Suggestions for topics for further exploration

Here I collected a list of topics and themes for you to explore further. Check also the additional list at the bottom and you can contribute new ones, just email me with suggestions!

You can also explore what students have done previously, looking through our textbook China’s Magical Creatures. The main goal this semester (F22) is to make the existing chapters shine: connect, condense and merge and add more study-aids and tools to help students learn the material easily. There’s a good foundation, but we can make this third edition an absolutely amazing project.

You can expand an existing chapter, or rewrite it, as long as you acknowledge on whose work you build.

Understanding the world
Life after death
Animals
History, literature, and the space in between
Other topics

1. Understanding the world:

The Book of Changes (Yijing)

Also translated as The Classic of Changes, this is one of key texts of Confucian scholarship (together with the Book of Documents which contains the “Tribute of Yu”). For centuries people have used this text to navigate through difficult passages and decisions in life, relying on different methods to choose one of sixty-four hexagrams (sets of six lines). These describe nuances in different situations, and nothing is ever black or white, since all of it is based on the principles of yinyang theory. (You can now consult your hexagram by refreshing this webpage: a new one will appear at random in the sidebar!)

The Sciences of Heaven and Earth

The Chinese have a long tradition of astronomical observations. The ruler, as the Son of Heaven, was seen as the linchpin which held heaven and earth in good balance. Solar and lunar eclipses that were not correctly predicted, comets, and the movements of the plants and stars were interpreted as signs from Heaven that the ruler should mend his ways, or he would fall from power. This led to a complex body of knowledge which combined five phases and yinyang theory with political and moral philosophy and mathematics into something more akin to astrology.

Masters of the Strange (Fangshi)

Esoteric (specialist, secret) knowledge of the workings of the world was necessary to understand the strange phenomena that were happening all around, including at the court. Many emperors were fascinated by ideas of longevity (or preferably immortality), travel to distant realms, and miraculous events, in addition to explanations of omens and portents. The Fangshi (Gentlemen of [esoteric] Techniques) were a group of specialists who were kept at court during the Han dynasty to help the emperors with that branch of knowledge, but the other officials looked down on them. Several biographies and many anecdotes are preserved in official historical accounts, documenting the wondrous feats of this particular group.

2. Life after death:

Ghosts and ancestors:

Explore some of the commonly held beliefs about what happens to the dead, before the rising popularity of Buddhism created a new view of the afterlife.

Ancestors were already important during the Shang dynasty, and the kings communicated with their ancestors on a daily basis using the oracle bones. There were sacrifices to the ancestors throughout the Zhou and Han dynasties. Dead relatives could create trouble for their offspring if the corpse was not taken care of; part of the funerary rituals included making sure the deceased had the right paperwork for the bureaucracy of the underworld.

Tombs were an important space for making sure one’s dead relatives were comfortable and would not create trouble; but some people thought that the spirit traveled into higher realms, or to distant lands of immortals.

The mausoleum of the First Emperor

The world-famous terracotta warriors were buried about one mile east from the tumulus covering the tomb of the First Emperor of Qin, who unified China in 221BCE. The entire mausoleum re-created a magnificent underground palace, complete with army, entertainment, and traps to ward off grave robbers. It is one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century, and there is much to learn about the Qin dynasty as well as views about the afterlife.

Buddhist Hell

Buddhism as a religious belief in China mixed the native views of a bureaucratic afterlife with the Indian Buddhist ideas about a purgatory, where one’s failures and good deeds were measured. There are many great stories, and paintings depicting all the evils of hell…

We already encountered the ghost month in the video “The Gravedigger’s Luck”, but there are many other materials, from stories and painting depicting the ten kings of hell. One famous person who traveled to hell and back is the second Tang, emperor Tang Taizong (r. 626-649). He was called to hell in 636, but returned and lived to tell the tale. The oldest known version of the story dates from the 9th century, the most elaborate version is from the late 16th century.

3. Animals

Foxes

Foxes were (and still are) devious creatures in Chinese culture. Both male and female fox spirits or fox fairies are attested in historical records and anecdotes, but it is the female fox that was the most dangerous. She would find a human lover, and then exploit his yang energy to balance out her excessive yin energy, and in the end kill him. So what happens when an innocent man in Tang dynasty Chang’an encounters a fox-fairy?…

There is a lot of material on foxes – late imperial fiction has many stories about foxes, too, and a few good studies. This would make a nice additional research project to explore in the second half of the semester.

White Snake

The White Snake is a beloved character in Chinese traditional plays (“opera”), but she is a demon, who falls in love with her victim. The story is set around the beautiful area of Hangzhou, and West Lake (Xihu). While snakes are not as prominent as foxes in literature, this is a very popular story. It has evolved through the centuries from Ms. White cast as an evil demon, to a lovable creature who is misunderstood.

Dragons, and medicine

Of course dragons belong in this course. But how do dragons fit into Chinese natural history, how they are different from European ideas about dragons, and how can Chinese dragons be used as medicine? That last question also leads to the topic of Materia Medica or Pharmacopeia (texts listing medicinal drugs, how to prepare them and how to apply them), and Chinese medicine, which is closely linked with yinyang theory and the Five Phases.

Mountains

If you’re hunting down magical creatures in China, try the mountains, and in particular the mountains in southwestern China. You can study famous picture scrolls under the title “Searching for demons in the mountains”, or commonly held beliefs on how to protect yourself as you travel through the mountains, “the final frontier”.

4. History, literature, and the space in between

Tang short stories

Already before the Tang dynasty, scholars were collecting stories that they considered as history, but were not worthy of inclusion in the official historical record. They created a new category of “records of the strange” (zhiguai) or “traditions of the marvelous” (chuanqi). To us, these are fantastical stories with a strong supernatural element, but to the Chinese at the time these stories inhabited a strange space between history and anecdote, and there was no concept of “fiction” as a fabricated story based purely on imagination. “The World in a Pillow” and “The Governor of the Southern Branch” are two famous stories that bring their protagonist into a different realm, where they live fulfilled lives, but something is “off”.

Outlaws of the Marsh/The Marshes of Mount Liang

In the twelfth century a gang of bandits gathers in the marshlands of Shandong and create an impregnable stronghold on Mount Liang. That is loosely based on historical facts (though we know next to nothing else about them). But the “origin story” given in the novel that grew out of the legends surrounding these tough but amiable characters, shows they are anything but human. One of the great novels of the Ming dynasty, with a supernatural background to what can be called China’s first great Kungfu novel.

Creation of the Gods

This sixteenth-century novel explains how the different gods commonly known in China came to be; the early chapters contain the origin story of Nezha: a powerful deity who is a troublemaker, who disobeys his father, and who causes death and destruction, while the other deities seem powerless. The text is an elaborate illustration of the way in which gods, demons, spirits and even mere mortals can rise up and down the scale from ghost to powerful deity, within a hierarchy that parallels the (human) imperial order.

Monkey

Like Creation of the Gods, the story of Monkey deals with a troublemaker extra-ordinaire. Who can tame this unruly creature? This is the background story that starts of the famous sixteenth century novel Journey to the West, which also contains the story of Emperor Taizong in Hell (see Buddhist Hell).

The Story of the Stone

The novel Honglou meng (Dream of Red Mansions or Story of the Stone) is in essence a complex portrait of a very wealthy family in eighteenth century China, tracing the rise and fall of their power as they fall out of favor with the emperor. It is an undisputed masterpiece of world literature and well worth your time. The hyper-realistic central story is framed in a supernatural setting, and the text plays with the reader, regularly reminding us that “Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true; Real becomes not-real where the unreal’s real.” (It also shows a refreshing perspective on women, if you’ve had enough of the misogyny that seems pervasive in many other texts in this course.)

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