#Shan hai jing movie
#Shan hai jing registration

#Shan hai jing movie

Next time you spot those magical beings on the movie screen, you will be able to reverse engineer them and understand how they come to be-the niffler, which has its eye on glittery objects always the bowtruckle, whose sharp fingers are good at picking locks the occamy, which fiercely guards its eggs in pure silver and many more. This deity has a human face, the body of a horse with the stripes of a tiger, and a pair of wings (Chapter 2)-akin to griffins and centaurs found in Western mythology.Ī bowtruckle, a niffler, and an occamy in the movie Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016), the latest addition to Harry Potter’s wizarding world. The deity Yingzhao (英招) is another example among the numerous outlandish beings that are imaginatively formed by combining features from familiar species. (Lu Xun 鲁迅, regarded as China’s greatest modern writer, was a famous fan from boyhood.) There is a Chinese version of a “mermaid” in The Classic of Mountains and Seas: residents in a nation called Diren (氐人) are described as having human faces, the bodies of fish, and no feet (Chapter 10). The creatures and stories in the book fascinated young people before children’s literature was intentionally produced in China at the turn of the twentieth century.

The Classic of Mountains and Seas 山海经, a Chinese classic text that first appeared as early as the fourth century BC, describes mythical beings, gods, and deities. So instead I will share cases of combinations I have found elsewhere. What collisions would you imagine if you are asked to add a picture or two to the book? When I tried to answer the question myself, I was tempted to come up with impressive invention ideas, but could not.

A young man and a young woman dash towards each other, and, on the last page of the book, a happy nuclear family of three is born. A blotch of blue and a blotch of yellow rush to each other and merge into a splash of green, reminding us of Little Blue and Little Yellow by Leo Lionni. If you are familiar with dim sum, you will appreciate that steamed buns with savory fillings are more popular than plain steamed bread. Why would the collision of a cat and an eagle produce an owl? Because in the Chinese vocabulary, “owl” is “mao tou ying 猫头鹰,” or “cat-headed eagle.” Steamed bread (馒头) and meat balls bump into each other head-on, and delicious steamed buns (包子) are ready to be served. Some combinations are inspired by Chinese language and culture. The Daoist sacred geography forms today the basic layout for official Chinese efforts to enlist these sites as part of Unesco’s world cultural heritage program.Īs the oldest and earliest textual representation of the Chinese concept of sacred geography and its long history of using natural landscape sites as markers of territory, culture, and identity, the Shanhaijing, should have an important place in the present-day discussions on cultural heritage sites in China.How the owl got its night vision, explained by a “collision theory.” This format and its concept of sacred geography was continued in the sacred geography of Daoism and its holy mountains, grottoes, and rivers, supported by and representing the Chinese central court in imperial times from the Han to the Qing dynasties, almost two thousand years. However, I would argue that it should be seen as an equivalent to the Yugong (Tribute of Yu) chapter in the Shujing (Book of Documents), a Confucian classic, dealing with governing the Chinese world, and defining to the central court (the Qin state) the territory and its environs as well as the way to negotiate these relationships in an alternative tribute-system governed by rituals of reciprocal gift-giving, rather than one-sided tribute offerings. Previous research has mainly focused on verifying its topographical locations (China), or on its many recorded myths and descriptions of weird creatures (West), and scholars therefore usually relate it to the shaman culture of South China (the Chu state). The different sections date to different periods, from the fifth to the second centuries BC, with some later additions. The Shanhaijing (Classic of Mountains and Seas) is a book on China’s ancient sacred geography and consists of two sections, one on mountains dealing with the territory of ancient China proper, and one on seas dealing with the lands outside China, which was imagined to be surrounded by seas.

#Shan hai jing registration

Lunch will be provided registration is required.