In 1349 Wang Dayuan (fl. 1311-1350), a Chinese literatus who had spent years traveling through Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean on merchant ships, was commissioned to write a detailed description of various foreign lands as an addendum to a new gazetteer of the major port city of Quanzhou. Wang later published an abridgement of the addendum as a standalone work titled Daoyi zhilue. In it, he revived the “flying head barbarian” myth with new information gained from the Cham people.

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Bintonglong (Panduranga)¹

Here, the Corpse-head Man (Shitou Man 尸頭蠻) women are even more dangerous than those in Zhancheng (Vijaya, Champa).² Hence the people worship them with blood sacrifices in temples. These Man are born from ordinary parents and are no different from other women, except that their eyes have no pupils and their heads fly off at night to eat people’s excrement. Once the head has flown off, if someone covers up the neck with paper or cloth, then when the head returns and can’t reattach itself, the woman will die. People who live in this land always use water to wash away their excrement after they have gone to the toilet. If not, the Man will eat their excrement and then, following the scent, go to sleep with them. If that happens, then the Man eats up the victim’s intestines and stomach. The victim loses his soul and dies.

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1. Panduranga was a Cham polity that corresponds to modern Phan Rang in southern Vietnam. ↩︎
2. The Daoyi zhilue entry on Zhancheng does not mention the Corpse-head Man, perhaps due to abridgment of the text. ↩︎