Shan Hai Jing Animal Catalogue
- Date of account
- Texts compiled across the Warring States, Han, and later periods
- Location
- Ancient China; geographically varied mountains and seas
- Source
- model_recalled_reference
- Record updated
- 2026-10-10
Record summary
The Shan Hai Jing is a layered Chinese geographical and mythographic corpus describing mountains, rivers, peoples, plants, minerals, and animals, including many composite or extraordinary beings. Its accounts have sometimes been mined by cryptozoologists as possible records of unknown fauna, but scholars generally approach the work as a complex textual tradition rather than a field guide. The lead supports comparison of catalogue-making, symbolic anatomy, and later illustration. Dating, redaction, translation, and the relation between text and image are all disputed or difficult to reconstruct.
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