vampires of old Chinese folk legend and literature in a pop culture way, with martial arts, comedy and a setting in the first years of the Republic. The department said the film made Lam Ching-ying a star, and he went on to play Taoist priests in vampire films.