Danger: Women Writing

The amazing thing about vampires is that you can look at a number of cultures and they all have some kind of legend about the blood-sucking undead! Maybe it’s the universal fear of dying, but that’s good for us vampire writers since it gives us a lot of different mythologies from which to borrow for our stories.

One of the different kinds of vampires that I’ve used in one of my paranormals is the Chinese vampire or Jiang Shi/Kiang Shi.

Unlike the European concept of vampires, Chinese vampires really don’t have much of a consciousness. They are actually more like zombies since they are walking corpses that are said to hop around, stealing the life forces of those that encounter.

Also unlike European vampires, the Jiang Shi are created when a person’s soul fails to leave the body, possibly due to some dishonor at the time of death, desecration of the corpse or suicide. Also unlike Euro-vamps, Jiang Shi are corpses and so it’s not uncommon to see pictures of them in various states of decay or with long hair/fungus (green or white) on their bodies.

You can keep the Jiang Shi out of your home by placing a small piece of wood at the bottom of your door or by dropping seeds or grains of rice in front of the Jiang Shi who will have to stop to count them (much like a Euro-vamp!).

Jiang Shi became quite popular in movies from Hong Kong in the 1980s.

If you want to read a little more about Chinese vampires, you can visit these sites:


Deliriums Realm
Chinese Vampire Movies
Monstrous