The Geography of Imagination
The Shanhaijing is, at its core, a geography book. But it is a geography of imagination — a map of places that exist somewhere between observation and fantasy.
Some locations in the text correspond to real places. Others are clearly invented. The interesting ones are in between — places that might be distorted descriptions of real locations, filtered through centuries of oral transmission and cultural imagination.
Kunlun Mountain (昆仑山)
Kunlun is the most important mythical location in Chinese cosmology. It is the axis of the world — the mountain that connects earth to heaven. The Queen Mother of the West lives on its summit, tending the Peach Garden of Immortality.
The Shanhaijing describes Kunlun as impossibly tall, surrounded by a river of weak water (弱水) that cannot support even a feather, and guarded by a nine-headed beast called Kaiming (开明兽).
There is a real Kunlun mountain range in western China. Whether the mythical Kunlun is based on the real one is debated. The real Kunlun is impressive — it includes peaks over 7,000 meters — but it does not have weak water rivers or nine-headed guardians.
The Country of Gentlemen (君子国)
The Shanhaijing describes a country where everyone is polite, honest, and generous. The people wear swords but never use them. They defer to each other in all things. Merchants insist on giving customers more than they paid for.
This is clearly not a real place. It is a utopia — an idealized society that serves as implicit criticism of the real society the author lived in. If the Country of Gentlemen is what society should be, then the author's own society falls short.
The Country of Women (女子国)
A land inhabited entirely by women who reproduce by bathing in a magical pool. The Shanhaijing's description is brief and matter-of-fact — it presents the Country of Women as simply another foreign land, no more remarkable than any other.
This matter-of-fact treatment is interesting. The text does not present an all-female society as strange or threatening. It is just another variation in the infinite variety of the world.
The Valley of the Sun (汤谷)
The place where the sun rises. The Shanhaijing describes a valley filled with boiling water, where ten suns roost in a giant mulberry tree called Fusang (扶桑). Each day, one sun rides across the sky in a chariot pulled by dragons, while the other nine wait their turn.
This myth explains why there is only one sun in the sky — and sets up the famous story of Hou Yi, the archer who shot down nine of the ten suns when they all appeared at once, scorching the earth.
What the Lands Mean
The mythical lands of the Shanhaijing serve multiple functions: they entertain (the descriptions are vivid and strange), they educate (they encode geographical and cultural knowledge about distant peoples), and they philosophize (they explore what society could be, should be, or should not be).
The lands are not real. But the questions they raise — about the limits of the known world, the variety of human societies, and the relationship between geography and culture — are as relevant now as they were two thousand years ago.