The invisible merchant in the land of spirits: a case of adaptation of a foreign cultural plot in a medieval Chinese tale

Abstract

   In ancient and medieval sources written in the classical Chinese language, there are references to the “Land of the Gui” (Gui Guo), which lies at a considerable distance from known inhabited places, and not in the sky, underground or underwater, but on a horizontal plane. The word “gui” usually refers to the spirits of the deceased, but is also used to describe various creatures of the demonic realm. Some medieval accounts of journeys to Gui Guo differ markedly from other contemporary accounts of visits to the afterlife. At the same time, there are several descriptions of the inhabitants of the “Land of the Gui” with distinctly demonic behaviour. One of these texts, a tale called “The Merchant of Qingzhou” from “Jishen Lu”, a 10th-century collection, is based on the assumption that the visit of a living person to a Gui Guo is harmful to the inhabitants. The actions of the inhabitants of the Gui Guo, who ask a magician to expel the invisible hero from their midst, resemble the measures traditionally taken to expel the wandering soul of the deceased. The narrative of “The Merchant of Qingzhou” is built around a motif identified in Yu. E. Berezkin’s catalogue as “Spirits do not see the living” (I56). The article argues that the plot of this story may have developed under the influence of Tungus-Manchu or Turkic folk traditions. It was adapted to the specific mythological worldview by reinterpreting the dead as demons and using terminology from natural philosophy. In addition, the narrative was enriched with a description of the ritual of exorcising disease-causing demons by feeding them.