Jiangshi Folklore, Flood Memory, and Burial Site Disturbance in Rural China: A Jiepai Oral Tradition Record from Jiangsu

This record is a primary source archival item about Jiangshi folklore, flood memory, burial site disturbance, corpse preservation, rural deathscape, and local lexicon in Jiepai, Jiangsu, curated for research use in Chinese corpse folklore, Chinese ghost folklore, deathscape studies, flood memory, rural China studies, Jiangnan folklore, oral tradition, and emic documentation. It is released as the OA_V1 item-level record for “Jiangshi,” a Chinese narrative text within the Jiepai Jianghu section of the Chuanyue Archive. The text documents a Jiepai family oral tradition transmitted from the Archive Author’s grandfather to the author’s father and later retold to the Archive Author. In the narrative, a flood around 1950 breaks open shallow graves in an old burial landscape. A corpse, said to have been dead for many years yet not reduced to bone, is exposed after the flood and later interpreted by villagers as a “jiangshi.” The record’s value lies in Jiangshi folklore, Chinese corpse folklore, flood memory, burial-site disturbance, corpse preservation belief, rural deathscape, Chinese ghost folklore, Jiangnan folklore, oral tradition, and local lexicon. The text is not presented as evidence for the supernatural reality of jiangshi. It is preserved as an emic record of how flood disaster, disturbed graves, corpse materiality, fear, and local death memory are connected in family oral transmission. Methodologically, this item combines the Archive Author’s childhood memory of hearing the story, the father’s 2026 retelling, a privately retained oral video, family transmission from grandfather to father to author, author questioning during the retelling, author annotations, and provenance notes. The annotations state that the public text follows the father’s oral account without authorial invention or narrative embellishment. A key feature of the record is its non-entertainment use of “jiangshi.” The narrative does not describe a mobile or theatrical monster. Instead, “jiangshi” appears as a local category for an unnervingly preserved corpse revealed by flood and grave disturbance. The item therefore preserves a rural deathscape use of the term, rather than a popular-media zombie image. The record also preserves local terms and cultural concepts, including “Qiwei Daotang,” an old wild-grave site; “yanchao,” meaning flood or high water; and “hong yiyi,” a Jiepai expression referring to a repulsive, hard-to-look-at shade of red. The specific written form of “yiyi” remains open for later verification. This item belongs to the Jiepai Jianghu Legends and Beliefs Series. The series-level record has been published on Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20834123. This item-level record has DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20968298. The item is also part of the broader Chuanyue Archive, a native-insider emic vernacular multimodal archive. Related records will be released on a rolling basis over the next few months. This public OA_V1 release includes the public narrative text, author annotations, and contextual metadata. It does not include the father’s oral video, precise burial-site or pond locations, location maps, private videos, raw spatial materials, or unreleased provenance materials. Those materials are retained in the Author Private Master Archive. Authorship and upload roles are separate. The Archive Author, The Jiepai Archivist, is the creator, archive owner, rights holder, and public contact person. Any uploader, 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.