THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
The Classic of Regions Beyond the Seas: South locates the Feathered Folk to the southeast, near the haunts of the paired one-winged birds: their people have elongated heads and bodies covered in plumage. Guo Pu's fourth-century commentary supplies the memorable details: they hatch from eggs, they can fly but not far, and they look like the immortals in paintings. The Huainanzi includes the Feathered Folk in its roster of thirty-six countries beyond the seas.
Feathered bodies attached themselves early to Chinese dreams of deathlessness and ascent. The 'Far Roaming' poem in the Songs of Chu speaks of joining the feathered ones at Cinnabar Hill, the old homeland of the undying. Han-dynasty tomb murals and bronze mirrors are full of winged beings called yuren, feathered men, who have shed mortality; to this day the standard idiom for becoming an immortal is yuhua, 'to transform into the feathered'. The Land of the Feathered Folk stands at the head of that lineage: first a far country of egg-born bird-people, later the winged immortals of the ascension cult.
