Editing Jiangshi (section)

=Myths & Movies=
Jiangshi, of course, have their roots in Chinese mythology, and have spread by osmosis to other parts of Southeast Asia. The characters for "jiāngshī" are read '''geung-si''' in Cantonese, '''cương thi''' in Vietnamese, '''kyonshī''' in Japanese, and '''gangsi''' in Korean. It is also known as '''phi dip chin''' in Thai, '''hantu pocong''' in Malay, and '''vampir cina''' in Indonesia. Older Western translations just call it the "Chinese Vampire".

As we stated at the start of this article, there are a ''lot'' of different interpretations of the creature, but the basic concept is of a stiff-limbed undead corpse that kills people to feed on their qi (life force) and usually prefers to only be active at night, hiding in caves or coffins during the day.

The earliest known source of the Jiangshi myth appears in the book ''Yuewei Caotang Biji'', published at the tail-end of the 1700s by Qing Dynasty scholar Ji Xiaolan. According to this book, a jiangshi is a corpse that has been raised from the dead by dark sorcery, steeping it in too much yang qi, possession by an evil spirit, the person's own ''po'' souls, or a restless soul created by improper death, suicide or just lingering mischief, or when an unburied corpse is struck by lightning or a black and/or pregnant cat leaps across the body. Of all these methods, deliberate raising by Taoist sorcery is usually the most prominent, and the mythical jiangshi is most frequently created by sorcerer-gravediggers to make it easier to transport the bodies of the dead back to their own villages to be buried proerly. Hence the iconic depiction of the jiangshi featuring a large paper scroll glued to their forehead; this scroll contains a binding spell that keeps the jiangshi docile and obedient.

Repelling or slaying a jiangshi is, once again, a highly variable affair, with different regions and different sources mentioning different methods. Some of the most popular are using swords fashioned from coins (symbolic of the traditional monetary offerings used to pay for the upkeep of souls in the afterlife) or peach wood (regarded in many Chinese beliefs as able to disperse evil auras), repelling them with an eight-sided Feng Shui "ba-qua" mirror, and the use of sticky rice.

Adding to the confusion, alongside overlap between the wide body of "hungry ghost" mythology, jiangshi movies were ''big'' in the Hong Kong movie industry during the 1980s and 1990s, which shamelessly crosspollinated the traditional jiangshi with elements of Western [[vampire]]s and even [[zombie]]s. These movies created a new mythos that imbued the jiangshi with more bizarre traits and abilities, such as being able to spread a zombie-like plague with their claws, using barbed tongues to suck blood, or levitating a few inches above the ground instead of hopping. As years have gone past, jiangshi have been continually molded and modified by anime, manga, movies and games, and the concept is now largely as nebulous as the concept of their Western counterpart.