Fish-Bodied, Serpent-Tailed Dragon-Kin of the Yin River
The Yin River rises on Mount Daoguo and flows south into the sea, and in its waters coils the hujiao, the 'tiger jiao'. Mount Daoguo is itself a storehouse of southern fauna — gold and jade above, rhinoceroses, buffalo, and elephants below — and the river adds this: a creature with a fish's body and a serpent's tail whose voice, incongruously, is the soft call of a mandarin duck.
The jiao is a water-beast of the dragon kind; Guo Pu describes the type as snake-like with four legs, small-headed and thin-necked, the great ones a dozen spans around and able to swallow a man, and the 'tiger' in this one's name has usually been read as a mark of ferocity. Yet the Classic of the Southern Mountains is not interested in its menace. The entry closes as a recipe: whoever eats it will suffer no tumorous swellings, and it can cure hemorrhoids. Filing a dragon-kin monster under dietary medicine is the book's naturalist manner at its purest — every marvel must declare its locality, its cry, and its use, like goods a fisherman could price. Later lore let jiao grow into flood-raising serpents striving to become dragons; the hujiao stayed quietly in the Yin River, an item in the pharmacopoeia.
