[Chinese] Jiang Shr (Putonghua) or Kuang Shi (Cantonese) are the zombies of Chinese myth. They have physical bodies, but they are not alive, nor have they will or thought. They are closer to Haitian zombies than to anything else in widely-known Western folklore. In modern Kong Kong film the Kuang Shi is the slave of the character of an evil Taoist priest, who launches platoons of these animated corpses at heroes of kung fu and even gangster movies. This picture of Kuang Shi in current film does not represent their old form. There are Chinese still living who say they have seen the Kuang Shi. Before the Civil War and before World War II, the dead still walked the roads of rural China in parades marching toward their ancestral villages. Buried away from the family, a dead Chinese has no feasts, no paper clothes, slaves, boats, food, or incense burnt to him, since all these things are in the hands of his descendants. Such is the spiritual importance of the Chinese ancestral village. When a Chines...
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