This work consists of Volume One of the Shan Hai Jing. Also called the Classic of the Five Treasures, or Classic of the Mountains, it contains a considerable amount of ethnographic data describing the social customs and rituals of the early Eastern Zhou Dynasty and in particular those traditions of the state of Chu. It refers to no less than 61 deities, 88 diseases, 307 animals and animal hybrids, 183 plants and plants hybrids, 82 minerals, and 846 geographical structures.
This major source of Chinese mythology (third century BC to second century AD) contains a treasure trove of rare data and colorful fiction about the mythical figures, rituals, medicine, natural history, and ethnic peoples of the ancient world. The Classic of Mountains and Seas explores 204 mythical figures such as the gods Foremost, Fond Care, and Yellow, and goddesses Queen Mother of the West and Girl Lovely, as well as many other figures unknown outside this text. This eclectic Classic also contains crucial information on early medicine (with cures for impotence and infertility), omens to avert catastrophe, and rites of sacrifice, and familiar and unidentified plants and animals. It offers a guided tour of the known world in antiquity, moving outwards from the famous mountains of central China to the lands “beyond the seas.” Translated with an introduction and notes by Anne Birrell.
The first major reassessment of ancient Chinese religion to appear in recent years, this book presents the religious mentality of the period through personal and daily experiences.
A Chinese Bestiary presents a fascinating pageant of mythical creatures from a unique and enduring cosmography written in ancient China. The Guideways through Mountains and Seas, compiled between the fourth and first centuries b.c.e., contains descriptions of hundreds of fantastic denizens of mountains, rivers, islands, and seas, along with minerals, flora, and medicine. The text also represents a wide range of beliefs held by the ancient Chinese. Richard Strassberg brings the Guideways to life for modern readers by weaving together translations from the work itself with information from other texts and recent archaeological finds to create a lavishly illustrated guide to the imaginative world of early China. Unlike the bestiaries of the late medieval period in Europe, the Guideways was not interpreted allegorically; the strange creatures described in it were regarded as actual entities found throughout the landscape. The work was originally used as a sacred geography, as a guidebook for travelers, and as a book of omens. Today, it is regarded as the richest repository of ancient Chinese mythology and shamanistic wisdom. The Guideways may have been illustrated from the start, but the earliest surviving illustrations are woodblock engravings from a rare 1597 edition. Seventy-six of those plates are reproduced here for the first time, and they provide a fine example of the Chinese engraver's art during the late Ming dynasty. This beautiful volume, compiled by a well-known specialist in the field, provides a fascinating window on the thoughts and beliefs of an ancient people, and will delight specialists and general readers alike.
A Chinese classic, the Shan Hai Jing, reportedly from 2000 BC claimed travels to the ends of the earth. However, today many, while accepting the antiquity of this account, believe it was just mythology. But was it?Testing the hypothesis that the Shan Hai Jing described actual surveys of North America, Charlotte Harris Rees, author of books about early Chinese exploration, followed an alleged 1100 mile Chinese trek along the eastern slope of the US Rocky Mountains. The Chinese account should have been easy to disprove. In the travelogue Did Ancient Chinese Explore America? Rees candidly shares her initial doubts then her search and discoveries. She weaves together history, subtle humor, academic studies, and many photographs to tell a compelling story.
The gorgeously illustrated contemporary edition of an ancient Chinese text—for fans of fantastic beasts everywhere Fantastic Creatures of the Mountains and Seas is a new translation for contemporary readers of a classic Chinese text that is at once the geography of an ancient world, a bestiary of mythical creatures, and a book of cultural and medicinal lore. Illustrated throughout with more than 180 two-color drawings that are so sinuous they move on the page, it is a work for lovers of fantasy and mythology, ancient knowledge, fabulous beasts, and inspired art. The beings catalogued within these pages come from the regions of the known world, from the mountains and seas, the Great Wastelands, and the Lands Within the Seas that became China. They include spirits and deities and all sorts of strange creatures—dragons and phoenixes, hybrid beasts, some with human features, some hideous or with a call like wood splitting, or that portend drought or flood or bounty; others whose flesh cures disease or fends off nightmares, or whose pelt guarantees many progeny. Drawn from The Classic of Mountains and Seas, Fantastic Creatures is the work of two members of China's millennial generation, a young scholar and writer once known as the youngest "Genius of Chinese Cultural Studies" and an inspired illustrator trained in China and the United States, who together managed to communicate with the soul of a 4,000-year-old beast and have brought forth its strange beauty. Their work has been rendered into English by the foremost translator of modern Chinese literature in the West.
" Shan Hai Jing " (山海经）, is a blend of rare natural history of geography customs blog. The book relates generally believed that the ancient myth , geography , animals , plants , minerals , witchcraft , religion , history , medicine , folk and ethnic content in all aspects . "Shan Hai Jing" records many folk legends of monsters , weird monsters and strange legends, which have long been regarded as a book of strange language . Some contemporary scholars believe that Shan Hai Jing is not only a myth, but also a survey record of ancient geography , including some ancient clan genealogy, sacrificial name, is a book of historical value. Contemporary scholars generally believe that "Shan Hai Jing" is not a one-time book, the author is not one person, but a collective result of long-term accumulation by different eras and different authors.
Shan Hai Jing (The Legends of Mountains and Seas), commonly titled The Classic of Mountains and Seas or Guideways Through Mountains and Seas per Richard Strassberg, was a book that was juxtaposed to the later book Shui Jing (classic or canons on 137 rivers) written by Sang Qin of the Cao-Wei dynasty (220-265 A.D.). For the absurdities and strange things in the book, such as folklore monsters, weird animals, ancient clan genealogies and strange lands (i.e., terra incognita), scholars of different dynasties felt troublesome to determine the genre in the imperial bibliography. In the Manchu Qing dynasty, Ji Xiaolan treated the book as fiction; during the Republic of China, Lu Xun treated the book as sorcery; and subsequently, Yuan Ke treated the book as mythology. Anne Birrell, author of The Classic of Mountains and Seas, pointed out that the book was taken to be of different genre in history, such as geomancy, geography and cosmology, etc., with the Westerners and Japanese going astray in different directions as well, including the claims of cosmography per M. Nazin (1839), geography per Léon de Risny (1890s), tribal peoples per Gustav Schlegel (1892), deities per Edward T. C. Werner (1923), materia medica per Bernard E. Read (1928-39), religious and medical per Ito Seiji (1969), ethnographic per Rémi Mathieu, folk medicine per John William Schiffeler (1977, 1980), gendered motif per Riccardo Francasso (1988), and bestiary per Richard Strassberg (2018), etc. Today, in the context of China's assertion of the grandiose imperial past, the book was wrongly treated by the Chinese to be about ancient geological exploration records, a theme also seen in Henriette Mertz's Pale Ink (1958). The Legends of Mountains and Seas, which would be expounded in this book to be about two different kinds of fortune-telling, sorcery and divination, should not be taken as a Han-dynasty equivalent philosophical 'jing' [canons or classic, i.e., longitude/28 lodges' asterism] learning edited by Confucius and his disciples, nor the nature of the derivative sets of interpretation and commentary books that were known as the Han dynasty 'wei' ['latitude' or "five planets' divination"] series, nor the 'chen-wei' (ch'an wei) prophecy and argot books (i.e., implicit prophecy or cryptology that Jacques Gernet called by esoteric commentaries). While the mountain part of the book could be termed 'guideways' as proposed by Yuan Ke and Richard Strassberg, the 'jing'-suffixed seas' components could not be qualified with this tag. The mountains' part was actually the ancient Shi-fa stalk divination. The Legends of Mountains and Seas was compiled by Liu Xin (53 BC - 23 AD). The book, totaling 18 chapters nowadays, apparently developed the different contents throughout the Zhou, Qin, Han and Jinn dynasties. It was deduced that Liu Xin combined the five chapters of the book on the "mountains" (Wu Zang San Jing) with the chapters on the "[over-]seas" contents to become a consolidated mountains and seas' book. The seas or overseas' components could be further separated into two groups, i.e., the "inner seas" and the "outer seas" sections that were compiled by Liu Xin and the "within-seas" and the "overseas wilderness" sections that were possibly collected by Guo Pu (A.D. 276-324), with the former two sections possibly synchronizing with the Han empire's military expansion, and the latter two sharing similar contents as Lian-shan Yi (divination on concatenated [undulating] mountain ranges), Gui-cang Yi (returning-to-earth hoarding divination), A.D. 279 Ji-zhong tomb divination texts, and the 1993 Wangjiatai excavated divination texts.
Of Mountains and Seas is a fictional play that weaves together legendary characters from the classic Chinese text, Shanhaijing. The well-known mythical characters are presented as ordinary individuals who, despite their divine powers, struggle with the misadventures and emotional consequences of life. The gods appear innocent and childish, comically mixing up traditional social roles and behavior. Gao Xingjian infuses his play with his trademark unconventionality and esthetic flair, indulging in a considerable amount of inventive and open staging that allows directors to add their own creative stamp. The spectacular, eccentric characters make this play a colorful dramatic experience.
The Ben cao gang mu, compiled in the second half of the sixteenth century by a team led by the physician Li Shizhen (1518–1593) on the basis of previously published books and contemporary knowledge, is the largest encyclopedia of natural history in a long tradition of Chinese materia medica works. Its description of almost 1,900 pharmaceutically used natural and man-made substances marks the apex of the development of premodern Chinese pharmaceutical knowledge. The Ben cao gang mu dictionary offers access to this impressive work of 1,600,000 characters. This third book in a three-volume series offers detailed biographical data on all identifiable authors, patients, witnesses of therapies, transmitters of recipes, and further persons mentioned in the Ben cao gang mu and provides bibliographical data on all textual sources resorted to and quoted by Li Shizhen and his collaborators.
