Leizu: Empress of the Silkworm (15-Minute Books Book 610)

These early guides and almanacs addressed popular concerns such as choosing auspicious days for travel and avoiding danger from gods and demons. In some of the more than , oracle-bone inscriptions from the late Shang dynasty c. This is generally believed to have denoted people with special vision who possessed various techniques of com- municating with spiritual beings. The names of a few individuals such as Shaman Xian [see no. Hence, the portrait of them that can be constructed is often a fragmented one with largely negative overtones.

Further confusion is created by the lack of an inclusive name for the many other varieties of occult practitioners in ancient China and by the anachro- nistic application of such designations by writers of later times. It is not even clear what these people looked like, although some modern scholars believe that painted figures on a zither excavated from a Warring States tomb in the state of Chu maybe depictions of wM-shamans engaged in various ritual activities fig. The most detailed description of their official religious functions emerged in the course of a purported conversation between King Zhao of Chu r.

In antiquity, humans and gods did not maintain direct contact. Those among the people whose essential spirit was capable of absolute concentration and who were, moreover, reverential and serious, whose awareness could correctly distinguish the signs of the realms above and below, whose divine sagacity enabled them to penetrate that which is distant, whose luminous discernment was capable of com- prehending this, and whose perception was able to achieve a deep understanding of it — into such people did the gods descend.

They also knew the names and locations of the important mountains and rivers, the ancestors of the ruling house, the management of the a airs of its ancestral temple, as well as the family lineage generation by generation. Thus, the gods bestowed benefits while the people o ered up sacrifices for them to enjoy. Disasters were averted and there was nothing that the people were in want of.

Painted image of a wu shaman. Detail of decorative images on a zither excavated from a Warring States-period tomb in Chu modern Changtaiguan, Xinyang, Henan in Guan went on to note the various government positions occupied by ww-shamans, indicating that some of them not only played a role in official cults but were also in- corporated into the political structure.

There was undoubtedly much diversity in the styles of their magical practices and beliefs, reflecting not only hierarchical di erences among them but also the considerable variations of local cultures. Little is known of their social organization, however. Their roles may have been largely, though not ex- clusively, hereditary, while only the names and myths about a few individuals have been preserved.

Although images, charms, demonological texts, and almanacs have recently begun to be excavated from tombs, suggesting an abundant pragmatic literature at the time, no theological texts have survived that can be directly connected with them. Perhaps the wn-shamans and other oc- cult practitioners are best defined by the range of their cultural functions.

Among the things they were skilled in were herbal medicine, divination, dream interpretation, ex- orcism, omenology, genealogy, mythology, geography, calendrical and astronomical cal- culation, sacrifices, sacred performance, rainmaking, as well as certain rites of resur- rection. The reader will find that practically all these elements appear in the Guide-ways. In a cen- turies-long process that ultimately undermined the political authority of shamanistic culture, the power of the central Zhou court unraveled as new aristocrats and local clans assumed control in the feudal states and competed with one another for dominance.

To aid the most ambitious of these rulers seeking to reunify China under their hege- mony, groups of literate intellectuals arose and sought to gain patronage by advocat- ing various schools of text-based knowledge. Both are imprecise designations, but collec- tively these literate thinkers did represent a new, highly mobile class proferring a range of ideas throughout the feudal states in response to the challenges of the times.

The role of the elite wu-shamans in official cults may have been tied to earlier aristocratic social structures, for they appear to have become increasingly subordinated to bureacratic rit- ual officials and priests connected to the newly dominant families, who often arose from among the ministerial or gentry class. The latter groups sometimes adopted the gods and divine ancestors of those they displaced and usurped the exclusive rights of previ- ous rulers to sacrifice to the important nature gods on behalf of the state, activities which the wu sometimes resisted. The Mohists notably con- tinued to champion demonological theology, but others selectively abandoned these older beliefs as new dualistic formulations such as the ethereal and earthly souls gained cre- dence.

The early Daoists of the Master Zhuang. Zhuangzi , late 3rd-ist cent, b. Later scholars of the Rw-Confucian school not only followed Confucius in distancing themselves from discussing strange phenomena, but, as in the case of Xun Qing c. Mythology and deity imagery contin- ued to be adapted to their systems, and many of the texts transmitted by these schools actually became repositories that preserved certain shamanistic traditions. However, the e ect of committing hitherto esoteric orally transmitted knowledge to writing en- abled nonspecialists among the literate elite to practice many of these techniques as well as to freely develop them in new directions.

Inevitably, the prestige of elite ww-shamans eroded. By the end of the second century c. In the face of relentless political hostility from officials, the wu were finally legally proscribed from becoming officials themselves, and henceforth the government sought to confine them, though not always successfully, to a substratum of the popular culture.

Finally, the new, more universalistic religions of Daoism and Buddhism, with their superior magical techniques, organized priesthoods, and sacred texts, were beginning to spread among all classes. In particular, the Celestial Masters School of Daoism absorbed many of the occult practices and directly challenged the local authority of the wu and th efang- shi, who appeared increasingly unsophisticated and less efficacious by comparison.

Earlier works such as the Book of Changes Yijing , c. Lii Liishi chunqiu, c. They tended to bring together both existing texts and oral traditions, often organizing their data for handy reference by using cosmological frameworks such as numerical systems, the lunar calendar and the four seasons, and spatial structures. As found in various forms in many premodern cultures, cosmographies typically blend empirical fact, hearsay, and fantasy within a geographical framework, purport- ing to be accurate descriptions of the world.

Cosmographies project the possibilities of a totalizing perspective by seamlessly mapping the near and the distant, the known and the unknown, the visible and the hidden, the verifiable and the imagi- nary. The reader willingly consumed an illusion that all the important objects of real- ity had been collected and ordered according to a fundamental taxonomy and that these things were now manageable and available for exploitation. Both official and private libraries during the Warring States period possessed vari- ous kinds of cosmographies that utilized words and probably images as well.

Although historical events and genealogical sequences may be included, this kind of ordering is essentially beyond linear temporality and is subordinated to the repetitive rhythms of natural processes, myth, and ritual. These books were continually evolving as new intelligence about the world was gathered. Those used in the major feudal states must have particularly grown in scope, detail, and or- ganization, creating totalizing visions that mirrored their political aspirations to achieve hegemony and national reunification. Certain government activities related to the necessities of statecraft also resulted in the production of written data, some of which found its way into the Guideways.

Metal, especially copper, was increasingly necessary for the weapons needed by the massive armies of the Warring States. The Master Guan urged rulers to survey mountains, take note of those that yielded valuable metals, and even proscribe the common people from trespassing — on pain of death. Wei Yan was made marshal of Chu, and Zimu [the chief minister] commissioned him to regulate the government levies and count the number of cuirasses and weapons each fief had to contribute.

He determined the levies due, fixing the number of chariots and horses to be contributed, and assess- ing the numbers of chariot drivers, foot soldiers, and armored soldiers with shields that had to be mustered. He presented the results to Zimu. They were all proper. The pres- ence of metals including copper is noted in over two hundred places, while a few moun- tains are specifically prohibited from being climbed. As geographical knowledge expanded through increased travel, military campaigns, and government-sponsored expeditions, heightened diplomatic relations led to greater contacts with neighboring as well as more distant foreign peoples.

Last, the Guideways can be related to an important group of texts that lie somewhat outside the mainstream of those mentioned above. Chu was the major feudal state in what is now central and southern China and a strong contender during the Warring States. Its cul- ture was regarded by the other Chinese states, especially those of the Central Plains and to the northeast, as only partially civilized and was characterized by its strong faith in shamanistic religion. After losing his influence at court, he goes into exile, visiting mythical realms, and meets gods, goddesses, and strange creatures as well as shamans.

Most of its pieces celebrate eroticized encounters with a range of high gods and nature deities who are invoked to appear. After the Guideways, this song is the second greatest repository of ancient mythology and often confirms its content. It is worth noting that the earliest com- mentator, Wang Yi c. This suggests that the Guide- ways may have been similarly committed to writing not by ww-shamans themselves but by others.

It is not impossible that certain strata of the Guideways could have been tran- scribed by literate ww-shamans who, in the era of competing, text-based schools, wished to preserve their knowledge or reinforce their oral authority with a written work of their own. Scribes in pri- vate aristocratic or feudal court libraries could have also contributed to piecing the book together from these and other sources both written and oral. Gradually, it was expanded for purely pragmatic purposes related to government administration as well as to fulfill the needs of patrons to know more about the world and its strange creatures.

What does seem clear is that the Guideways took form over some time and that its diverse content served a variety of purposes. Largely because of the unique light that the Songs of Cliu shines on the spiritual be- liefs of late Chu, and based on certain linguistic traces in the text, some scholars in re- cent years have argued that the Guideways itself is largely a product of Chu writers and reflects a worldview that is more characteristic of this feudal state than any other.

It ultimately absorbed more than sixty states and numerous tribal groups. There is still some debate over the origins of the Chu people and their early history. According to some scholars, the core ethnicities may have migrated from the north and eventually by the Eastern Zhou period established themselves in central China along the Han and middle reaches of the Long Yangtze River in modern Hubei, then re- garded as the South. Among the ancestors claimed by its royal house were the Yellow Thearch, Zhuanxu, Old-Child Laotong , and Zhurong, all of whom are mentioned in the Guideways.

It was one of the first states to break away from the ritual authority of the central Zhou court and, over the course of more than five centuries, became a ma- jor contender to reunify the Chinese world. By the time it was defeated by Qin in b. This area covered each of the five di- rections, and its government would have had particular need for a cosmography con- sistent with the framework of the Guideways.

Although Chu maintained certain common cultural features with other Chinese states and the central Zhou court, it nev- ertheless also increasingly became di erentiated from them. During its greatest ex- pansion in the Spring and Autumn period, it was highly successful in absorbing the be- liefs and artistic styles of the many non-Chinese states on its periphery that it gradually engulfed so that others particularly associated it with shamanistic and demonological practices, the worship of nature gods, and the early Daoist philosophy expressed in such texts as the Old Master Laozi , late 3rd cent, b.

Even dur- ing its gradual decline in the Warring States period, it still expanded eastward. After its military defeat, Chu continued to be a major cultural and political force well into the Han dynasty, whose imperial family also originated from this region. Thus, though con- clusive proof is still lacking, there is some reason to regard Chu as the place where a critical shaping of the Guideways may have occurred, even though its content could also reflect the worldview of a more northern or western state such as Qin.

Unfortu- nately, there is so far no clear indication of what precise form the text took during the Zhou dynasty, and there are no direct references to it among the other early surviving texts, despite instances of similar content. Sima Qian wrote that he considered the Guideways and a similar cos- mography, the now-lost Basic Annals of Yu Yu benji, n. Such a distinction would grow in Chinese literature and lead some scholars in later centuries to also challenge the Guideways as an accurate description of the world. During the reign of Emperor Xuan r.

Since then, many court scholars have particularly esteemed the Guideways through Mountains and Seas and the Rw-Confucian erudites have all studied it. They consider it a unique work, a means of investigating auspicious and strange phenomenon as well as of observing the customs of foreign peoples in distant lands. He also recorded an earlier incident involving Dongfang Shuo b. One day, a strange bird was presented to the palace and refused to eat anything until Dongfang Shuo identified it and described its eating habits, claiming to have obtained the information from the Guideways.

Many of the Warring States texts that we have today passed through his hands and were substantially edited by him. This power struggle contributed to the collapse of the Western Han dynasty in 8 c. When Liu presented his edited version of the Guideways to the Western Han imperial court in 6 b. He may have stitched together several separate cosmographies into one book, noted variant versions of these texts, reorganized the chapters, and per- haps interpolated additional material.

In addition, he probably translated the ancient graphs from their archaic styles into the simpler, more standardized calligraphic forms that had evolved during the Han dynasty. But to preserve the mythical authority of the text, he typically refrained from revealing too much about his role. Like Sima Qian, he disparaged shamanistic culture, though he shared the general belief in the existence of dragons and other strange crea- tures. When Em- peror Ming r.

Hequshu and the now-lost Maps to the Tributes of Yu Yugongtu, n. Yiwenzhi, late 1st cent. The Guideway s was now considered an occult text that had been espoused by members of an eclectic philosophical school called Techniques and Calculations Shushujia. The works in this category were distinguished from the more orthodox, canonical texts of the. Ru-Confucian tradition, for the members of this school had by now been relegated to the lesser ranks of specialist practitioners.

The Guideways was listed in this last group, which includes six works on geomancy and phys- iognomy. In the four centuries until reunification under the Sui, Confucianism managed to survive in a less energetic form as an official ideology with limited intellectual appeal. New literary genres spread during this period such as accounts of anomalies and local geographies, religious scriptures, as well as a wide range of manu- als of the occult, many of which transmitted ancient mythology and other information related to the content of the Guideways.

The latter pur- portedly documents the extensive tour of a Western Zhou dynasty king of the mid- tenth century b. Yet another text about strange creatures circulating during this era was the Master Lie Liezi, c. All mountains, whether large or small, contain gods and powers, and the strength of these divinities is directly proportional to the size of the mountains.

To enter the mountains without the proper recipe is to be certain of anxiety or harm. In some cases people fall ill, are wounded, or become stricken with fear. In other cases, lights and shadows are seen, strange sounds are heard. Lack of the proper recipe can make a large tree fall when there is no wind, or a high rock fall for no apparent reason, striking and killing people.

It can confuse such travelers or drive them madly onward so that they fall into ravines. Lack of preparation may cause you to meet with tigers, wolves, or poisonous insects that will harm you. Moun- tains are not to be entered lightly. His ideal reader should be an independent thinker unfazed by contemporary opinion who belongs to a select group of cognoscenti.

However, he anachronistically argued that it supplemented the themes of the Master Zhuang, a work revered by Daoists, Buddhists, and more secular schol- ars whose skeptical philosophy had little in common with the shamanistic beliefs in the Guideways. He apparently felt no conflict between this position and more animistic and demonological beliefs and argued that what people conven- tionally regard as the strange is a legitimate part of nature: People who read the Guideways through Mountains and Seas today all suspect it because of its exaggerations and absurdly extravagant claims and because of its many strange and fanciful expressions.

For, how can one completely describe the vastness of the universe, the abundant forms of life, the benevolent sustenance of yin and yang, the myriad distinctions between things, the admixture of essences bubbling over in conflict, wandering souls and strange divinities who take on form, migrate to mountains and rivers, and adopt beautiful appearances as trees and rocks?

Yet, Coordinating their diverse tendencies, they resonate as a single echo: Perfecting their transformations, they blend into one image. What is the reason behind this? A thing is not strange in itself; it depends on me to make it strange. These sought to resolve a set of traditional textual problems that in- cluded pronunciation and transcription of graphs, identification of geographical places, correction of textual errors, dating and organization of the chapters, identifying the authorship, and interpreting the recorded myths.

Simultaneously, Guo Pu also intro- duced the possibility of more personal, alternative readings by composing some three hundred short poems known as the Encomiums to the Illustrations of the Guideways through Mountains and Seas Shanhaijing tuzan, c. These too form a kind of commentary though often with a playful, irreverent tone that demystifies the authority of the text. For example, the Pearl-Turtles [no. Their taste is sweet and sour, and they can cure seasonal epidemics if eaten.

Embodying Heaven, Earth, and Man, They su er harm, becoming trade. Possessing so many uses, How can they possibly escape? Having renounced the conventional ladder of success through an official ca- reer, he often affirmed instead the purer existence of rural life and literary creativity. Some figures are vehicles for expressing his political frustrations and criticisms. Others are envied for dwelling in utopian environments, and still others are considered tragic char- acters evoking commiseration.

The latter can be seen in poem ten about Spirit-Guardian [no. Tao regarded both sympathetically, for even though they metamorphosed after their deaths, they remained trapped by the resentments of their pasts: Spirit-Guardian bites hold of twigs Determined to fill up the deep- blue sea. Xingtian dances wildly with spear and shield: His old ambitions still burn fiercely. In vain do they cling to their hearts from the past. How can they, a better day, foresee? This attitude affirming per- sonal meanings of the text through figurative interpretations was later charmingly de- picted in an illustration in the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting Jieziyuan huazhuan, , in which a recumbent scholar leisurely gazes at the illustrations in a direct allusion to Tao Qian see frontispiece.

Thefirst page of chapter l from the printed edition of the Guideways through Mountains and Seas. From Shanhaijing zhuan facsimile ed. In the next major official bibliography after the Han, which was included in the History of the Sui Dynasty Suishu: With the development of commercial woodblock printing in the Song dynasty, elite as well as more popular editions began to be printed. You Mao , a biblio- phile who published the earliest surviving edition through a local government printing house fig. Not only did he believe that the Guideways was mostly compiled sometime just before the Qin period, but he voiced a new, historical appreciation of it.

In his opinion, as a record of an archaic cultural mentality, the text was worth preserving simply because of its an- tiquity, quite apart from any practical use. Reinvigorated by the more metaphysically inclined ideology of Neo- Confucianism, some intellectuals continued to evince an interest in the Guideways. This interest reflected not only the perennial desire to comprehend strange phenomena but the challenge to render such things intelligible in terms of the more rational spirit of the age.

These included more humanistic themes in the representation of the strange, developing a tendency that had earlier arisen in Tang fiction. In response to a question from one of his students, he replied: These texts underwent several meta- morphoses and continued to be transmitted in Europe through the Middle Ages, sur- viving in pseudoscientific form into the Enlightenment.

Despite the increase in travel and the more factual accounts that appeared over the centuries, many Euro- pean scholars continued to affirm the existence of these creatures somewhere in the di- rection of the distant east. There are intriguing parallels between some of these figures and foreign tribes in the Guideways such as people with large, heavy ears that they must carry fig.

Their bodies are milk-white. Whether these indigenously emerged from the European and Near Eastern imaginations or represent the dissemination of ancient myths from elsewhere remains to be explored, but just as in China, the representations of these strange crea- tures in texts confirmed their existence for readers well into a period when a spirit of empiricism and greater exploration of the world began to take hold. It was not until the middle of the sixteenth century, however, that another revival of interest in the book began that continued through the Qing dynasty and into the modern period.

The burgeon- ing commercial economy and urban culture of this period supported a rapid expan- sion of popular printing and of a wide variety of relatively inexpensive books to serve a broader readership beyond the elite level of scholars. Some of these developments provided additional contexts for appreciating the Guideways. This category originally denoted mar- ginal or ideologically unorthodox stories that were gradually excised from official his- toriography. Xu Hongzu was in- spired to devote his life to exploring the Chinese world by reading such texts and pro- duced monumental travel diaries that recorded his extensive journeys in minute detail.

Although China under the Ming had largely turned inward and sought to restrict for- eign contacts, events such as the seven naval explorations of the eunuch-admiral Zheng He to South Asia and East Africa from to , the continuing visits of tribute-bearing emissaries from neighboring peoples, and the arrival of European traders and missionaries fanned interest in gathering intelligence about foreigners.

One result of this interest was the publication of a number of works that continued the tradition of court records of tributary peoples such as the compendium Records of Foreign Guests Xianbinlu , , as well as illustrated collections such as the Illustrations and Records of Foreign Lands Yiyu tuzhi, Ming dynasty, see fig. On the one hand, popular religion continued, as it had for centuries, to be largely focused on using shamanistic and de- monological practices for personal benefit.

This fact was remarked upon by the Jesuit Matteo Ricci — , who reported back to his European correspondents on as- pects of Chinese life. He noted with evident disapproval the widespread practice of ex- orcists plastering the walls of houses with pictures of monstrous strange creatures drawn in ink on yellow paper. On the other hand, there was also a minor, though noticeable trend toward iconoclasm among some Confucian scholars who be- lieved that representing gods in temples interfered with a direct comprehension of the moral Way Dao.

They managed to sponsor the destruction of some city gods for a short time and to proscribe the use of images of them in the state cult. Among the earliest Ming scholars to closely reexamine the text of the Guideways was Yang Shen An unsuccessful official, he was sentenced to internal ex- ile in Yunnan province in the distant south where aboriginal tribes, non-Chinese lo- cal cults, and shamanism were still pervasive. While there, he further questioned the cultural orthodoxy of his time through a penchant for ancient epigraphy and inves- tigations of strange phenomena. Wang had earned the metropolitan graduate degree in and rose to the prestigious positions of minister of both the ministries of rites and personnel in Nanjing.

The author of commentaries on the five Confucian classics, he sought to improve on Guo Pu, whose version he re- garded as too enamored of the strange and insufficiently concerned with elucidating the rational cosmic patterns of Neo-Confucianism. Later, he served in the Hanlin Academy, where he helped compile the official His- tory of the Ming Dynasty Mingshi, printed , especially the treatise on the calendar.

One collects prefaces and numerous evaluative remarks by schol- ars through the ages tracing the reception of the text from Liu Xin onward. In addition to dealing with traditional questions of authorship, composition, and etymology, Wu Renchen wisely urged the reader not to assume a correspondence between the geography in the Guideways and present-day locations. He also recognized an aesthetic dimension of the language by noting its recurring rhythmic formulas. The grand bibliographical project known as the Complete Works of the Four Libraries Siku quanshu, sponsored by the Qing court gathered more than ten thou- sand books known in China at that time, reprinting 3, of the most important ones while suppressing others deemed to be seditious.

The catalogue of descriptive notes pro- duced by one of the chief editors, Ji Yun , evaluated the acceptable works and expressed an orthodox judgment of them reflecting the highest contemporary stan- dards of scholarship and taste. The Guideways is represented by three editions: The entry on the palace edition provided the opportunity to discuss traditional historiographical issues.

This occurred during the century when the short story writer Pu Songling , the poet Yuan Mei , and Ji Yun himself produced collections of short classical tales about strange phenomena that combined the narrative conventions of earlier anomaly accounts and classical short stories with a new degree of aesthetic imagination and ideological self-consciousness.

These were largely based on careful collation of textual sources using the more intensive scholarly meth- ods of the School of Evidential Research, but some reflect his personal experience as a traveler. A few of these identifications are plausible and have gained acceptance, but many remain questionable. More significant is his defense of the fundamental credi- bility of the Guideways. In contrast to Ji Yun, Bi argued that the book was not at all concerned with discussing the strange, for if the language were understood figuratively, even the most fantastic descriptions could be seen to refer to actual creatures or for- eign peoples.

This argument is not entirely convincing in practice, but it reveals a rare sensitivity to the nature of mythological discourse as di erent from the semiotics of historical writing. It was originally printed in Yangzhou in in a fine edition sponsored by the scholar-patron Ruan Juan , a latter-day promoter of ancient texts.

Perhaps his greatest contribution is to internal textual problems such as attempting to resolve contradic- tions among the di erent recorded versions of myths. In an appendix, he identified and sought to correct more than three hundred misprinted graphs and produced with the help of his wife an updated count of the graphs for each chapter and for the book as a whole. His edition nevertheless summed up the traditional hermeneutical reading of the text and still stands as the single most authoritative one before the modern period.

Li ex- ploited the satiric potential of some of the more fantastic foreign peoples from chap- ters 7 and 16, placing them among thirty or so island kingdoms visited by a group of fictional Chinese travelers during the Tang dynasty. In the late Qing pe- riod, the reading public expanded further to include a new kind of middle-class reader in the treaty ports with a more modern, international outlook. One indication of the degree to which the Guideways still permeated Chinese consciousness is an amusing il- lustration in an issue of the Dianshizhai Pictorial Dianshizhai huabao of fig.

This regular supplement to the influential Shanghai newspaper Shenbao presented scenes reflecting the influence of modern Japanese and Western illustration styles. They depicted current events, social life and customs, scientific advancements, and occa- sionally sensationalistic news designed to titillate and entertain.

This particular illus- tration used a strange creature from the Guideways to explain a bizarre birth said to have recently taken place in Italy. The cap- tion explains that when she was bound with rope in prison, she became obsessed with the idea that she would lose her head and then suddenly gave birth to this anomaly. It goes on to quote the passage in the Guideways describing Xingtian, slyly suggesting that perhaps the child belongs to this species.

Clearly, among the more sophisticated members of this readership, the Guideways was now regarded as an amusing source of the absurd, though, ironically, it continued to be used to identify foreigners as strange creatures. Around this time, however, the book made a deeper impression on the young Lu Xun. Lu later wrote a short reminiscence about an irritating maid he knew as a child, Achang, who finally won his undying a ection after giving him a copy of one of the in- expensive popular editions of the Guideways.

He had previously seen a version in the library of a relative and became obsessed with its illustrations of strange creatures. Among those that particularly impressed him were the human-headed beasts, the nine- headed snake Minister Liu [no. The New Culture Movement, which arose along with the anti-imperialist protests of May 4, , ushered in a period of fundamental questioning of traditional Chinese culture and an unprecedented openness to Japanese and Western intellectual concepts.

Wu Rujun, A Kind of Xingtian. Lithograph illustration from Dianshizhai Pictorial , a supplement to the Shanghai newspaper Shenbao. Everyone who witnessed this was amazed. Someone explained that when the prisoner had been bound with rope she feared that she would lose her head and this obsessive thought engendered the pregnancy which resulted in the birth of this strange creature. Could the child of this female prisoner be one of his kind? From Dianshizhai huabao, series 1, vol. Lu Xun ex- pounded his ideas about the Guideways while he was teaching a new course at Beijing University on traditional Chinese fiction from to , and these first appeared when his lectures were published in Although not all of his ideas have stood the test of time, as mentioned earlier, Lu Xun was notably prescient in asserting the ori- gins of the book as a reflection of the WH-shaman culture.

Later, he and his associates moved on to interests in folklore and popular culture in a continuing e ort to refashion a viable version of traditional Chi- nese civilization for the modern age. He published his opinions on the first five chapters of the Guideways in and also used data from the text for his study of travel in early China. In the mid- s, a volume dedicated entirely to studies of the Guideways appeared in the influential Folk Literature Series of Beijing University.

Yuan Ke , the leading contemporary scholar of early Chinese mythology, has been a major force in focusing attention on the Guideways in recent decades. Having published a collo- quial version of the text and a number of critical studies, his work culminated in in the most complete modern edition so far, the Guideways through Mountains and Seas, Corrected with Commentary Shanhaijing iaozhu. It was also among the first Chinese texts to interest Eu- ropean sinologists in the nineteenth century, some of whom produced partial transla- tions as early as In recent years, there have been further translations of it into En- glish, Japanese, Russian, German, and French, but the most accurate sinological rendition in a Western language so far is the one in Italian recently published by Ri- cardo Fracasso in The remaining two sections represent somewhat di erent geographies.

They contain some duplication of material and variant versions of information within their chapters, indicating that these sections were less subject to close editorial pro- cessing and may have been compiled more haphazardly. Given the preponderance of mythological material throughout the chapters of the Guideways through Seas, in- cluding beliefs that can be traced back to the Shang dynasty or that may be even ear- lier, it would seem that some of the content of these chapters is actually older than the Guideways through Mountains, which most would date to the Warring States pe- riod.

Strictly speaking, though, the form of the present version can only reliably be dated to the time of Guo Pu. The text records a sequence of environmental spheres extending in a given direction each of which usually consists of mountains, bodies of water, or foreign lands. Each sphere is a kind of ecosystem whose strange creatures denote its level of spiritual power.

Distinctive topographical features, resident gods and strange creatures, and valuable objects are cataloged in repetitive, formulaic lan- guage that may have facilitated memorization and that also conveys a sense of cul- tural order common to cosmographies. Because traditional Chinese editorial practice primarily valued the preservation and transmission of information from the past, compilers over the centuries often avoided intervening in the text itself to resolve contradictions, repetitions, or variant versions.

Moreover, ascribing a single date of com- pilation to any group of chapters is not necessarily an indication of the origin or age of the information in a particular passage. The known editors and commentators such as Liu Xin, Guo Pu, and Hao Yixing were all later scholars who were removed from the mentality of the Warring States period.

They did not travel themselves to personally confirm the geography of the Guideways but sought to recover its meaning through the standard historiographical and philological methods of their times, maintaining the tra- ditional attitude of preservers, transmitters, and correctors of ancient texts. Even mod- ern scholars have basically followed a textual approach, for, in fact, no individual could possibly retrace all the itineraries that are recorded. With each new reading, some more parts may emerge more distinctly.

Others remain embedded in the obscurities of ancient discourses and the accidents of transmission. Still, the world according to the Guideways is predominantly a coherent one, and this fact becomes increasingly revealed as one journeys along its itineraries. Fundamentally, it signifies its cosmographical intentions by inscribing a largely natural geography of mountains, rivers, lakes, and seas within the contiguous space of heaven and earth. Chapter 2 records Cleft Mountain in the west, alluding to a myth in which the god Gonggong [no.

The mountain was damaged, and the cord tether- ing heaven to earth snapped. Having the sky and earth, the chaos separated, Thus appeared Renzu, the brother and sister. They climbed to the high mountain Kunlun, To throw the millstone and get married. Therefore, though people in this world look different, In fact they belong to the same family.

I urge you to be a good person, Because a good person can be blessed by the Renzu in earth. A widespread myth at this festival is that of the brother-sister marriage. When Yang and her colleagues met a fifty-year-old woman an illiterate peasant who was selling local snacks in the Renzu Temple complex, they asked her if she knew something about the source of the Renzu Temple.

She related a legend of why the Renzu Temple was reconstructed during the Ming dynasty. After that, when she was asked why people worshiped the ancestors, she told the brother-sister marriage myth: Once upon a time, there were a brother and his sister. Every day, when they went to school, they fed a stone turtle. One day when they fed the turtle, the turtle told them there would be a great flood. Only the two of them survived the deluge by hiding in the belly of the turtle.

They wanted to marry each other in order to re-create human beings. Wondering whether this was proper, they decided to divine by throwing the two pieces of a millstone from two different mountains. The two pieces landed on top of one another, so they got married. While this myth was being told to Yang, several others surrounded them, listening while the woman spoke. The two pieces of the millstone did not fall on top of each other, so they did not get married. With encouragement from Yang and her colleagues, she concluded the story quickly and roughly: They placed the mud-humans outside to let them dry.

But there Introduction 19 A group of pilgrims in the Renzu Temple complex during the temple fair. The leading woman was chanting jingge, Courtesy of Yang Lihui came a rain. So they hurried to sweep the mud-humans back into their cave. During the process, some people lost their arms, some lost their legs, and some were blinded.

That is why today there are some disabled people in this world. Later Yang and her group caught up with the older lady and asked her to tell what she knew of the brother-sister myth. She told the same tale but in a more detailed and vivid narrative style: Therefore, the brother and sister did not get married. Then, they decided to create humans by molding mud. And when the rain came, some were disabled. Because when humans were created by the ancestors, they actually looked like monkeys, because they had fur on their skin.

But they gradually changed, gradually changed, and then became human. Their children became more and more handsome and beautiful. Many factors are interplaying in this dynamic process, including 20 Handbook of Chinese Mythology ethics, evolutionism, and belief. They interweave and shape the conduct of the myth-telling performance. This event also shows how a myth is recontextualized and transformed by a creative person. The older lady illustrated her creativity by changing the myth to solve problems of incest and evolutionism that exist in the brother-sister marriage myth.

Therefore, she made it more reasonable to the modern moral system and scientific notion. While displaying to the folklorists and others her creative competence of myth telling and her authority in traditional knowledge, she also expressed her views and beliefs about ancestors, ethics, science, and human history. In addition, because the Han people make up the majority of the population in China, when some Western scholars introduce Chinese myths they usually discuss only the myths of the Han people.

But in fact, China has 56 ethnic groups including the Han. Since China boasts many ethnic groups, and almost every ethnic group has its own body of myths, myths spread in the modern geographic boundaries of China are rich not only in amount but also in types, themes, and motifs. For example, there are more than ten myth types explaining the origins of humans: Humans were made by gods.

Among this type, there are many subtypes, such as: This subtype can be found in Han, Kazak, and many other ethnic groups. This type of myth can be found in Manchu, Lahu, and others. A myth told among the Tujia people states that the goddess Yiluo created humans, using bamboo as their bones, lotus leaf as the liver, cowpea as their gut, radish as their flesh, and a gourd as their head. Then she poked seven apertures into the head two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, and one mouth and blew air into them, and after that the human was alive. This type of myth can be found in the Baima Tibetan ethnic group in Sichuan Province.

Humans were sown from seeds. A myth told by the Zou people in Taiwan states that a god sowed the seed of humans into the earth, and later humans grew. Humans were spat out from the mouths of gods and goddesses. Among the Uighur people, it is popularly said that a goddess inhaled the dust and air of the universe and then spat out the sun, the moon, the earth, stars, and humans. Humans were made from sound.

A myth spread among the Miao people in Yunnan Province that after a huge flood, only a mother and her son were left. A god turned the mother into a girl to marry the son. When the son realized that the girl he married was none other than his mother, he ran into the wilderness and shouted. His mother followed him and also shouted. Where their voices sounded, there emerged humans. Humans came from the shadows of deities. Humans were made by a god and a goddess projecting their shadows onto the earth.

This type of myth can be found among the Miao people and other groups. Humans were created by two gods touching their knees together. This myth, told by Yamei people in Taiwan, states that the first human couple was created this way. Humans were transformed from animals. Among the Yao people in Guangxi Province, a popular myth explains that the great goddess Miluotuo carried a beehive home and refined the bees several times a day. After nine months, the bees were transformed into humans.

Humans were transformed from plants. Besides these types of myths, there are many other types, themes, and motifs concerning the origin of humans in various ethnic groups, such as a human emerging from a cave, coming out from a huge stone or a gourd, being procreated by animals or plants, being born after a man married a goddess or an animal, being procreated by the sun, or being made from a corpse of a divine creature. Flood myths have been documented among forty-three ethnic groups in China. These myths have different formal characteristics in different ethnic groups. Based on his study of over versions of flood myths, Chen Jianxian, a modern Chinese mythologist, divided the flood myths in China into four principal subtypes: The sibling ancestors received miraculous omens or instructions from gods.

Usually they are told to watch for omens of the flood the eyes of a stone tortoise or a stone lion will turn red, a mortar will produce water, etc. Because of the instruction or warning, the siblings survive the flood by hiding in the stomach of the stone tortoise or the stone lion. In order to re-create human beings, the siblings have to marry each other, but before that, they divine to decide whether they should do so if they throw two pieces of millstone separately from two mountains but the two pieces still touch when they reach the bottom, or if they create fires on two different mountains but the smoke twists together.

After their marriage, the sister gives birth to humans, or the two create humans by molding mud. Chen found that although this type of flood myth is spread in Bai, Manchu, and Hui ethnic groups, it mainly occurs in myths of the Han people. Therefore, he presumes that this type originated from Han people and was transmitted primarily by Hans.

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This subtype states that two brothers, the Thunder God and the ancestor of humans his name differs in different texts , often quarreled with each other. One day, the human ancestor caught the Thunder God. But when he went out, his two young children a brother and his sister; their names differ in different texts set the god free. Before the Thunder God went back to heaven, he sent the siblings one of his teeth or sometimes a seed of a gourd or pumpkin and told them there would be a huge flood and they should do what they were told.

When the flood came, all humans were destroyed except the brother and sister, who hid in a big gourd that grew from the seed sent by the Thunder God. In order to re-create humans, the siblings divined their methods are various, and some are similar to the methods mentioned in the first subtype above and then married.

The sister later gave birth to a gourd. They cut the gourd into pieces, and the pieces turned into humans. Alternately, they opened the gourd and from it came the ancestors of many ethnic groups. Chen presumes that this type might have begun in Miao regions, especially in southeast Guizhou Province, after which it was diffused to other ethnic peoples in different regions.

The only surviving man sought the Heavenly Maiden. This subtype states that the human ancestor plowed fields with his siblings. Every morning after they tilled, they saw that the plowed field had become uncultivated during the night. They found that a wild boar had done this. When his Introduction Among some Han, Miao, Yao, and Tujia ethnic people, the brother-sister couple ancestors are usually worshipped as Nuogong and Nuomu, the god and goddess who originated the ritual of Nuo to drive away devils.

As a reward, he received a prophecy from a god disguised as the wild boar that there would be a flood. He survived the flood by hiding inside a skin-covered drum or a wooden box. He went to heaven and wanted to marry a heavenly maiden. He passed many tests and finally married the girl. They gave birth to three sons, and they became the ancestors of the Tibetan, Naxi, and Bai peoples. The brother and sister plowed the wilderness. This subtype is a combination of the three types above. A myth of this type collected from Gelao people in western Guizhou Province in southwest China states that two brothers plowed a wild field with their sister.

Every morning they saw that the plowed field had become uncultivated during the night. They 23 24 Handbook of Chinese Mythology found that an old man, who in fact was a god, had done this. The god told them that there would be a flood and instructed the elder brother who was unkind to take refuge in a stone boat, and the kind young brother and sister to hide in a huge gourd. As a result, the younger brother and the sister were the only survivors of the flood.

They divined to learn whether they should marry to re-create humans by the similar ways mentioned above. After the verification, they got married and later gave birth to a son. The son married a heavenly maiden and they became the ancestors of humans. This type is spread mainly among Yi and Miao peoples; therefore, Chen has deduced that it may have been formed from a mix of the different types of flood myths of the Yi and Miao peoples. Among his conclusions, Chen writes that flood myths in China are quite rich not only in amount but also in their forms and types. These subtypes show different social lives and cultural characteristics of different ethnic groups, reflect ethnic identity, and illustrate the cultural communication and fusion between ethnic groups in China.

Contexts of Myth Telling in Ethnic Minorities Similar to the contexts of myth telling among the Han people, myths in other ethnic groups also are told on common occasions and in rituals. In the Maonan and Li ethnic groups in southern China, for example, myths are told like other ordinary spoken arts and are not necessarily told in rituals or special occasions.

Anyone can tell myths, and there is no strict method for myth tellers to learn the art of telling myths. Meng divided the rituals in which myths are told into four types according to their different functions: Examples for the first type of ritual come from the Naxi and Achang peoples. When people in the Naxi ethnic group offer sacrifices to the sky, according to tradition they will invite a dongba shaman to preside over the ritual.

When offering sacrifices to dajiagui, the shaman will chant a creation epic that lasts one day and one night. The epic describes how the sky and earth were created by these two ancestors, and how they created humans and cultural artifacts in this world. By chanting the creation epic in this ritual, people ask for blessings from their divine ancestors. At the same time, this epic reminds everyone in the community that they are children of the same ancestors.

Thus, the mythic epic can be used to maintain the tradition and bring together the members of this ethnic community. In the Achang ethnic group, for example, a person is believed to have three souls. After a person dies, one soul will be sent into the grave and one soul will be sent to the ancestors. The third soul will remain in the home to be worshiped. The Achang people believe that only a shaman can properly arrange the three souls. After someone dies, the family will invite all members of the community to attend a funeral and will request that a shaman come and chant the classic texts.

Before the shaman arranges for the souls, he will chant for an entire day. The second part of this ritual is a chant of the history of the nomadic movement of the ancestors, which aims to tell the soul how to travel to meet the ancestors. So the creation epic chanted in funeral rites functions to direct the dead soul toward the ancestors and remind the living that death is not terrible but is a way to leave this world and live in another land with the divine ancestors. In this way the creation epic consoles the dead and the living, and builds a bridge to communicate between the dead and the living.

Lan Ke reported how creation myths were told in a wedding ceremony in in a Jingpo village in Yunnan Province of southwest China. The ceremony continued from morning to night with feasting, music, and dance. It tells that in remote antiquity a flood destroyed the world. Only a girl and her young brother survived by hiding in a wooden drum. Courtesy of Chen Ganglong tions of the Mountain God.

Then they gave birth to a baby that could not eat or sleep and cried all day. The Mountain God cut the baby into eight parts. Four of the parts became four men, and the others became four women. Later they became the ancestors of some ethnic groups. Among them, the fourth one became the ancestor of the Jingpo people, and he then made a rule that from then on Jingpo people should not marry a sibling or a person with the same family name, and they should choose husbands and wives from certain other clans. This kind of myth told in rituals serves to confirm traditional history and remind people of the rules for marriage.

Every March and April before the sowing of crops, people of the same clan went out to hunt for Introduction heads. The heads they found would be placed on altars, and the shaman would lead the clan in worshiping them, chanting the creation myth Sigangli: In the remote past the great god and human ancestor Muyiji ordered one god to create the earth and another to create the sky, the sun, and the moon. Muyiji created animals, plants, and humans. He put humans into a stone cave and led a small bird to peck the stone cave until it opened.

Gradually the Wa people learned to settle down, to speak, and to build houses. But when the Wa people planted the seeds they did not sprout, and when the harvesttime came, a flood destroyed the village. And then Muyiji told the Wa that they should offer human heads as sacrifices to the gods, and after they did this it would always rain during planting and growing, and there would be no flood during harvest.

Later the Wa moved to where they live today in Yunnan Province, and their custom of using heads to offer sacrifices to Muyiji and the corn god was transmitted over time. By obtaining relevant knowledge and telling myths to others, they pass on myths from generation to generation and spread myths to many places. Myth tellers endow meaning and life to myths. When discussing myth tellers, scholars usually emphasize the importance of professional shamans. This is true to some degree, but there are others as well. Three kinds of myth tellers in ethnic groups are discussed here: It should be noted that these three kinds of myth tellers can be found among the Han people, too.

Shamans play an extremely important part in preserving and transmitting traditional knowledge. Myth telling is often part of the work that a shaman does. In many places, shamans are known as the individuals who know the most about myths. In the postscript of his book Mythological Stories of the Manchu People, Fu Yingren, a Manchu folklore collector and formerly a shaman himself in Heilongjiang Province of northeast China, introduces the sources of the myths and sacred stories about gods that he gathered, and also the importance of the shaman in transmitting knowledge about gods.

The students 27 28 Handbook of Chinese Mythology had to kneel down to listen. During the era of the Republic of China, this strict rule gradually was broken, and Manchu myths were learned by more and more people. Fu himself became a shaman when he was fifteen years old, but he did not succeed at this. Afterward he was able to inquire into many myths and mythological stories because of his former shaman status.

Eventually he knew so much about these stories that even older shamans often learned from him. The stories he compiled into his book were all told by shamans who were his relatives. Qumo Yynuo was born into a professional Bimo shaman family in He began to learn to perform rituals from his father when he was seven years old. When he was fourteen he achieved expert status and began to be a master of ceremonies by himself.

At age fifteen he formally began to study the kenre a kind of verbal dueling tradition. He attended many ceremonies where he chanted epics in the kenre form, and gradually he became a famous and skilled epic performer. Among his knowledge about Yi epics, the Hnewo epic tradition is significant. Hnewo can be chanted at weddings, funerals, and during soul-sending ceremonies in the specific narrative form of kenre. It has two forms, female and male.

The male parts are all about heaven, and the female parts are all about the earth. There are twelve acts in the female part, which are used especially in wedding ceremonies. There are seven acts in the male part, generally used in funerals and in ceremonies one or two years after a funeral to send the ghost away to the ancestors.

The male part tells how the gods were summoned by the god of heaven and how they created the sky and the earth; how one of the gods called the sun and moon, and they appeared; and how the hero Zhyge Alu shot down the surplus suns and moons. The female part explains why the gods in heaven wanted to create humans, how the snow on earth came into being, and how it changed. With his extensive knowledge of Yi culture, Qumo has achieved a wide reputation. He not only inherits the shaman tradition but inherits the epic tradition as well.

Talented singers or storytellers can also be important bearers of mythological tradition. When the Dong people in southern China offer sacrifices to their ancestors, they gather together to sing songs and dance to entertain the gods. The ritual can be presided over by a shaman or sometimes by a middle-aged singer. People who attend will be divided into groups according to gender. They join hands and make two circles, one inside the other.

One circle is male, the other female. In these circles they will sing and dance. Several people Introduction The talented Yi epic singer, Qumo Yynuo, chanting an epic during a wedding ceremony, Courtesy of Bamo Qubumo will lead the singing and others will follow. The content of the songs includes the creation myths of the Dong people. In the s, researchers collected stories from a distinguished female Manchu storyteller named Li Chengming —. Among the forty-six stories that were published, there are five myths. These myths explain how humans were created by the first brother-and-sister couple after the cosmos was destroyed; why humans lost the paradise of harvesting endless grains because they took these grains for granted; how the sun and the moon were created, and why people could not look at the sun directly with their eyes; how the divine maiden Hailun repaired the broken sky; and how the ancestor of the Manchu people was born after his mother consumed a hawthorn fruit and miraculously became pregnant.

As an ordinary Chinese farmer, she often told stories to her neighbors and children during the slow seasons in farming, occasions of 29 30 Handbook of Chinese Mythology working with other people, or during the relaxed long winter nights on her warm kang a brick bed that is warmed by a fire built underneath, popular in northern China.

Ordinary people also bear some traditional mythical knowledge though they are not specifically connected to professional or highlighted myth-telling activities. In another small village in Gansu Province, northwest China, when Yang asked several old men and women chatting beside a country road about the flood myth, two of them knew only that there was indeed a flood in remote antiquity that destroyed almost the whole world.

And then they sighed deeply about the complicated development of this world and the hardship of their lives. So, though these common people are passive bearers of myth tradition, they also use mythological material to create their own ways to express their views and attitudes about history, the world, and their lives.

Rather, their existence and transmission are deeply influenced by their social and cultural contexts. In this section, myths in the Chinese language will be put into the context of Chinese history and society. The purpose of this is to illustrate how Chinese myths have continually been transmitted and shaped during the past thousands of years.

This section will pay special attention to these questions: Who was involved in this? Why did people record myths? Others may select different examples and find different aspects of Chinese history and society to relate to myths. Additionally, since information in written documents about how common Chinese people thought about and told myths in ancient China is limited, the de- Introduction scription in this section, especially the parts about myths in ancient China, will primarily rely on texts written during those periods by intellectuals.

A more comprehensive and synthetic study about this topic needs to appear in the future based on more complete data, including analysis not only of written accounts but also of silk paintings, funerary stone carvings, cliff paintings, inscriptions on stone tablets, and other historical materials. Before continuing on, the reader may wish to peruse the following table for a review of the dynasties and other ruling powers and coordinate dates throughout Chinese history.

They deduce that Chinese myths might have been created at least 10, years ago with the advent of clan societies, flourishing when clan societies were well developed in the middle to late Neolithic era. This hypothesis has been partially confirmed by archeological data. In , for example, Shandingdong Man, dating to about 18, years ago, was found at Zhoukoudian, in the Fangshan district of Beijing. Many Chinese archeologists think that Shandingdong Man shows that the social organization of the people had already changed from primitive society to a clan community.

Some believe that Shandingdong people had a belief in the existence of the soul. Some scholars even assume that Shandingdong Man might have known some basic and simple myths to accompany those beliefs. The patterns and decorations molded or carved on stone, jade, bone, wood, and pottery tell mythical stories. Comparing these relics with ancient writings, we may get an idea about the myths of that time. In Hemudu village in Yuyao County, Zhejiang Province, a bone dagger was found in that dated back to 7, years ago.

On the handle of the dagger was a carved pattern depicting two symmetrical birds carrying the sun. Classified as the Miaodigou Type of Yangshao Culture a Neolithic culture of central China , these relics are usually dated to 6, years ago. In these relics the bird carrying the sun is sometimes depicted with three legs.

This same motif can be found in myths recorded in ancient writings, such as Shanhaijing, Huainanzi, and Lunheng Critical Essays, written by Wang Chong, 27—ca. According to these texts, there was a crow settling on the sun some versions say there were ten crows settling on ten suns. The crow functions as the spirit of the sun or, variously, the one who carries the sun across the sky. Sometimes the bird is said to be three-legged. According to an account in Shanhaijing chapter 14 , there was a huge tree named Fusang Leaning Mulberry in the eastern Tang Valley.

In its branches rested the ten suns. As soon as one sun came back from its journey crossing the sky, another sun started forth. Each of the ten suns was carried by a crow. Why did the crows shed their feathers? Yao then ordered the hero Yi to shoot down the ten suns in the sky, and Yi shot down nine of them.

The nine crows settling on these suns died, and their feathers fell out. In later versions, the crow of the sun is sometimes said to be three-legged. So it can be concluded to some degree that in the middle to late Neolithic era, the mythical motif of a bird carrying the sun or a bird settling on the sun the number may be interpreted as plural is already quite developed. Those written myths are not just single occurrences of such mythical ideas. Instead, they receive support from artifacts found by archaeologists. It may be further assumed that the designs carved on bone or other materials were telling the sun myth in another way, not in spoken language, but in drawings and engravings.

During the Zhou dynasty BC— BC , written records about ancient myths in the Chinese language became more and more visible. An obvious reason for this is the mature writing system of the Zhou. Chinese intellectuals began to rationalize and historicize myths at a very early time. Kui is a one-legged mythical monster. It looked like an ox but was gray, hornless, and one-legged.

Whenever it came out or dived into the sea, a storm would follow. Its light was like the sunlight and moonlight, and its sound was like thunder. Later it was caught and killed by Huang Di, who made a drum by using its hide as the cover. When struck with the bone of the Thunder God, the drum made a great sound that could be heard over five hundred miles away. Huang Di used the drum to show his power to the whole world. Huang Di beat the drum many times during the war. The sound it made was so great that it prevented Chiyou from flying away; thus Chiyou was caught and beheaded by Huang Di.

But Confucius cunningly demythologized the Kui myth and rationalized it as real history. Originally drawn in the 17th century by Jiang Yinghao. He described Kui as an accomplished and talented official who contributed much to society. He explained that Kui was the master of music for the sage king Shun, and he adjusted musical tuning and harmonized music. People became convinced that Kui was indeed a model official. Therefore, Confucius explained, if an emperor had an excellent official like Kui, one was enough.

In this way, Confucius skillfully dissolved this myth and rationalized the Kui story. He cunningly turned Kui, the one-legged mythical monster, into a virtuous and talented historical official. His rational attitude provides an exemplary model for pragmatically dealing with myth and legend. As the founder and representative of Confucianism, Confucius was not interested in the supernatural realm, though he did not obviously argue against the existence of gods and ghosts.

He paid attention to what he considered real in life instead of oddities, violence, disorder, and spirits. Its emergence also has to do with the development of rational intellect. Coming from a novel written by a Greek writer, Euhemerus late fourth century BC , the term euhemerism refers to the modification of human hero kings to gods. In contrast, Chinese scholars regularly eliminated the supernatural or marvelous elements in a myth that seemed to them improbable, and then interpreted myths as real history, and the gods as humans.

Another example from the Eastern Zhou dynasty illustrates the political struggle, the integration of ethnic groups, and the systematization of a pantheon of gods during that period. Besides the four main ethnic groups of Xia, Shang, Ji, and Jiang, who lived in the Central Plain and formed the primary part of the Huaxia people the predecessor of the Han people , there were more than one hundred small states and ethnic groups around the areas that now belong to Hebei, Henan, Shaanxi, Shandong, Jiangsu, and Anhui provinces.

At that time, these states began to fight and integrate with each other. During the early part of the 35 36 Handbook of Chinese Mythology Warring States era, there were just over ten states remaining. They struggled to annex other states and expand their land and power. In order to facilitate the amalgamation, to break up the substantial divide between states and ethnic groups, the formerly scattered and independent divine ancestors were connected and re-created into a new pantheon of gods. The northern ethnic group Hun Xiongnu and the south Yue were originally unrelated to each other and to Huaxia, but then they all became descendants of Yu, who was also said to be a progeny of Zhuanxu in late tradition.

Since there were many unrelated gods and ancestors from different ethnic groups now in a new pantheon, scholars in the Warring States era rearranged their relationship to solve the problem: The two adversary peoples, Shang and Zhou, were suddenly depicted as a brotherhood; the mothers of their founders were supposed to be the wives of the supreme god Di Ku.

In this way, these states and ethnic groups were all attributed to the same lineage, and the amalgamation especially the bigger states annexing the smaller ones was thus proved reasonable. Though the Qin dynasty is famous in later years for the Great Wall and the Terracotta Warriors thousands of life-size pottery warriors, horses, and weapons that were unearthed in the s , it was quickly overthrown by the Han dynasty in BC, only fifteen years after it unified the country.

The Han dynasty not only boasted a much longer vitality years but also was very influential in Chinese society and culture long after it ended. Scholars often use the myths that appeared in Han recordings when they investigate myths in early times of ancient China.

Myths in Han recordings usually are more complete and detailed, whereas recordings before Introduction the Qin dynasty primarily the Zhou dynasty tend to be fragmented and were frequently historicized. Even so, Han writers adopted many living myths from popular tradition into their writings, so they sometimes provided new myth versions. For this reason, although Han writings appeared later than the myths written before the Qin, it does not necessarily mean that myths in Han texts emerged later than those of earlier texts.

They might have been popular in earlier times and only were recorded in later years by Han writers. These myths came from earlier written literature, but sometimes they also took their sources from popular living tradition. For instance, the myth of the Shang founder Qi says that Jiandi is a daughter of the Yousong clan and is the second concubine of Di Ku.

One day, when she went out to bathe with Di Ku, she saw a swallow dropping an egg. She picked it up and swallowed it. Then she inexplicably became pregnant, and later gave birth to Qi. Guo Biheng deduces in his dissertation that Sima Qian might have adopted these myth versions from living oral tradition. After Qinshihuang the First Emperor of Qin unified China, he and his assistants felt that those earlier classic writings of philosophy and of histories of other sizeable states were subversive to their rule.

To eliminate these potential dangers, in BC they burned all books except for the ones on agriculture, medicine, and divination, as well as the ones collected by the Qin government. But soon after that, in BC, when the leading rebel, Xiang Yu, overthrew the Qin, he burned the Qin palace and those books stored by the Qin government. These two fires destroyed almost all of the books written before this time. For this reason, in the Western Han dynasty, intellectuals were busy rewriting classics of earlier times by recalling them from memory, or by finding new sources from living tradition.

This was the case when Sima Qian began to write his historical book. Finding the earlier 37 38 Handbook of Chinese Mythology historical accounts severely deficient, he had to rely on the living popular custom and oral tradition to supplement the shortcoming. He collected abundant historical materials, among them rich folk literature. But Sima Qian did not accept all the myths he received from oral tradition and writings.

Instead, he selected what he wanted and reworked them into his book. The history in his book begins with the story of the five emperors apparently he did not take the Three Divine Sovereigns as the start because Sima Qian Instructional Resources Corporation their achievements are more implausible. Yinglong began by storing all of the water. Chiyou asked the wind god and rain master to release a cloudburst. Then Huang Di asked the goddess of drought to descend from the heavens, and the rain was stopped.

Eventually Huang Di killed Chiyou. Other stories state that Chiyou was able to soar into the sky and overcome the dangerous and difficult obstructions. But Huang Di made a drum from the hide of Kui and beat it many times. The sound it made was so great that it prevented Chiyou from flying away. So Chiyou was caught and killed by Huang Di. Another version states that Chiyou led many ferocious mythical animals to attack Huang Di at the Zhuolu plain.

So Huang Di ordered his subjects to blow horns sounding like dragons to threaten them. Sima Qian did not put all of these myth versions into his own rendition of the Huang Di story. About this fierce battle, he says only that Chiyou was a duke under the administration of Huang Di. He did not obey Huang Di and later rebelled against Introduction him. Thus Huang Di called up an army of other dukes and fought with Chiyou.

Furthermore, he historicized stories that he felt were relevant, as most ancient scholars did in their works. Toward the late Han dynasty, the predominantly Confucian thought in the Western Han became weakened within society. Many people believed in mystical prophecy and superstition.

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Challis, sometimes referred to as challie, by Stella Blum; published by Courier Corporation; via Google Books or chally,, volume 23, page ; edited by S. Dexter North; published ; via Google Books is a lightweight woven fabric, originally a silk-and-wool blend, which can also be made from a single fibre, such as cotton, silk or wool, or from man-made fabrics such as rayon.

A chamanto Mapudungun chamall, woolen fabric is a traditional decorative garment from central Chile, similar to a poncho and woven in silk thread and wool.

The Champagne fairs were an annual cycle of trading fairs held in towns in the Champagne and Brie regions of France in the Middle Ages. Chang'an was an ancient capital of more than ten dynasties in Chinese history, today known as Xi'an. Channapatna is a city and taluk headquarter in Ramanagara District, Karnataka, India,.

Charles Julius Bertram — was an English expatriate in Denmark who "discovered"—and presumably wrote—The Description of Britain De Situ Britanniae , an 18th-century literary forgery purporting to be a mediaeval work on history that remained undetected for over a century. Charles Holme — was an English journalist and art critic, founding editor of ''The Studio'' from Charles Spencer Storms, known as Charlie Storms was a professional gunfighter and gambler of the Old West, who is best known for having been killed in a gunfight with Luke Short in Tombstone, Arizona.

A Charvet fabric is woven of silk or acetate in warp-faced rib weave, of a reversed reps type with a double ridge effect. The Cheney Brothers Historic District was a center of the silk industry in the late 19th and early 20th century. Cheney Building, also known as the Brown Thomson Building, is a commercial building designed by noted American architect H.

China poblana Chinese Pueblan is considered the traditional style of dress of women in Mexico, although in reality it only belonged to some urban zones in the middle and southeast of the country, before its disappearance in the second half of the 19th century. China—Indonesia relations refer to the foreign relations between China and Indonesia. China—United States relations, more often known as U. Chinatowns in Europe include several urban Chinatowns that exist in major European capital cities. Chinese culture is one of the world's oldest cultures, originating thousands of years ago. Chinese musical instruments were traditionally classified according to the materials used in their construction.

Chinese knotting is a decorative handicraft art that began as a form of Chinese folk art in the Tang and Song dynasty — CE in China. The term Chinese orchestra is most commonly used to refer to the modern Chinese orchestra that is found in China and various overseas Chinese communities.

Chinese painting is one of the oldest continuous artistic traditions in the world. Choli is also part of the ghagra choli costume in South Asia. Chrysiridia rhipheus, the Madagascan sunset moth, is a day-flying moth of the family Uraniidae. Chunqiu shiyu is an early Chinese text written on silk which was unearthed in from the Tomb no.

A cigar band is a loop made of paper or foil fitted around the body of a cigar to denote its brand or variety. Cigarette cards are trade cards issued by tobacco manufacturers to stiffen cigarette packaging and advertise cigarette brands. City Palace, Jaipur, which includes the Chandra Mahal and Mubarak Mahal palaces and other buildings, is a palace complex in Jaipur, the capital of the Rajasthan state, India. Claudio Zanier born is an Italian historian specialising in the history of East Asia and South East Asia, and in the history of silk, in particular. According to the, it has a population of people.

A cloak is a type of loose garment that is worn over indoor clothing and serves the same purpose as an overcoat; it protects the wearer from the cold, rain or wind for example, or it may form part of a fashionable outfit or uniform. Cloth menstrual pads are cloth pads worn to absorb the menstrual flow during a woman's period. Cloth of gold or gold cloth is a fabric woven with a gold-wrapped or spun weft—referred to as "a spirally spun gold strip". A clothes iron is a roughly triangular surface that, when heated, is used to press clothes to remove creases.

Clothing in ancient Rome generally comprised a short-sleeved or sleeveless, knee-length tunic for men and boys, and a longer, usually sleeved tunic for women and girls. Clothing terminology comprises the names of individual garments and classes of garments, as well as the specialized vocabularies of the trades that have designed, manufactured, marketed and sold clothing over hundreds of years.

The coinage metals comprise, at a minimum, those metallic chemical elements which have historically been used as components in alloys used to mint coins. Colias philodice, the common sulphur or clouded sulphur, is a North American butterfly in the family Pieridae, subfamily Coliadinae. Collagen is the main structural protein in the extracellular space in the various connective tissues in animal bodies. A color gel or color filter British spelling: A comforter in American English , also known as a doona in Australian English, a cloonie in parts of Canada, or a continental quilt or simply quilt or duvet in British English, is a type of bedding made of two lengths of fabric or covering sewn together and filled with insulative materials for warmth, traditionally down or feathers, wool or cotton batting, silk, or polyester and other down alternative fibers.

Commercial butterfly breeding or captive butterfly breeding is the practice of breeding butterflies and moths in controlled environments with the purpose of supplying the stock to research facilities, universities, zoos, insectariums, elementary and secondary schools, butterfly exhibits, conservation organizations, nature centers, individuals and other commercial facilities. The Commercial Revolution consisted in the creation of a European economy based on trade, which began in the 11th century and lasted until it was succeeded by the Industrial Revolution in the midth century.

A commercial treaty is a formal agreement between states for the purpose of establishing mutual rights and regulating conditions of trade. Commodity money is money whose value comes from a commodity of which it is made. A composite bow is a traditional bow made from horn, wood, and sinew laminated together, cf. The conservation and restoration of flags and banners is the process by which conservators work to preserve and restore flags and banners from future deterioration and damage.

The conservation and restoration of fur objects is the preservation and protection of objects made from or containing fur. The conservation and restoration of textiles refers to the processes by which textiles are cared for and maintained to be preserved from future damage. The cope known in Latin as pluviale 'rain coat' or cappa 'cape' is a liturgical vestment, more precisely a long mantle or cloak, open in front and fastened at the breast with a band or clasp. Corded quilting also known as Marseilles quilting, Marseilles embroidery, marcella, or Zaans stitchwork is a decorative quilting technique popular from the late 17th through the early 19th centuries.

In world systems theory, the core countries are the industrialized capitalist countries on which periphery countries and semi-periphery countries depend. The Cornucopia Institute is a national food and farm policy watchdog group working to uphold the integrity of organic, local, and other forms of alternative agriculture. A coronation is the act of placement or bestowal of a crown upon a monarch's head.

A corrosive substance is one that will destroy and damage other substances with which it comes into contact. A corset is a garment worn to hold and train the torso into a desired shape, traditionally a smaller waist or larger bottom, for aesthetic or medical purposes either for the duration of wearing it or with a more lasting effect. Costermonger, coster, or costard is a street seller of fruit and vegetables, in London and other British towns. Cotton paper, also known as rag paper, is made using cotton linters or cotton from used cloth rags as the primary material.

Coulomb's law, or Coulomb's inverse-square law, is a law of physics for quantifying the amount of force with which stationary electrically charged particles repel or attract each other. The country-of-origin effect COE , also known as the made-in image and the nationality bias, is a psychological effect describing how consumers' attitudes, perceptions and purchasing decisions are influenced by products' country of origin labeling. Court dress comprises the style of clothes prescribed for courts of law, and for royal courts. Courtaulds was a United Kingdom-based manufacturer of fabric, clothing, artificial fibres, and chemicals.

The genus Crambus includes around species of moths in the family Crambidae, distributed globally. Crassicorophium bonellii is a species of amphipod crustacean in the genus Crassicorophium. The cravat is a neckband, the forerunner of the modern tailored necktie and bow tie, originating from a style worn by members of the seventeenth-century military unit known as the Croats.

The term "crazy quilting" is often used to refer to the textile art of crazy patchwork and is sometimes used interchangeably with that term. Cribellum literally means "little sieve", and in biology the term generally applies to anatomical structures in the form of tiny perforated plates. Croatian dance traditionally refers to a series of folk-dances, the most common being the kolo "circle ". Crocetta del Montello or Croseta del Montel in the local Venetian dialect , formerly Crocetta Trevigiana, is a comune municipality in the Province of Treviso in the Italian region Veneto, located about northwest of Venice and about northwest of Treviso.

Not to be confused with Crotchet, the common name for a Quarter note in music. Crochet is a process of creating fabric by interlocking loops of yarn, thread, or strands of other materials using a crochet hook. Croscombe is a village and civil parish west of Shepton Mallet and from Wells, in the Mendip district of Somerset, England.

Cross-stitch is a form of sewing and a popular form of counted-thread embroidery in which X-shaped stitches in a tiled, raster-like pattern are used to form a picture. A crown is a traditional symbolic form of headwear, or hat, worn by a monarch or by a deity, for whom the crown traditionally represents power, legitimacy, victory, triumph, honor, and glory, as well as immortality, righteousness, and resurrection. The Crown of Baekje refers to several artifacts excavated that are believed to be the royal headgear of the kings, queens, and nobility of the Baekje Kingdom.

Korona Chrobrego, also known in Latin as the Corona Privilegiata was the coronation crown of the Polish monarchs. Cultural behavior is behavior exhibited by humans and, some would argue, by other species as well, though to a much lesser degree that is extrasomatic or extragenetic—in other words, learned. Kamarupa was most powerful and formidable kingdom in Northeast India ruled by the Varman and Pala dynasties from its capital in Pragjyotishpura and Durjaya in Lower Assam and by indigenous peoples at Haruppeswara in central Assam.

The traditional culture of Korea refers to the shared cultural heritage of the Korean Peninsula. The culture of Somalia is an amalgamation of traditions in that were developed independently and through interaction with neighboring and far away civilizations, including other parts of Africa, Northeast Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and Southeast Asia. Ottoman culture evolved over several centuries as the ruling administration of the Turks absorbed, adapted and modified the cultures of conquered lands and their peoples. The culture of the People's Republic of China is a rich and varied blend of traditional Chinese culture with communist and other international modern and post-modern influences.

The Song dynasty — AD was a culturally rich and sophisticated age for China. Tunisian culture is a product of more than three thousand years of history and an important multi-ethnic influx. Cuprammonium rayon is a rayon made from cellulose dissolved in cuprammonium solution.

Cydia deshaisiana or jumping bean moth is a moth from Mexico that is most widely known as its larva, where it inhabits the carpels of seeds from several species of the shrub genus Sebastiania S. Czech traditional clothing expresses Czech history relative to Czech culture and behaviour.

Damodar Vithaldas Gajjar is a master craftsman and artist belonging to a family of craftsmen in Pethapur, a village near Gandhinagar, Gujarat. Damascening is the art of inlaying different metals into one another—typically, gold or silver into a darkly oxidized steel background—to produce intricate patterns similar to niello. A dance costume is the clothing worn by a dancer when performing before an audience. Daqin alternative transliterations include Tachin, Tai-Ch'in is the ancient Chinese name for the Roman Empire or, depending on context, the Near East, especially Syria.

The Dark ages of Cambodia, also called the Middle Period, refers to the historical era from the early 15th century to , the beginning of the French Protectorate of Cambodia.

One hundred million books‎ | Page 6

Dayuan Ta-yuan; Old Chinese reconstructed pronunciation: A decorative box is a form of packaging that is generally more than just functional, but also intended to be decorative and artistic. It was a small fan-shaped artificial island formed by digging a canal through a small peninsula in the bay of Nagasaki in by local merchants. Dejima was built to constrain foreign traders. Originally built to house Portuguese traders, it was used by the Dutch as a trading post from until Covering an area of or, it was later integrated into the city through the process of land reclamation.

Dentistry is a branch of medicine that consists of the study, diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of diseases, disorders, and conditions of the oral cavity, commonly in the dentition but also the oral mucosa, and of adjacent and related structures and tissues, particularly in the maxillofacial jaw and facial area. The death and destruction during the 13th century Mongol conquests have been widely noted in both the scholarly literature and popular memory. Dharmavaram is a city in Anantapur district of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.

A dhurrie also dhurri or durrie or durry is a thick flat-woven rug or carpet used traditionally in India as floor-coverings. In the field of acoustics, a diaphragm is a transducer intended to inter-convert mechanical vibrations to sounds, or vice versa. Dimity is a lightweight, sheer cotton fabric, used historically, having at least two warp threads thrown into relief to form fine cords. The Dingley Act of ch.

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Representative Nelson Dingley, Jr. Dino Minichiello born December 28 , legal name Domenic Dean Minichiello, is a Canadian fashion designer, entrepreneur and the founder and cofounder of several apparel companies. Diogo Veloso was an explorer from Portugal who, along with Blas Ruiz, was the first Europeans to ever set foot in Laos. Diospyros is a genus of over species of deciduous and evergreen trees and shrubs. Diriamba is a municipality in the Carazo department of Nicaragua, with a population of 57, A diving bell is a rigid chamber used to transport divers from the surface to depth and back in open water, usually for the purpose of performing underwater work.

Toy Hospital in the fourth season is an American animated children's television series produced by Brown Bag Films. Dog's fashion is a popular style or practice, especially in canine clothing and accessories. Double cloth or double weave also doublecloth, double-cloth, doubleweave is a kind of woven textile in which two or more sets of warps and one or more sets of weft or filling yarns are interconnected to form a two-layered cloth. Dowlish Wake is a small village and civil parish in Somerset, England, situated south of Ilminster and north-east of Chard in the South Somerset district.

A dress shirt, button shirt, button-front, button-front shirt, or button-up shirt is a garment with a collar and a full-length opening at the front, which is fastened using buttons or shirt studs. A dudou—also known by other names—is a traditional Chinese form of the bodice, originally worn as an undershirt with medicinal properties. Dupioni also referred to as Douppioni or Dupion is a plain weave crisp type of silk fabric, produced by using fine thread in the warp and uneven thread reeled from two or more entangled cocoons in the weft. Dutch India consisted of the settlements and trading posts of the Dutch East India Company on the Indian subcontinent.

A duvet is a type of bedding consisting of a soft flat bag filled with down, feathers, wool, silk or a synthetic alternative, and typically protected with a removable cover, analogous to a pillow and pillow case. A dye is a colored substance that has an affinity to the substrate to which it is being applied. Dyeing is the process of adding color to textile products like fibers, yarns, and fabrics. East Hanney is a village and civil parish on Letcombe Brook about north of Wantage.

The eastern tent caterpillar Malacosoma americanum is a species of moth in the family Lasiocampidae, the tent caterpillars or lappet moths. The Eastern Turkic Khaganate Chinese: Evidence of pre-historic human settlement has been discovered locally, but the area was predominantly agricultural until the Industrial Revolution, when a textile industry was established in the town.

The arrival of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the world's first passenger railway, led to the town's expansion along the route of the track linking those two cities. Eccles cakes, first produced and sold in the town in , are now exported across the world.

Handbook of Chinese Mythology (World Mythology)

Economic entomology is a field of entomology, which involves the study of insects that benefit or harm humans, domestic animals, and crops. The economic history of China covers thousands of years and the region has undergone alternating cycles of prosperity and decline. The economic history of India is the story of India's evolution from a largely agricultural and trading society to a mixed economy of manufacturing and services while the majority still survives on agriculture. Mexico's economic history has been characterized since the colonial era by resource extraction, agriculture, and a relatively underdeveloped industrial sector.

The economic history of the Netherlands — is the history of an economy that scholar Jan de Vries calls the first "modern" economy. There have been a number of economic arguments advanced regarding evaluation of the benefits of biodiversity. There's evidence to believe that Aurangabad was developed as a trading hub four centuries ago. The market-based economy of Bangladesh is the 43rd largest in the world in nominal terms, and 30nd largest by purchasing power parity; it is classified among the Next Eleven emerging market middle income economies and a Frontier market.

Cheshire is a county in north-west England, famous for its agricultural industry. According to the Mexican government agency Conapo National Population Council , Oaxaca is the third most economically marginalized states in Mexico. The Economy of the Empire of Brazil was centered on export of raw materials when the country became independent in For over three centuries during the Song dynasty — China experienced sustained growth in per capita income and population, structural change in the economy, and increased pace of technological innovation.

Since gaining independence, the has stated that it is committed to a gradual transition to a market-based economy. The Edict on Maximum Prices Latin: Egypt is an unincorporated community and a census-designated place in Whitehall Township, Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, United States, about north of Allentown and west of Cementon.

Electric charge is the physical property of matter that causes it to experience a force when placed in an electromagnetic field. An electrical telegraph is a telegraph that uses electrical signals, usually conveyed via dedicated telecommunication circuit or radio. An electroscope is an early scientific instrument that is used to detect the presence and magnitude of electric charge on a body. Eliza Lucas Pinckney December 28, May 26, changed agriculture in colonial South Carolina, where she developed indigo as one of its most important cash crops.

Elmer Keiser Bolton June 23, — July 30, was an American chemist and research director for DuPont, notable for his role in developing neoprene and directing the research that led to the discovery of nylon. The order Embioptera, commonly known as webspinners, are a small group of mostly tropical and subtropical insects, classified under the subclass Pterygota. Embroidery is the craft of decorating fabric or other materials using a needle to apply thread or yarn.

Embroidery thread is yarn that is manufactured or hand-spun specifically for embroidery and other forms of needlework. Emil "Teddy" Vorster April 12, — May 10, is a German racing driver and entrepreneur, so-called gentleman-racing driver and motorsport-functionary.

Emperor Shizong of Jin 29 March — 20 January , personal name Wulu, sinicised name Wanyan Yong originally Wanyan Xiu , was the fifth emperor of the Jurchen-led Jin dynasty, which ruled northern China between the 12th and 13th centuries. Empididae is a family of flies with over 3, described species occurring worldwide in all the Ecozones but the majority are found in the Holarctic. Enarmonia formosana, the cherrybark tortrix or cherry-bark moth, is a small but colorful moth species of the family Tortricidae. English embroidery includes embroidery worked in England or by English people abroad from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day.

The English longbow was a powerful medieval type of longbow a tall bow for archery about long used by the English and Welsh for hunting and as a weapon in medieval warfare. Women's hats in the late middle ages were often a coneven shaped based with a flimsy net or gauzy fabric thrown carelessly and effortlessly over the top so it hung in drapes.

Eolienne also spelled aeolian is a lightweight fabric with a ribbed corded surface. Epargyreus clarus, the silver-spotted skipper, is a butterfly of the family Hesperiidae. The episcopal sandals, also known as the pontifical sandals, are a Roman Catholic pontifical vestment worn by bishops when celebrating liturgical functions according to the pre-Vatican II rubrics, for example a Tridentine Solemn Pontifical Mass. An Ethiopian suit is the name given in America to the traditional formal wear of the men of Ethiopia. Hand fans first arrived in Europe in the 15th century from Asia and became popular in the 16th century.

Given textual and archaeological evidence, it is thought that thousands of Europeans lived in Imperial China during the period of Mongol rule. An evening gown, evening dress or gown is a long flowing women's dress usually worn to a formal affair. Evercreech is a village and civil parish south east of Shepton Mallet, and north east of Castle Cary, in the Mendip district of Somerset, England.

The evergreen bagworm Thyridopteryx ephemeraeformis , commonly known as bagworm, eastern bagworm, common bagworm, common basket worm, or North American bagworm, is a moth that spins its cocoon in its larval life, decorating it with bits of plant material from the trees on which it feeds. The external morphology of Lepidoptera is the physiological structure of the bodies of insects belonging to the order Lepidoptera, also known as butterflies and moths.

Eynsford is a village and civil parish in the Sevenoaks District of Kent, England. The Factory and Workshop Act was a UK Act of Parliament intended to regulate the conditions, safety, health and wages of people working in factories. Farhad-beg-yailaki is an archaeological site on the Silk Road in what was the Kingdom of Khotan which is located 60 miles east of its affiliated city, Hotan, China.

Felice di Michele Brancacci born - fl. Fiber or fibre see spelling differences, from the Latin fibra is a natural or synthetic substance that is significantly longer than it is wide. Fiber art refers to fine art whose material consists of natural or synthetic fiber and other components, such as fabric or yarn. Fiber festivals bring together producers and vendors of mostly animal fibers, such as wool, qiviut, camelid, mohair, and angora.

Fibroin is an insoluble protein present in silk created by spiders, the larvae of Bombyx mori, other moth genera such as Antheraea, Cricula, Samia and Gonometa, and numerous other insects. The filmy dome spider Neriene radiata is a sheet weaver: Angel hair, called in Portuguese fios de ovos "egg threads" is a traditional Portuguese sweet food made of eggs chiefly yolks , drawn into thin strands and boiled in sugar syrup. A fishing lure is a type of artificial fishing bait which is designed to attract a fish's attention.

A fishing reel is a cylindrical device attached to a fishing rod used in winding and stowing line. The Five Barbarians or Wu Hu, is a Chinese historical exonym for ancient non-Han Chinese peoples who immigrated to northern China in the Eastern Han Dynasty, and then overthrew the Western Jin Dynasty and established their own kingdoms in the 4th—5th centuries. The flag of Alaska consists of eight gold stars, forming the Big Dipper and Polaris, on a dark blue field.

The flag of China, also known as the Five-star Red Flag, is a red field charged in the canton upper corner nearest the flagpole with five golden stars. The two components of an obsolete British military flak vest. On the left, the nylon vest. On the right, the several layers of ballistic nylon that provide the actual protection A flak jacket or flak vest is a form of body armor. Flemingia macrophylla a is woody leguminous shrub belonging to the genus Flemingia. Fly fishing is an angling method in which an artificial "fly" is used to catch fish. During the Empire of Japan and up to , Japan was dependent on imported foods and raw materials for industry.

The Forest tent caterpillar moth Malacosoma disstria is a North American moth found throughout the United States and Canada, especially in the eastern regions. A foulard is a lightweight fabric, either twill or plain-woven, made of silk or a mix of silk and cotton. The history of relations between France and Japan goes back to the early 17th century, when a Japanese samurai and ambassador on his way to Rome landed for a few days in Saint-Tropez and created a sensation. Frankenthal Pfalz is a town in southwestern Germany, in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate.

The Frankfurter Judengasse from German: Frederick George Cotman was an English painter of landscapes, portraits and interiors and a member of the Norwich School of painters. The Directory or Directorate was a five-member committee which governed France from , when it replaced the Committee of Public Safety. Fashion in France is an important aspect in the spectrum of culture and social life, as well as being an important aspect of the economy.

Fringe is an ornamental textile trim applied to an edge of a textile item, such as drapery, a flag, or epaulettes. Fuzhou Tanka Fuzhou dialect: Gadwal sari is a handcrafted woven sari style in Gadwal of Jogulamba Gadwal district in the Indian state of Telangana. The Galle Trilingual Inscription is a stone tablet stele inscription in three languages, Chinese, Tamil and Persian, that was erected in in Galle, Sri Lanka to commemorate the second visit to the island by the Chinese admiral Zheng He. Galleria mellonella, the greater wax moth or honeycomb moth, is a moth of the family Pyralidae.

Gandria is both a quarter of the city of Lugano in the Swiss canton of Ticino, and a village, on the northern shore of Lake Lugano, which forms the core of that quarter. The gastrointestinal tract digestive tract, digestional tract, GI tract, GIT, gut, or alimentary canal is an organ system within humans and other animals which takes in food, digests it to extract and absorb energy and nutrients, and expels the remaining waste as feces.

The gayageum or kayagum is a traditional Korean zither-like string instrument, with 12 strings, though some more recent variants have 21 or other number of strings. Gazar also gazaar is a silk or wool plain weave fabric made with high-twist double yarns woven as one. Thailand's , square kilometers lie in the middle of mainland Southeast Asia. George Emory Goodfellow December 23, — December 7, was a physician and naturalist in the 19th-century American Old West who developed a reputation as the United States' foremost expert in treating gunshot wounds.

Silk and George E. The Georgia Experiment was the colonial-era policy prohibiting the ownership of slaves in the Georgia Colony. Gersau is a municipality and district in the canton of Schwyz in Switzerland, sitting on the shores of Lake Lucerne. There are many Malay ghost myths Malay: Museo dell'Aeronautica Gianni Caproni is Italy's oldest aviation museum, as well as the country's oldest corporate museum.

Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini c. Glass fiber or glass fibre is a material consisting of numerous extremely fine fibers of glass. Globalization, the flow of information, goods, capital, and people across political and geographic boundaries, allows infectious diseases to rapidly spread around the world, while also allowing the alleviation of factors such as hunger and poverty, which are key determinants of global health.

Glorpy, sometimes known as the Haunted Handkerchief, is a close-up magic trick normally performed for children. This glossary of botanical terms is a list of terms relevant to botany and plants in general. Dyeing is the craft of imparting colors to textiles in loose fiber, yarn, cloth or garment form by treatment with a dye. Sewing is the craft of fastening or attaching objects using stitches made with needle and thread. A glove Middle English from Old English glof is a garment covering the whole hand.

Godavaya or Godawaya is a small fishing hamlet located at the mouth of the Walawe river, between Ambalantota and Hambantota in the Hambantota District in southern Sri Lanka. The Golden Age of Piracy is a common designation given to usually one or more outbursts of piracy in the maritime history of the early modern period. The was a portable gilded chashitsu tea room constructed during the 16th century Azuchi—Momoyama period for the Japanese regent Lord Toyotomi Hideyoshi's tea ceremonies.

Gossypium barbadense, also known as extra-long staple ELS cotton, is a species of cotton plant that has been cultivated to have ELS fibres — fibres longer than — which are associated with high quality cotton cloth.