Shanhaijing in Video Games and Anime

Something strange happened around 2018. Game developers and anime studios — mostly Chinese, but increasingly Japanese and Western — started mining a 2,000-year-old geographic catalog for content. The Shanhaijing (山海经, Shān Hǎi Jīng), a text that most Chinese students encounter as a footnote in history class, suddenly became the hottest intellectual property in entertainment.

And honestly? It makes perfect sense. The Shanhaijing is basically a game design document that someone wrote two millennia early.

Why the Shanhaijing Works for Games

Think about what a game designer needs:

A large bestiary of unique creatures with distinct visual designs
A world map with named locations, each with specific characteristics
A lore system that connects creatures to locations
Items with specific properties (wear this fur for protection, eat this plant for power)
A power scaling system (more heads = more powerful)
Boss-tier creatures guarding specific locations

The Shanhaijing has all of this. It's organized geographically (mountains, seas, regions), each location has unique flora and fauna, each creature has specific abilities and weaknesses, and the whole thing is internally consistent enough to feel like a coherent world.

No game designer could have built a better source text if they'd tried.

The Major Games

Black Myth: Wukong (黑神话：悟空)

The 2024 release of Black Myth: Wukong by Game Science was a watershed moment for Chinese mythology in gaming. While the game draws primarily from Journey to the West (西游记), its creature design pulls heavily from the Shanhaijing.

The game's bestiary includes creatures that are direct adaptations of Shanhaijing entries:

| Game Creature | Shanhaijing Source | Chinese | Description | |--------------|-------------------|---------|-------------| | Various yaoguai | Shanhaijing beasts | 妖怪 | Hybrid creatures with animal-human features | | Mountain spirits | Mountain gods | 山神 | Guardians of specific peaks | | Water demons | Sea creatures | 水怪 | Aquatic monsters from the sea chapters |

What Black Myth does brilliantly is translate the Shanhaijing's flat, catalog-style descriptions into three-dimensional, animated beings. The text says "a beast like a horse with a white head and tiger markings." The game shows you what that actually looks like — running at you, teeth bared, in a misty mountain forest.

Genshin Impact (原神)

MiHoYo's Genshin Impact doesn't explicitly credit the Shanhaijing, but the influence is everywhere — particularly in the Liyue (璃月) region, which is based on Chinese culture.

The game's artifact system mirrors the Shanhaijing's approach to magical objects: items derive power from their geographic origin and material composition, not from enchantment or crafting. A flower from Jueyun Karst has different properties than a flower from Qingce Village, just as the Shanhaijing assigns different properties to minerals from different mountains.

Liyue's creature design also draws from the Shanhaijing tradition:

The Geovishaps resemble the Shanhaijing's mountain-dwelling reptilian beasts
The Oceanid's water mimics echo the shape-shifting water creatures of the sea chapters
Rex Lapis / Zhongli's dragon form follows the Chinese long (龙) tradition rather than the European dragon model

Shan Hai Jing Mobile Games

Several Chinese mobile games have adapted the Shanhaijing directly:

山海经：异兽录 (Shanhaijing: Record of Strange Beasts): A creature-collection game where players capture and train Shanhaijing monsters
山海镜花 (Shanhai Mirror Flower): A gacha RPG that personifies Shanhaijing creatures as anime-style characters
妄想山海 (Chimeraland): An open-world survival game set in a Shanhaijing-inspired landscape where players can capture, ride, and even fuse creatures

Chimeraland is particularly interesting because it embraces the Shanhaijing's hybrid logic. Players can combine creatures to create new hybrids — a mechanic that directly mirrors the text's approach of describing creatures as combinations of familiar animals.

Anime and Animation

Big Fish & Begonia (大鱼海棠, Dà Yú Hǎi Táng)

This 2016 Chinese animated film is the most visually stunning Shanhaijing adaptation to date. Set in a world beneath the ocean where supernatural beings control the tides and seasons, the film draws its creature designs directly from the Shanhaijing.

The protagonist, Chun (椿), lives in a realm populated by beings from the text — including the Kunpeng (鲲鹏, Kūn Péng), the legendary fish-bird that transforms from a massive fish into an enormous bird. The Kunpeng originally appears in the Zhuangzi (庄子) rather than the Shanhaijing, but the film blends both sources seamlessly.

The film's visual style — flowing water, luminous creatures, vast underground seas — captures something essential about the Shanhaijing's aesthetic: a world where the boundary between water and air, fish and bird, human and spirit is constantly shifting.

Japanese Anime Connections

Japanese anime has drawn from the Shanhaijing for decades, though often indirectly:

Naruto's nine-tailed fox (九尾の狐, Kyūbi no Kitsune) traces back to the Shanhaijing's nine-tailed fox (九尾狐, jiǔ wěi hú)
Pokémon features several creatures inspired by Shanhaijing entries — Ninetales being the most obvious
Natsume's Book of Friends (夏目友人帳) features yokai that share design elements with Shanhaijing creatures
InuYasha draws on the shared Chinese-Japanese tradition of animal spirits and hybrid beings

The transmission path is clear: Shanhaijing → Chinese folk religion → Japanese Buddhism and Shinto → Japanese folklore → anime. The nine-tailed fox traveled from a Chinese geographic catalog to a Japanese ninja manga in about 2,000 years. Not bad for a creature that was originally described in a single sentence.

The Design Challenge

Adapting the Shanhaijing for visual media presents a unique challenge: the text's descriptions are simultaneously very specific and very vague.

Specific: "A beast like a dog with leopard markings, ox horns, and a bark like a dog's" (the creature called Hu, 狐, from the Southern Mountains).

Vague: What does a dog with leopard markings and ox horns actually look like? The text gives you the ingredients but not the recipe. Two artists given the same description will produce completely different designs.

This vagueness is actually an advantage for game designers and animators. The Shanhaijing provides a creative constraint — the creature must have these specific features — while leaving enormous room for interpretation. It's like a design brief that's detailed enough to be useful but open enough to allow creativity.

Compare this to, say, Tolkien's descriptions of orcs, which are so specific that every adaptation looks roughly the same. Shanhaijing creatures can look like anything, as long as they include the specified features. This is why you can have a dozen different games all adapting the same creature and none of them looking alike.

Cultural Reclamation

There's a political dimension to the Shanhaijing's gaming renaissance that's worth acknowledging.

For decades, Chinese game developers relied on Western and Japanese source material — Tolkien-style fantasy, D&D-inspired mechanics, anime aesthetics. The turn toward the Shanhaijing represents a conscious effort to build games from Chinese cultural foundations rather than imported ones.

This isn't just nationalism (though nationalism plays a role). It's also good business. Chinese gamers — the world's largest gaming market — respond enthusiastically to games that draw on their own cultural heritage. Black Myth: Wukong sold 10 million copies in its first three days, partly because Chinese players were hungry for a AAA game that took their mythology seriously.

The Shanhaijing provides something that Western fantasy bestiaries can't: cultural authenticity. A Chinese player encountering a nine-tailed fox in a game feels a connection that goes beyond gameplay mechanics. That creature has been part of their culture for two thousand years. It appeared in their grandmother's bedtime stories. It's on the decorative plates in their parents' house.

Western games can borrow Chinese creatures, but they can't replicate that depth of cultural resonance. When a Chinese studio adapts the Shanhaijing, they're not just making a game — they're continuing a conversation that started before the Roman Empire existed.

What's Next

The Shanhaijing gaming trend shows no signs of slowing down. Several major projects are in development:

Multiple Chinese studios are working on open-world RPGs set in Shanhaijing-inspired worlds
VR experiences that let players "explore" the Shanhaijing's mountains and seas are in early development
AI-generated art tools trained on Shanhaijing descriptions are producing creature designs at scale
Tabletop RPG adaptations are bringing the Shanhaijing to the pen-and-paper gaming community

The text's 550+ creatures represent a fraction of what's possible. The Shanhaijing also describes hundreds of plants, minerals, and geographic features that haven't been fully exploited by game designers. The medicinal plants alone could fuel an entire crafting system. The mountain descriptions could generate dozens of unique biomes.

Two thousand years ago, someone sat down and wrote a catalog of every strange thing they'd heard about the world beyond their village. They described mountains they'd never climbed, seas they'd never sailed, and creatures they'd never seen — with the same matter-of-fact precision they'd use to describe their neighbor's cow.

That catalog is now generating billions of dollars in entertainment revenue. The Shanhaijing's anonymous authors would probably be confused by video games. But I think they'd be pleased to know that people are still reading their work — even if they're reading it on a screen, with a controller in their hands, while a nine-tailed fox charges at them from across a digital mountain.

Some stories are too good to stay on the page.