Shan Hai Jing
| Classic of Mountains and Seas | |||||||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | 山海经 | ||||||||||||
| Literal meaning | Classic of Mountains and Seas ; ) | ||||||||||||
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| Transcriptions | |
|---|---|
| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Shānhǎijīng |
| Wade–Giles | Shan1-hai3 Ching1 |
| Yue: Cantonese | |
| Yale Romanization | Saan1-hoi2 Ging1 |
The Classic of Mountains and Seas or Shan Hai Jing, formerly romanized as the Shan-hai Ching, is a Chinese classic text and a compilation of mythic geography and myth. Versions of the text have existed since the 4th century BC, but the present form was not reached until the early Han dynasty a few centuries later. It is largely a fabulous geographical and cultural account of pre-Qin China as well as a collection of Chinese mythology. The book is divided into eighteen sections; it describes over 550 mountains and 300 channels.
The exact author(s) of the book and the time it was written are still undetermined. It was originally thought that mythical figures such as Yu the Great or Boyi wrote the book. However, the consensus among modern Sinologists is that the book was not written at a single time by a single author, but rather by numerous people from the period of the Warring States to the beginning of the Han dynasty.
The first known editor of the Classic was Liu Xiang from the Western Han, who among other things cataloged the Han imperial library. Later, Guo Pu, a scholar from the Western Jin, further annotated the work.
The book is not a narrative, as the "plot" involves detailed descriptions of locations in the cardinal directions of the Mountains, Regions Beyond Seas, Regions Within Seas, and Wilderness. The descriptions are usually of medicines, animals, and geological features. Many descriptions are very mundane, and an equal number are fanciful or strange. Each chapter follows roughly the same formula, and the whole book is repetitious in this way.
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