Shanhaijing
山海經 (Classic of Mountains and Seas)
The world beyond the settled Chinese heartland is populated by strange mountains, seas, peoples, and beasts each with its own fixed place and properties, and cataloguing them geographically, however fantastical they read to a modern eye, is a legitimate way of mapping and making sense of the unknown.
- geographically organized catalogue of the known and unknown world
- richest surviving source for early Chinese mythology
- composite compilation across the Warring States and Han
- associated with southern Chu shamanic and mythographic tradition
An anonymous, geographically organized catalogue of mountains, rivers, seas, and the strange peoples, plants, minerals, and hybrid creatures (some clearly mythological, others plausibly garbled reports of real fauna) said to inhabit them, moving outward from the known Chinese heartland to increasingly fantastical outer regions. Compiled in stages by unknown hands across the Warring States and Han period, its content is often linked to the mythographic and shamanic traditions of the southern Chu region, and it was edited into a more systematic form by the Han bibliographer Liu Xin. Read historically as a serious, if credulous, geographical and natural-historical reference rather than as fiction, it is now the single richest surviving source for early Chinese mythology.
Commentary
Readers' notes on this work. No account needed - be scholarly, or at least civil.
Loading commentary…