THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
The Classic of Regions Within the Seas: South places this country just west of Jianmu, the great tree by which gods and shamans climbed between earth and sky. Its people have human faces on fish bodies and no feet. Illustrators through the centuries gave them human heads and arms trailing into a fish tail, making them the Shanhaijing's closest anticipation of the mermaid silhouette familiar today.
The Classic of the Great Wilderness: West records a Land of the Hu people with a notable pedigree: Lingjia, grandson of the Flame Emperor Yandi, begot the Hu people, who 'can ascend to heaven and descend again'. Commentators since the Qing scholar Hao Yixing have generally taken 'Di' and 'Hu' to be the same name corrupted in copying, and read the two passages as one country. Taken together, the fish-bodied nation carries an exalted genealogy: descendants of the Flame Emperor, neighbors of the world-tree, travelers between heaven and the waters below. The details fit together into something like a way station between gods and men.
