Huang Zhong (1474-1553) was a Ming official who, after retiring from office in 1529, began collecting interesting stories and lore about the sea from mariners. Another of his informants was a foreign Buddhist monk who had arrived in Guangzhou with a tribute mission.¹ This is presumably the “barbarian monk” mentioned below as the source of Huang’s information on the krasue myth in Siam, in which case the monk was probably from the Siamese/Thai kingdom of Ayutthaya. In 1536, Huang published the Haiyu, the only extant premodern collection of Chinese maritime lore.

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The Flying Head Man barbarians are also one of the demonic beings of the islands in the sea. In their dwelling places and appetites, they are no different from human beings, but at night, their heads fly off to eat filthy things. The head returns and reconnects to the body while holding the food in its mouth. There is just a faintly visible red scar, like a thread, under the chin. Among the island barbarians of Xianluo (Siam), some men marry women who turn out to be of this kind, much to the husband’s disgust. Some teach the husband to wait for the head to leave and then place the body on the ground and stab it in the throat or neck with a short knife. When the head returns, it cannot rejoin with the body and flies round and round until it finally dies. A barbarian monk told me that one becomes a creature of this kind as a punishment from the spirits for repeatedly breaking one’s oaths. But I happened to recall a novel that spoke of a family that gave birth to a boy who had no head. In that case, aren’t people with flying heads also a result of random concentrations of inauspicious qi?

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1. See Elke Papelitzky, “Editing, Circulating, and Reading Huang Zhong’s Hai yu 海語: A Case Study in the History of Reading and the Circulation of Knowledge in Ming and Qing China,” Ming Qing Yanjiu 23.1 (2019), 1-38. ↩︎