Corpse Reanimation, Funeral Vigil, and Death-Ritual Folklore in Rural China: A Jiangnan Oral Tradition Record from Jiepai, Jiangsu

This record is a primary-source archival item about corpse reanimation folklore, funeral vigil, night-watching practice, temple memory, fear narrative, and local death customs in Jiepai, Jiangsu, curated for research use in Chinese funeral vigil, death-ritual folklore, Chinese ghost folklore, vernacular religion, rural China studies, Jiangnan folklore, oral tradition, and local lexicon. It is released as the OA_V1 item-level record for “Corpse Reanimation,” a Chinese narrative text within the Jiepai Jianghu section of the Chuanyue Archive. The text documents a Jiepai oral tradition concerning a monk’s corpse, a funeral vigil, a local night-watching custom known as panyè, and a fear narrative of corpse reanimation. It preserves a local death-related story in which temple memory, corpse vigil practice, fear transmission, and vernacular explanation converge. The record’s value lies in corpse reanimation folklore, Chinese funeral vigil, death-ritual folklore, Chinese ghost folklore, vernacular religion, rural China studies, Jiangnan folklore, local death customs, oral tradition, and local lexicon. The text is not presented as evidence for the supernatural reality of corpse reanimation. It is preserved as an emic record of local narrative form, death-related custom, fear transmission, temple memory, and place-based vernacular cosmology. Methodologically, this item combines the Archive Author’s childhood memory, family oral transmission, later confirmation from the author’s father, local lexical explanation, narrative clarification, and author annotations. The annotations distinguish oral tradition, strict source-based narration, authorial narrative invention, local funerary practice, temple memory, and provenance boundaries. A key feature of the record is the local term “panyè,” written provisionally as “盘夜” and interpreted as a local form related to “伴夜.” It refers to the practice of staying near the body after death, often overnight, with villagers or relatives playing cards or mahjong to keep watch. The item also records a local explanation of zhashi, or corpse reanimation, as “mouse breath-blocking,” a vernacular explanatory model transmitted in childhood. 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.20847177. 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 raw oral recordings, private videos, precise location maps, or unreleased provenance materials. Those materials, if any, 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.