Ma Huan (fl. 1413-1451) was a descendant of Muslim immigrants to southeast China and served as an interpreter on the Muslim eunuch Zheng He’s (1371-1433) maritime expeditions to expand the Ming dynasty’s tributary relations into the Indian Ocean. The expeditions were not voyages of exploration—the countries visited were all already known to Chinese merchants—but did inspire a burst of ethnographic writing, as returning participants eagerly capitalized on their experiences to publish books for a curious public. Of the three such works extant today, Ma Huan’s Yingya shenglan is the most well-informed, in part because of his knowledge of Islam and in part because he revised and expanded it periodically from 1416 to 1451. The two competing titles, Gong Zhen’s Xiyang fanguo zhi (Gazetteer of Foreign Countries in the Western Ocean, 1434) and Fei Xin’s Xingcha shenglan (Comprehensive Survey from the Starry Raft, 1436), appear to have copied much of their contents from early editions of Ma Huan’s book. Ma Huan himself often borrowed material from Wang Dayuan’s Daoyi zhilue (see source 4.40). The passage below reflects this borrowing, but it should be noted that the full entry on Zhancheng (which is much longer) contains much original information not found in the Daoyi zhilue.

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Zhancheng (Vijaya, Champa)

The Corpse-head Man (Shitou man 屍頭蠻¹) were originally women from ordinary households and are only different from human beings in that their eyes have no pupils. When they sleep at night, their heads fly off and eat the excrement of other people’s children. The child’s bowels are attacked by their demonic qi and the child always dies. The flying head returns and reattached to its body and is the same as before. But if someone who knows of this matter waits for the head to fly off and then moves the body to a different location, [the head] returns and cannot reattach and dies. If a household has [this kind of woman] and does not report her to the government for her to be removed and killed, the entire household is punished for her crimes.

[Translator’s note: The Xingcha shenglan description of the Corpse-head Man is mostly similar but adds this detail: “When a person is sick and encounters one of them near excrement, their demonic qi enters his bowels, and the sick person always dies.”]

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1. Some variant editions have Shizhi yu 屍致魚, which may be a transcription of a foreign word. Some later Ming texts also use it as a name for the Corpse-head Man. ↩︎