THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
The Classic of Regions Within the Seas: North needs only one laconic line for it: human face, hands and feet, fish body, lives in the sea. The text places it among the marvels of the northern waters, in the same stretch of entries as the giant fish and the isles of Lieguye and Penglai where immortals were said to dwell. Illustrated editions typically show a large upright fish with small human hands and feet emerging below the fins and a human face set into the head.
The 'Heavenly Questions' of the Songs of Chu asks where the lingfish dwells, and some traditional commentators took that creature to be this same human-faced fish. Fish-bodied people form a small clan within the Shanhaijing itself: the Di people of the southern seas chapter have human faces and fish bodies but no feet, and the dragon-fish of the western chapter lives ashore on the plains. The Lingyu, with its full set of limbs, is the most completely human of them. The weeping, silk-weaving jiaoren mermaids of later tale collections, and the mermaid of the modern imagination, count this terse record among their earliest Chinese ancestors.
