Harbour of Hungry Ghosts: A Letter from Eliza Chan

Dear Fellowship Readers,

Let me tell you a little about Chinese hopping vampires. Firstly, despite the name, they neither hop, nor are they blood-sucking vampires. Weird right? The term was popularised by the 1980s Mr Vampire movie series, a martial arts comedy-horror about a Taoist priest and his hapless apprentices trying to exorcise the malevolent undead. Up until then, they were known by their Chinese name (e.g. geongsi in Cantonese and in Harbour of Hungry Ghosts; jiāngshī in Mandarin) which means stiff corpse. 

So, why hopping? Stiff corpse is the clue here. After death, rigor mortis sets in, so even though the geongsi are able to move, they are unable to bend at the knee or elbow. They jump after their victims. Why they weren’t called jumping vampires instead is beyond me. Perhaps hopping vampires was deemed less (or more) comical. Either way, the image is both terrifying and hilarious at the same time, in the same way daleks were when I was a kid. 

In Chinese traditional beliefs, the dead should be made offerings at a household shrine. If forgotten or unfed, they can become malevolent. Hungry ghosts. Ghosts apparently aren’t great with directions and can get lost easily. However people often died when they were far from home and needed repatriation. When this happened, their families would employ corpse-drivers to transport them back. The corpse-drivers would stand at the front and back of two bamboo poles, with the corpses in a column between them, poles propped under their armpits, working mostly at night to avoid crowds. Hence the terrifying stories of stiff corpses out after dark, jumping around looking for their next victim, were born. 

Pu Songling, author of Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, put together hundreds of ghost and spirit accounts he heard across China during his travels in the 1600s. Some of them featured geongsi as well as fox spirits and other strange occurrences. These malevolent spirits fed on qi, or life energy. By the 1980s, blood-sucking European vampires were trending. Riffing on this popularity, the geongsi of Hong Kong cinema grew fangs and started to bite people too. The film makers wanted to make an explicit connection between the two and hence the name, despite all the errors with it, stuck.

 Just as European vampires come with their own rules and weaknesses (sunlight, mirrors, garlic and stakes), so too did geongsi lore develop (glutinous rice, paper talisman, chicken blood and batgua mirrors). Some of it from Taoist and folk practices, some of it an invention of the film makers. Take the clothing of geongsi, quintessentially Qing Dynasty officials’ uniforms. This was not because the Qing Dynasty was a particularly haunted era, nor because government officials were more likely to be turned into the undead than the ordinary people. It was because Hong Kong film studios shot large scale Qing Dynasty epic dramas at the time and there were many costumes for extras that could be used to evoke a bygone era.  A practical reasoning that has become an integral part of the lore, much like leprechauns wear green and Frankenstein’s monster has those bolts in his neck. 

The hopping vampires in Harbour of Hungry Ghosts are, despite the name, neither sparkly nor sexy. But for me they are a fascinating part of Chinese folk beliefs that I wanted to share with readers. They are also just really good fun to write, especially in an action-packed, martial arts inspired romp of a book. I found the longest set of stairs in all of Hong Kong to set one of the fight scenes because, why wouldn’t I? Geongsi allowed me to tread a fine line between humour and horror, East and West. After all this research, I too added my own twist to the geongsi lore, because that’s the power of being a fantasy author: I get to make shit up. What exactly that was… well you’ll have to read the book to find out!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this Chinese hopping vampire 101 and I hope you enjoy Harbour of Hungry Ghosts.

Eliza Chan