ExclusiveShanhai Jing |The earliest cultural and geographical record in China

Look at those mythical beasts from Shan Hai Jing. Do you think they are all fictitious? The Shan Hai Jing, also called the Classic of Mountains and Seas, is thought to be a wondrous book of ancient myths and legends, but it is indeed the earliest cultural and geographical record in China. With a total of over 30,000 words in 18 chapters, Shan Hai Jing is divided into five mountain chapters called Shan Jing and eight sea chapters called Hai Jing, four chapters covering the great wilderness and a chapter on regions within seas. The book documents over 100 states, 550 mountains, 300 waterways, more than 100 historical figures and 400 mythical monsters. The exact author of the book and the time in which it was written are still undetermined. Legend has it that the Shan Hai Jing was first recorded by Yu the Great, who asked Bo Yi to observe the folk customs and products in various places they reached during the flood control. Yu the Great summoned all gods from different eras that oversaw mountains, rivers and trees, asking them about the mysterious local mountains and rivers, the gold and jade treasures contained in the land, and various flying and crawling birds in the mountains and forests, beasts and insects as well as the customs and so on. The gods generously told the unknown secrets of the world, and Bo Yi wrote down one by one and with explanation. And this is the Shan Hai Jing, it is a book from the gods. The earliest version of the Shan Hai Jing we can now find was published by Liu Xiang and his son Liu Xin in the Western Han Dynasty. Liu Xin said in the editing postscript that the Shan Hai Jing originated from the era of Tang Yu, that is the era of Emperor Yao and Shun, Yu the Great taming the water. It is said in the Shan Hai Jing preface by Guo Pu, a lexicographer of ancient semantics and phonology in the Western Jin Dynasty, that the Shan Hai Jing was finished during seven generations of 3,000 years. The Shan Hai Jing had pictures and scriptures. The pictures come first, and the scripture comes after, which is the explanation of the pictures. Quite a few famous Asian scholars presented beliefs that pictures in Shan Hai Jing were consistent with those carved on Emperor Yu's nine tripods, demonstrating the wonders of mountains, the wonder of water, the wonder of grass, the wonder of wood, the wonder of birds, and the wonder of beasts. According to studies, copies of Shan Hai Jing were taken to Japan during the Sui and Tang Dynasties, or much earlier. In Japan, the work was popular as a and was once regarded as a guidebook for traveling in China. The monsters described in the book were also popular, such as the nine-tailed fox, which is linked to the Killing Stone. It is believed that the stone contains the transformed corpse of a beautiful woman who had been part of a secret plot hatched by a feudal warlord to kill Emperor Toba, who reigned from 1107 to 1123. Judging by the many years of research on Shan Hai Jing by overseas scholars, it seems that the description of Shan Hai Jing is not limited to Asian China and even other continents. The mythical beasts in the book are highly consistent with reality on a global scale. For example, an alien beast with a human face but a tiger body and a white body is highly consistent with the image of the Sphinx in the pyramids of ancient Egypt. Another strange beast called Lu Shu, its shape is like a horse with a white head, its text is like a tiger with a red tail, its sound is like a ballad, its name is Lu Shu. It is consistent with the Okapi, a large mammal discovered in the Congo in the early 20th century. There are also the raccoon fox in the book and the anteater in America. The flying fish in the book looks very similar to the flying fish in the Atlantic Ocean. Enhanced by Shan Hai Jing, Henriette Merz, a Chicago attorney, wrote in Pale Ink that there were 4,000-year-old Chinese trails that could be traced in the Americas. From among the four routes that Merz outlined, Charlotte Harris Rees and her husband Dave chose the route along the Rockies and said in a lecture that her 17,070-kilometer trip might validate the notion that the Shan Hai Jing was an actual journey. Sarah's History of China. See you soon!