The Corpse Procession at Xiangxi
China (Western Hunan, the Xiangxi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture) · Qing through Republican, the cinnabar-mine years
The road ran north from the cinnabar workings at Wanshan to the river ports of the Yuan. The road was kept by the corpse-drivers. The corpse-drivers were a guild. The guild was small. The records of the trade, what little of them survive, place the busy years between the middle of the Qing and the close of the Republican period, when the mines were worked by labourers from the lowland counties who, in the routine of the work, were killed by collapse and by the slow poisoning of the ore.
The bodies of the dead were owed to the home villages.
The bodies were not carried on carts. The road did not permit it. The road was narrow. The road climbed. The road in the wet months was a single track of wet clay between cliffs. The corpse-drivers moved the bodies on foot. The bodies moved with them.
On the procession
The accounts of the surviving drivers agree on the order.
A priest walked at the head with a paper lantern on a long pole. The lantern was the only light. The priest carried a small bronze bell of the kind sold at the temple markets of Changde, and struck the bell once for each step. Behind the priest, in single file, walked the dead. The dead were dressed in long black robes that fell to the ankle. Each wore a conical straw hat that hid the face. Each had the wrists lashed to a length of green bamboo, the bamboo carried at the front by a living man and at the rear by another, the bodies suspended between the two so that the feet of the corpses scuffed forward in time with the bell. The road, in the dark, swallowed the lantern at the bends and gave it back at the straights.
The bell sounded once for each step. The lantern moved before them. The bodies walked behind in single file and did not break the line.
The procession travelled at night. The accounts insist on this. The bodies could not be moved in heat. The villages along the road were warned in the late afternoon by a runner from the priest, and the householders shuttered their windows and barred their doors, and the dogs of the village were tied up indoors, and no fire was to be lit on the threshold until the bell had passed.
On the inns and the talismans
At the towns on the route the procession was given shelter. The inns of the Yuan-river road kept a windowless room at the back of the courtyard, the door fitted with an iron bar on the outside, the floor swept and laid with fresh straw, for the use of the corpse-trade. The inn-keepers did not enter the room. The bodies were stood against the back wall in the order in which they had walked. The bamboo was laid down. The priest sat outside the door through the night and did not sleep.
The records of the priests describe the talismans.
A square of yellow paper was pasted to the forehead of each corpse before the procession was set in motion. The paper was inscribed in cinnabar ink, the ink mixed with the blood of a white rooster, the characters drawn in the running-grass hand of the Daoist registers. The talisman bound the body to the bell. If a talisman fell from a forehead in the course of the walk, the procession halted. The priest re-brushed the seal on the spot, in chicken-blood ink carried in a small lacquered horn at the belt, and burnt a string of spirit-money at the next crossroads to settle the disturbance. The accounts of the drivers say that a body whose talisman had fallen and was not at once replaced would step out of the line, and would not step back, and would walk into the cliff or into the river or into the dark of the forest and was not recovered.
On what was buried
The bodies were delivered to the village headman at the end of the road. The talismans were burnt in a clay bowl at the threshold. The bamboo was returned to the priest. The straw hats were burnt. The bodies were washed by the women of the household and buried in the village cemetery on the morning of the third day. The priest walked back to Wanshan in daylight, alone, the bell silent in the bottom of his pack.
The archive holds no position on the means by which the bodies were made to walk. The trade had its explanations. The Republican authorities at Changsha had others. The accounts of the inn-keepers, who heard the bell pass in the dark and did not open their shutters, recorded only the order of the steps. The archive observes that the road is no longer used, and that the bell, in the museums of Hunan, has been catalogued among the instruments of the Daoist priesthood and is not rung.
- Liao Yiwu. The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up. Translated by Wen Huang. New York: Pantheon Books, 2008. The chapter The Corpse Walker, pages 7 to 18, the testimony of the retired transporter Luo Tianwang of the Yuanling district.
- Shen Congwen. Xiangxing Sanji [Random Sketches on a Trip to Hunan]. Shanghai: Shangwu Yinshuguan, 1934. The earliest twentieth-century literary record of the corpse-driver trade along the Yuan River.
- Sutton, Donald S. Steps of Perfection: Exorcistic Performers and Chinese Religion in Twentieth-Century Taiwan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003. The comparative ritual context for the talismanic Daoist exorcist on the mountain road.