THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
The 'Classic of the Western Mountains' locates this god on Mount Tian, a peak rich in gold, jade, and green realgar from which the River Ying flows: 'shaped like a yellow sack, scarlet as cinnabar fire, with six feet and four wings, an undifferentiated mass without face or eyes, yet it knows song and dance — this is Dijiang.'
The commentator Guo Pu read 'Jiang' as 'Hong', and later scholars have identified Dijiang with Di Hong, an ancient sovereign associated with the Yellow Emperor. The phrase 'hundun, without face or eyes' binds the god to Hundun, the primal Chaos. In the Zhuangzi, the emperors of the southern and northern seas repay the hospitality of Hundun, emperor of the center, by drilling him one aperture a day — 'on the seventh day Hundun died.' The Zuozhuan, for its part, names Hundun a worthless son of the Di Hong clan and lists him among the Four Fiends. God, sovereign, and fiend overlap in the one name.
The Ming illustrated edition of the Shanhaijing drawn by Jiang Yinghao pictures Dijiang as a winged, clawed sack of red flesh, the image that still circulates in modern bestiaries.
