Kuang Lu (1604-1650) was a flamboyant Guangdong literatus who made a trip to Guangxi in 1634 to avoid trouble after offending a county magistrate. After his return, he wrote an account of Guangxi’s indigenous peoples, landscape, and flora and fauna; the text’s title, Chiya, reflects the south’s association with the color red in Chinese cosmology. Kuang became a noted collector of antiquities in Guangzhou and participated in the Ming loyalist defense of the city during the Manchu invasion. After the city’s fall, he committed suicide by self-starvation. Kuang Lu was an avid teller of tales of the strange. In the Chiya he claims to have encountered various extraordinary creatures in Guangxi, including the fabled Flying Head Lao. The passage below was evidently inspired by the Youyang zazu and Yingya shenglan (see sources 4.39 and 4.41), possibly with a whimsical touch (the flapping ears) from the Bowu zhi (see source 4.37).

This passage has previously been translated by Steven Miles, but my reading of the text differs slightly from his. See Steven B. Miles, “Strange Encounters on the Cantonese Frontier: Region and Gender in Kuang Lu’s (1604-1650) Chiya,” Nan Nü 8.1 (2006), 130. Miles’s article is an interesting analysis of the Chiya from a gender studies perspective.

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A day before his head flies off, the Flying Head Lao develops a mark encircling his neck, like red thread. When night comes, he appears sick, and his head suddenly flies away. Soon afterwards. it flies back [and reattaches]. His stomach feels full and he feels like he just had a dream, and even the Lao don’t know what happened. Once, I climbed Mount Shipao and happened to see two heads by a stream. One was eating a crab and the other a worm. When they saw me, they were startled and took off. The one eating a worm still held the worm in its mouth as it flew away. The worm was about a chi (a foot) long. The ears on either side flapped like a bird’s wings. The ordinary Lao despise the Flying Head Lao and refuse to intermarry with them, hoping that their kind will go extinct. I note that in Zhancheng (Champa), there are Corpse-head Man barbarians. These were originally [ordinary] women but their eyes have no pupils. Their heads fly away and eat children’s excrement. When one of these women has eaten up all a child’s excrement, the child dies, and the woman’s eyesight grows stronger. They would make a good marriage match for these [Flying Head] Lao, I suppose. Ha ha!