THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
Mount Huaijiang 'is in truth the level garden of the High God' — the paradise later ages called the Hanging Garden — and the god Yingzhao keeps it. The 'Classic of the Western Mountains' gives him a horse's body and a human face, tiger stripes and bird's wings; he 'makes his circuit of the four seas', proclaiming the God's commands, with a voice like water drawn through a pipe.
From Huaijiang one looks south to Kunlun, 'its light blazing, its vapors billowing'; westward lies the great marsh where the spirit of Houji, lord of millet, lies hidden; the mountain itself yields gold, realgar, and langgan gems. The garden thus sits on a terrace overlooking Kunlun, and the Huainanzi counts the Hanging Garden as one rung of the ladder that leads up the mountain to heaven — whoever climbs it 'becomes numinous, able to command wind and rain'.
Yingzhao pairs naturally with Luwu, warden of Kunlun: both are human-faced, beast-bodied tutelary gods of the far west, one seated in the God's capital, the other ranging out from the God's garden across the four seas.
