In today's wiki, it is really interesting to see different vampire images through cultures. I do learn a lot, but I still want to add some more information on Chinese Vampires so that people can know more about it. I believe, as a native, I can tell more actual stories about it.
Firstly, in Chinese, we call them Jiang-Shi. It basic means hard corpses. They cannot bend their arms and legs. This means their arms are always pointing straight forward and they jump instead of walking. Also, they are not able to open either their arms or legs. Other parts of their bodies are also rigid. They cannot move their heads and they cannot look at anywhere instead of straight forward. As the image, Jiang-Shi look more like human. This is not strange at all because they are human who come to live after they die. They feed on human as vampires do but in different way. Vampires take human blood as food, while Jiang Shi take human vitality, a kind of spirit that keeps people alive. I am sure it seem to be confused, but I can not get more close translation than vitality. Most of Jiang Shi are unable to think, or to feel like vampires. They more like animals that simply looking for food. They do not attract people in the way vampires do because they look so different than human. They can smell human breath and chase this smell. Therefore, some people believe if they hold breath when Jiang-Shi come, Jiang Shi are not able to find them.
After the appearance, let me introduce some history about Jiang Shi. Jiang Shi have existed for long time but they are brought on TV much later. There are two different catalogs of Jiang Shi. One is those who can back to life soon after death. Another is those who have be died and buried for year but they did not decompose. Under these two catalogs, there are eight different kinds of Jiang Shi. There are purple, white, green, hairy, flying, swimming, creeping and un-died Jiang Shi. I know this sound like ridiculous, but it is one way that Chinese use to differ them by their appearance and behavior.
Then, I am going to tell how they become Jiang Shi. This is really hard to explain; however, I am going to try. Unfortunately, people cannot choose to be a Jiang Shi by their owning choices. Died people become Jiang-Shi in the three situations; one is that they have great grievance before they died. Second one is that the died bodies are infected after they are buried. Lastly, died people become Jiang-Shi when they are buried at the some special places. It is sound complicated, is not it? I am going to explain one by one. For the first way, it is easy to understand that people who are murdered or have unfinished wishes are going to become Jiang-Shi after their death. For the second way, you may ask that how died bodies can be infected after they are buried. It is long stories. According to Chinese culture, people used to build huge graves for their after lives. The inside of these graves will look like their houses that they live during lives. In addition, people will put expensive things or their favorite things into the graves after they die so that they can keep enjoy of having them. Some of them may place among the coffins and some of them may inside of coffins. This is why there are grave robbers in China. They make a living on robbing graves. When they open the coffins, their vitalities have big chance to make corpses into Jiang-Shi. For the last way, it is a kind of object effect. When the bury places are not balancing in PH value, corpses which are buried in there will not decompose for years. Therefore, they become Jiang-Shi. Ok now, I hope these explanations makes some sense for you.
Lastly, I am going to talk a little about how to kill Jiang-Shi. It is similar to vampires. Jiang-Shi can be burned, or killed by Myrtus. They are also afraid of yellow paper with curses on. These paper can stop their movements. There are also some other things like sticky rice, and dog blood can scare them away.
One more very interesting thing I want to talk about is that there are a group of people who can walk Jiang-Shi. These Jiang-Shi walkers will walk Jiang-Shi back to hometowns. Walkers put several Jiang-Shi on a rope and walk them during night. Walkers will paste yellow paper on the foreheads of Jiang-Shi so that they will not hurt other people. Walkers also ring bells when they walk Jiang-Shi to warn human to stay inside houses. Is that interesting?
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