THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
The Ying River rises on Mount Qingqiu and runs south into the Marsh of Jiyi, and in its waters swarm the chiru. The Classic of the Southern Mountains describes a creature shaped entirely like a fish but wearing a human face, its call like the soft cry of a mandarin duck; the 'chi' of its name suggests a reddish body. The prescribed benefit is bluntly practical: eat it and you will not suffer scabies. It shares Mount Qingqiu with the nine-tailed fox and the guanguan bird, the mountain fielding one marvel each for beast, bird, and fish.
Human-faced fish form a family of their own in the Shanhaijing: the lingyu of the northern seaboard has a man's face with hands and feet on a fish's body, the people of the Land of Diren are fish-bodied and legless, and the northern mountains hold four-legged 'man-fish'. The chiru is the southern representative of the line. Discussions of the motif often set beside it the human-face-and-fish painted basin unearthed at Banpo near Xi'an — an image millennia older than the book, yet uncannily close to its text — and among the sources of later Chinese mermaid lore the chiru keeps a firm place.
