Jiepai Jianghu Chinese Legends and Beliefs Series: Chinese Vernacular Folklore, Sacred Sites, Ghost Narratives, and Local Belief Memory from Jiepai, Jiangsu, China

This record is a series-level primary source archival record for the Jiepai Jianghu Legends and Beliefs Series, a group of fourteen Chinese narrative texts about vernacular legends, local belief narratives, sacred-site memory, ghost stories, water-spirit beliefs, temple-related oral traditions, death-related customs, and place-based folklore from Jiepai, Danyang, Jiangsu, China. It is curated for research use in Chinese folklore, vernacular religion, Jiangnan studies, rural China studies, oral tradition, sacred-site folklore, deathscape studies, water-spirit folklore, local memory, and emic documentation. It is released as the OA_V1 series-level record within the Jiepai Jianghu section of the Chuanyue Archive. The series gathers Chinese vernacular legends and belief narratives from Jiepai, a Jiangnan riverside township in the Lower Yangtze region. The included texts concern Jiangzhuzi, the sacred ginkgo tree of Hongdeng village, snake deity traditions, corpse reanimation, the Dragon King Temple stone lion, Taohuagang, Badoushan, the Dragon King Temple fox spirit, fox-related egg folklore, river-god sacrifice narratives, drowned ghosts, ghost-wall experiences, and a flood-related zombie tale. The record functions as a discovery, inventory, and contextual metadata entry for the series. It identifies the series scope, item-level contents, archive context, access boundaries, and provenance structure, while leaving item-specific evidence, access decisions, and supporting materials to the relevant item-level records or the Author Private Master Archive. The materials are based on the Archive Author’s childhood memory, family oral transmission, oral accounts from the author’s father, selected local interlocutor narratives, recent site revisits, photographs, videos, and author-produced location maps. Item-level annotations in the broader series distinguish oral tradition, remembered fact, authorial reconstruction, narrative embellishment, uncertain details, local vocabulary, and private provenance materials. This series-level public record does not include raw oral recordings, private videos, precise location maps, unpublished photographs, private evidence chains, or unreleased provenance materials. Those materials are handled separately at the item level or retained in the Author Private Master Archive. Item-level records in this series may have different access statuses, including open access, restricted access, or non-public private-master retention. Authorship and deposit roles are separate. The Archive Author, The Jiepai Archivist, is the creator, archive owner, rights holder, and public contact person. Any depositor or curatorial assistant provides deposit and formatting assistance only and is not the author, creator, archive owner, rights holder, or public contact for this archive.