THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
Mount Di is rich in water and bare of plants, and its one marvel is emphatically called a fish while resembling almost anything else. The lu has the body of an ox; it dwells on the hillside, not in the streams; a serpent's tail trails behind it, and wings sprout from beneath its ribs — the character qu being read by the old commentators as the flanks. Its call is the lowing of an ox. Fish, ox, snake, and bird are riveted into one body, a textbook specimen of the Shanhaijing's composite creatures.
Stranger still is the clause 'it dies in winter and lives in summer'. Guo Pu's commentary resolves the paradox as hibernation — a winter torpor like death rather than death itself — making this one of the plainest early Chinese records of the phenomenon. Sympathetic magic supplies the medical rider: a beast that returns from death must master dead and rotting flesh, so eating it protects against tumorous swellings. Illustrated editions render the lu as a winged, scaled ox-fish couched on a slope, tail coiled and hooves showing, the most elaborately assembled water creature in the scrolls.
