Chinese Vampire

aka: Jiangshi

These ones are particularly bouncy...

"Stop shooting! I'm not a zombie! I'm a jiang shi! I don't even eat people OR their brains!"

— Hsien-Ko's win quote to Chris Redfield in Marvel vs. Capcom 3

The monster called a 'Chinese Vampire' (Simplified: 僵尸; Traditional: 殭屍; Pinyin: Jiāngshī) has also been translated as a hopping corpse or hopping vampire, among other names. The Mandarin name is romanized as jiangshi, usually, which means "stiff corpse". Despite the name, they are much closer in nature to the Western concepts of ghouls or zombies than to any common depiction of vampires.

A typical Chinese Vampire drains life energy though some jiangshi drain blood while they're at it due to cross-cultural influence. Behaviour-wise, however, the Chinese Vampire is bestial in its monstrosity; it cannot speak, has pale skin, long claw-like fingernails, and a long prehensile tongue. In what would probably be a particularly huge display of the Uncanny Valley, it moves by hopping and always has its arms outstretched in rigor mortis. Often a bit on the decayed side, they typically wear shabby robes of the kind worn by the nobility in times gone by — nowadays, Qing Dynasty-style robes are the thing. The modern visual depiction of the Jiangshi as a horrific Qing official may have been derived by the anti-Manchu or anti-Qing sentiments of the Han Chinese population during the Qing Dynasty, as the officials were viewed as bloodthirsty creatures with little regard for humanity. Jiangshi were popularized during the jiangshi boom of the Hong Kong film industry, which was partially a response to the preceding wave of western vampire fiction. Mr. Vampire is the most influential film from this era and is Trope Codifier for jiangshi portrayals.

In some versions, it detects potential victims by the energy fluctuations caused by their breathing — one can hide, for a while, from one by holding one's breath. Some of these stories purport that if one manages to suck the creature's dying (and still held) breath out of it, it will fall inanimate and become an ordinary corpse. Folklore may also suggest escaping it by strewing many small objects, such as rice, in its path, which it would feel compelled to count. It may be controlled with a parchment inscribed with runes placed on its head.

A person drained of Life Energy will become another of its kind.

Typical weaknesses of a jiangshi include the blood of a black dog, a wooden sword made from a peach tree, a hen's egg, glutinous rice (by extension of its use in the attempt to draw poisons from a living body), and the urine of a virgin boy. In case you were wondering, the classic Kill It with Fire is implied by the text of Zi Bu Yu to work as well. It's been suggested that due to the jiangshi's lack of advanced motor function, one could pull off Flipping Helpless on it if it was knocked onto its back.

The myth is an out-growth of an earlier legend to the effect that a person who died far from home could be brought back home for burial, which was greatly preferable, by a Daoist magician or priest's affixing a parchment with an effective prescription to its forehead and leading it home, often with the accompaniment of a drum to tell it when to hop. Some expanded this into entire of squads of hopping corpses led across the countryside, it being cheaper that way... though more prone to one's getting lost, or undetectedly exceeding the limits of its animating spell and going rogue.

Sub-Trope of Our Vampires Are Different. Compare Classical Movie Vampire and Our Zombies Are Different, Looks Like Orlok. Settings with a Vampire Variety Pack will often at least mention that these exist. Not to Be Confused with a western-style vampire who is ethnically Chinese.

Incidentally, in Chinese, the word jiāngshī is also applied to the Anglo zombies (alongside 丧尸/喪屍, sàngshī which exclusively means zombies), while Slavic vampires use another term entirely 吸血鬼 (xīxuèguǐ, literally "blood-sucking ghost"). A Chinese person would find jiangshi to be closer to zombies than vampires.

Not to be confused with the actual Chinese poet Jiang Shi.

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Examples:

Animation

• Spookiz: Kong Kong is a jiangshi who often teams up with the vampire Cula. Kong Kong regularly moves around by hopping, but isn't bound by stiff movement. His talisman enables and forces him to take on the attributes of whatever drawing is placed on it.

Anime & Manga

• Dropkick on My Devil: Kyon-Kyon and her older sister Ran-Ran are jiangshi, though the latter was turned into a panda.
• Dragon Ball:
  • Chiaotzu is based on a jiang-shi, wearing a Qing Dynasty outfit, having extremely pale skin, and uses telekinetic powers by stretching his arms out.
  • Android 19 also shares many similarities to them, namely his pale white skin and his absorption of fighters' ki to power himself via stretching his arms out in front of an attack.
• Interspecies Reviewers: Zel ends up sleeping with a jiangshi when the reviewers (sans Crim) visit the undead brothel Necrowife. He gives her a six out of ten.
• Monster Musume: Jiang-shi are a sub-species to zombies, primarily found in Asian countries like China and Taiwan. They tend to suffer from rigor-mortis almost daily, especially after sleep, locking up their elbows and knees, forcing them to practice tai chi every day to open up their joints. Chapter 39 introduced the first named jiang-shi in the form of Shiishii.
• Nanbaka 's Upa dresses like one.
• Rosario + Vampire: Ling-Ling is a Chinese jiangshi, who can freely dismember and reassemble herself. She commands an army of Zombies, though it's seen that her "friends" have some degree of independence. She's also capable of using the Jigen-Tou, though she's the least skilled of its three users.
• Shaman King: The corpse servants of the Chinese Tao family of shamans are jiangshi. The family tends to kill people with strong bodies to fill out their army of corpses. Lee Pai-Long, Jun's personal servant, has the full outfit and everything, but is much less stiff, seeing as he's a Bruce Lee Clone.
• ∀ Gundam: Merrybell Gadget is an eccentic Moonrace engineer who dresses and acts like a jiang-shi: Her spacesuit has long sleeves, most of her face is covered in stark-white makeup, and she tends to hop around and stick her arms out.
• In one episode of Wan Wan Celeb Soreyuke! Tetsunoshin, Chin dresses up as a jiang shi as part of a horror attraction held in a cemetery. While Tetsunoshin has no idea what a jiang shi is, Victoria both knows and is afraid enough of them that she punts Chin clear off-screen purely out of fear.
• Rin Azuma from Yozakura Quartet is one, though she doesn't quite look the part. In fact, her only vampiric traits seem to be her need to keep a talisman on her person and her vulnerability to a Necromancer's mind-control. Also matter-destroying forcefields in the anime.
• The CMX manga Zombie Fairy features one of these in the title role.

Comic Books

• "Barfly!" (Vampirella #33): While in Hong Kong for business, the American Ludlow Guthrie meets and marries Ch'ing Shih. Ch'ing Shih is a ch'ing shih and she is after Guthrie's share in a company he runs with Phillip Vandamm, legal access to the USA, Guthrie's blood while she's at it, and later she also sets her romantic sight on Phillip. The men do get a warning before Ch'ing Shih's trap closes but they dismiss it: at a party, the monster movie actor Fortesque Bromide notices Ch'ing Shih's peculiar name and in jest draws a circle around her with rice kernels. However, Ch'ing Shih, being the actual creature, responds to it as if she's being suffocated, which Bromide assumes is psychosomatic. Ch'ing Shih and Guthrie leave thereafter and Ch'ing Shih drains her husband for the last time, after which she drugs him into a heart attack to prevent him from becoming a ch'ing shih too. Then she goes after Phillip and turns him, teaching him that as a ch'ing shih he is immortal, can mentally travel the earth through moonlight, and change shape into a bat-dog hybrid. He rejects her at first, but after two months of subsiding on animal blood with no way out but suicide, he returns to be with her.
• One Iron Fist series featured Chinese vampire bats who were dressed like traditional jiangshi.
• Top 10: Jiangshi are the Triad-analogue rivals of The Mafia-analogue European vampire mobsters.
• In the first issue of Spirit World (2023), Cassandra Cain battles jiangshi after getting stuck in the Spirit World.

Films — Live-Action

• One of the blonde heroine's costume changes in Asian Dynamite is one of these.
• Crazy Safari: The corpse of a Chinese vampire is bought from an auction and flown with a plane to China in order to give it a proper burial. The plane crashes and a group of tribesmen (Bushmen) come across the vampire, and use it to get fruit out of a tree, by having it hop into it repeatedly. Yeah.
• In Fantasy Mission Force, one of the many random oddities encountered by the eponymous force while spending a night in a haunted house is a bunch of hopping jiangshis.
• The Taiwanese Jiāngshī Xiǎozi (Jiangshi kid) / Hello Dracula / Kyonshies series is probably the most successful jiangshi film series after Mr. Vampire, notable for its Kid Hero protagonists, recurring undead child characters and more family-friendly tone than its rival series. It had four sequels, a TV show specifically made for Japan and a Direct to Video spin-off series that only made it to the first entry.
• The Jitters: A jiangshi gets loose in America.
• Kid from Kwangtung has a scene where the titular kid and a bunch of his friends snuck into a funeral parlour in order to steal from a coffin, by dressing themselves as jiangshis. Much to their horror, in the middle of their theft a group of real jiangshi suddenly enters...
• The various characters of Kung Fu Wonder Child includes a jiangshi and his two kids, who travels everywhere by hopping with their arms outstretched. Oddly enough, they can appear in broad daylight, with the two jiangshi kids tagging behind Yukari Oshima's heroine.
• The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires: (1974) is a co-production with Hammer Horror, and features Western and Chinese vampires in the same film. It has been released cut with various titles such as Seven Brothers Meet Dracula.
• Our Friend Power 5: Dalgeun at one point dresses up as a jiangshi, complete with painting his face a pale purple and wearing a long, colorful robe, all in an effort to scare Mina. When he moves, he even hops around with his arms outstretched. Then, when the turtles see him hopping around, they also transform into jiangshi, thinking that's just how humans are supposed to look...
• The Shadow Boxing: A novice sorcerer working at a funeral parlour transfers bodies from morgues to graveyards by converting them to jiangshi first. A botched spell results in the jiangshi getting loose.
• Swift Shaolin Boxer: A cadre of kung fu fighting jiangshi shows up in one scene and quickly disappears, although they're later revealed to be a group of rogue martial artists posing as the undead.
• Ultraman Ginga S The Movie: Showdown! The 10 Ultra Warriors!: Arisa gets assaulted by a horde of jiangshi when she attempts to infiltrate Etelgar's fortress. The fortress feeds on her fears and apparently jiangshi are what scares her the most.
• Vampire Vs Vampire: The jiangshi is a child and friendly (it is shown sucking a tomato dry rather than drinking blood or lifeforce). The Western vampire is dug out of the ground but associated with an old church.
• Zombi 56: Hopping Mad to the Sound of Music: The jiangshi can be subdued by music, at which point it goes from hopping to dancing uncontrollably.

Literature

• Anno Dracula: A hopping corpse is sent to first threaten and then attack Geneviève Dieudonné.
• The Dresden Files: Quite possibly the basis of the Asia-based Jade Vampire Court.
• The lurching, strangling, and soul-stealing variety appears in The Story of the Stone. When its hand is cut off, it continues to strangle our hero, until Ox dumps the lamp over his head and the lamp oil loosens the thing's grip enough to pry it off. Then the dismembered body keeps moving... Fortunately for all concerned, once the monster's grip was broken, it lost its power to steal souls. When the fires finally died out, there was nothing getting up again. Too bad the mastermind using said vampire to do his dirty work was still alive... Hugart would later use one again, a great deal less climactically, to start off the plot of his third book.
• In S.A. Sidor's Fury From The Tomb, Yong Wu's parents had been railroad workers until a jiangshi killed them in their tent one night. Though blind, mute, and ghastly to behold, they retain enough of their human emotions to look out for their son's welfare, following Yong Wu and his companions on their journey through the desert, feeding on coyotes and other wildlife when they're not discreetly helping out against ghoul banditos and a stolen mummy's curse.
• Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation: Mo Dao Zu Shi: The really tall thresholds at the entrances and exits of ancient Chinese coffin homes is meant to prevent them from getting out. See, when the corpse is animated by natural energy, the body is still undergoing rigor mortis, so it can only hop, and it becomes difficult to hop over the threshold. So it hops, it trips, and it falls and stays on the ground until daybreak, where it could be discovered.
• The Mediochre Q Seth Series sees them used as Mooks by the Big Bad of Born to Raise the Sons of Earth.
• Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio: In "The Blood-Drinking Corpse", a woman's corpse reviving in an inn and going on a killing spree, before chasing one of her would-be victims to a garden. Missing a slash with her Femme Fatalons, she ends up being Left Stuck After Attack as she embeds her claws into a tree. She is discovered the next morning, having reverted back to a corpse with her fingers still in the bark.

Live-Action TV

• Blood Ties: Jiangshi are mentioned by Coreen in reference to "Illuminacion del sol," a sun-shaped weapon that paralyzes a vampire when stuck in his or her chest. Despite the Spanish name, possibly given by its previous owner Monsignor Javier Mendoza, it was actually created at the request of a Chinese emperor to battle jiangshi. Given that the weapon works on a Western vampire, it can be assumed that these jiangshi are the same, although the number of supernatural beings in existence in this verse could indicate otherwise.
• In Choujuu Sentai Liveman, a Monster of the Week transformed the departed souls lingering on Academia Island into Jiangshi in order to have a private army.
• Forever Knight: Nick Knight is captured by a Chinese acupuncturist who (incorrectly) believes he killed his mother years before. He identifies Nick as a jiangshi.
• Juken Sentai Gekiranger: The mook enemies known as the rinshi are based on the jiangshi, though they feed off fear instead of life energy. That and jumping headfirst into cars and making them explode. A rinshi that passes through the Chamber of Trials is worthy of becoming a Monster of the Week. Dark Action Girl main character Mele is a really strong one.
  • Aside from parsing the name as two words rather than one, no significant changes seem to be made to the Rin Shi in Gekiranger's adaptation, Power Rangers Jungle Fury.
• What We Do in the Shadows (2019): In "The Orgy", one of the guests at the Bi-Annual Vampire Orgy that the main characters are hosting is a Chinese hopping vampire. Nadja greets him personally and even refers to him as a jiangshi.

Manhua

• Bloodline: The Last Royal Vampire: Is a much nicer form of this trope... in a sense. It's played straight with Chong Yin and Ye Ren in the prequels.

Music

• RTRT by Mili is about a girl befriending one of these by offering him normal human food. The two get along great, at least until he gets shot.

Podcasts

• One episode of Residents of Proserpina Park has Terry challenge Alina and her friends to stay in the park overnight. Terry provides them with some jiangshi for protection against the more dangerous residents of the park.

Tabletop Games

• All Flesh Must Be Eaten is mostly geared toward survival horror and monsters in the Romero tradition, but the Atlas of the Walking Dead supplement features information and stats for various monsters from around the world, including "gyonshi" (alternate romanization). The Gyonshi here is depicted as a blue-gray, visually corpse-like undead created when bad Feng Shui leads to improper chi flows through a graveyard or when Taoist rituals are invoked to deliberately raise the dead. Largely paralyzed from the waist down, they move only through hopping, and they're blind, hunting through a combination of hearing and the ability to smell the breath of the living. They are inhumanly strong and resistant to pain, and wield claw-like fingers. Their claw (and their bite or tongue, if they have such) carries a dark curse which afflicts a living person with an uncontrollable hunger for blood, turning them into a kind of "living vampire". They are repulsed or even damaged by string soaked in chicken blood and sticky rice, can be subdued and controlled by Taoist paper charms, and slain by using fire or a sword made of peach wood that has been blessed through Taoist ritual. Variable attributes include being smarter than the usual mindless hopping corpse, being able to hop impossibly high distances or even levitate and get around by hovering (usually a result of the gyonshi having been a Taoist priest or sorcerer in life), having fangs, using a barbed tongue to suck blood, and only being able to move in straight lines, forcing them to stop and reorient themselves if they want to change direction.
• The Deadlands faction known as the Maze Rats, which were a gang of mostly Chinese pirates, had one of these, with the instructions to "remove the paper from its forehead and stand back" in case of emergencies.
• Feng Shui: Jiangshi are among the many monsters used by the Eaters of the Lotus. The Architects of the Flesh also use them, modifying them with Arcanowave technology to become Bouncing Benjys.
• Kindred of the East, a supplement in the Old World of Darkness. Calling themselves the Kuei-Jin, they are spirits of the dead who fought their way back from one of the 1001 hells and back into their bodies, which they reanimate and keep alive by feeding on the chi of other people. In the setting's present day, they're usually involved in turf wars with western vampires. Only people of Asian descent can become Kuei-Jin. Primarily another example of the setting's many conflicting religions which are all somehow true and mutually exclusive from one another.
  • And a book for the new line, Vampire: The Requiem, features the jiangshi, ghosts bound to their bodies and graves who seek out the life of the living. It's part of a whole book on things in the setting that are vampiric without being, well, vampires.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!: Ghostrick Jiangshi is part of a monster rally and can search out his comrades very easily.
  • A straighter example is Master Kyonshee, a Normal Zombie-Type Monster. Unlike Ghostrick Jiangshi, Master Kyonshee isn't shown hopping, but instead appears as the revived body of an Old Master of some kind, put to evil use—the paper over his face reads "Cursed."
• Dungeons & Dragons has dabbled with the trope before via its Ravenloft setting, which is home to the game's widest variety of vampires.
  • The earliest iteration of the Chinese Vampire was the Oriental Vampire in 2nd edition. This is more a weird blend of the standard (Western) Vampire and the Bakeneko and Nekomata, with a sprinkling of Jiangshi. This vampire looks largely like its living self, save a feral cast to its features, slightly luminescent skin, and that its nails grow into massive claws, which it tends to favor over weaponry. They can't turn into mist, but can turn invisible and walk through walls. Their gaze paralyses a victim with a mesmeric effect rather than charming them. They can summon insect swarms and great cats to their aid, and transform into tigers. They are repulsed by mirrors, holy symbols, garlands of rosemary & ivy, and the scent of incense of rosemary and myrrh. They lack the ability of the "western" vampire to climb walls like a spider, but can instead levitate at will, and retain their cousin's lack of a reflection or shadow and their ability to move in complete silence. Nonmagical weapons that strike these vampires do no damage and are destroyed. They must rest in at least a cubic foot of soil from their original burial place at night; if exposed to sunlight, or prevented from sleeping in this grave-soil for nine days in a row, they are destroyed. Staking them through the heart with bamboo renders them inert; killing them requires placing blessed rosemary in the vampire's mouth and then sewing its mouth and eyes shut with golden thread using a silver needle. These vampires are largely associated with the Japanese-based domain of Rokushima Taiyoo and the India-based domain of Sri Raji, in large part due to the setting's only China-based domain, I'Cath, being an uninhabited wasteland.
  • In the 3rd edition reboot, the aforementioned "Oriental Vampire" was renamed the Chiang-Shi, but otherwise remained identical.
  • In the 5th edition reboot, the Jiangshi finally debuted under its accepted name. Described as a soul trapped within its own corpse, animated by its bitterness, the jiangshi is all but paralyzed by rigor mortis, causing them to hop along with their arms outstretched. They feed on the life energy of others, which sustains them and temporarily limbers up their bodies, which grants them the ability to fly via levitation at an impressive pace. They can freely shapechange into people, animals, and other undead creatures, and are repulsed by mirrors and holy symbols. They are finally associated with I'Cath, which in this iteration of the setting is an actual populated domain.
  • Adjacent to the Chiang-shi and Jiangshi is the Kizoku, a monster from Rokushima Taiyoo that combines elements of the standard vampire and the incubus; though its modus operandi combines elements of both, it's not an undead creature. Appearing as handsome Japanese or Chinese men with a small mole in the shape of a black crescent moon somewhere on their body (typically a hand or face), the Kizoku seduce women into committing acts of evil, usually murdering their husband or betrothed, before sucking out their souls. There are some key differences between the 2nd and 3rd edition versions of the monster. In 2nd edition, a Kizoku merely devours the women he corrupts, and can only be slain permanently by staking him the heart with a stake made from weeping willow wood. In 3rd edition, the women whose lives are drained by the Kizoku are transformed into weeping willows. They can be restored by Wish or Miracle spells, but if someone who truly loved a Kizoku's victim finds her tree and sacrifices her by cutting it down and fashioning a weapon from its heartwood, that victim can permanently slay the Kizoku, which will instantly restore all of the Kizoku's other victims to life. The woman whose heartwood was used can only be restored with a Wish or Miracle spell.

Toys

• Living Dead Dolls Series 27, a "monsters of the world" collection, includes the Hopping Vampire, who comes with a velcro spell tag which can attach to its head.

Video Games

• Abyss Crossing:
  • The Black Wastelands has a Jiangshi enemy that is weak to light like most other undead.
  • The Dark Astra Mona created an undead clone of his sister Reina. Said clone wears a hat that looks similar to the Jiangshis' mandarin hats, as well as a Chinese-style outfit.
• The Tale of the Dragon expansion for Age of Mythology allows chinese players who worship Zhong Kui in the Heroic Age to train Jiangshi at their temple. They are fairly strong myth units with a special attack that drains life from enemy soldiers and restores their own.
• These are recurring enemies in Alex Kidd and the Enchanted Castle.
• The Battle Cats features Jiangshi Cat as the final form of the Pogo Cat family. Its mystic seal is just last month's gas bill. True to its undead nature, it gains a Last Chance Hit Point that lets it come back from an otherwise-fatal attack.
• Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia: An optional boss is a jiangshi. It's the only boss to not be permanently destroyed; it is frozen by a talisman upon defeat, and if you attack it again, the talisman will break, causing it to revive and attack you, once more.
• Chaos Seed: Kyonshi are the very first enemies thrown at the protagonist when he enters the training grounds.
• Darkstalkers: Hsien-ko (International) / Lei-Lei (Japan) is a jiangshi; her sister's soul resides in the talisman on her forehead to protect Lei-Lei from losing control of her powers. A special move allows the two sisters to separate momentarily and let Lei Lei enter a kind of reckless state. This is lampshaded in Marvel vs. Capcom 3, where Lei-Lei has to remind Chris and Jill that she's completely different from the other type of undead they're used to dealing with.
• Demon's World: Jiangshi appear in the China stage. They come at the protagonist riding on bicycles.
• Double Dragon Neon: Jiangshi appear as enemies in only one level. Coincidentally, the same level has undead versions of many previous foes.
• Jiangshi appear as part of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup's lineup of undead enemies and are described as being "bound into servitude by esoteric rituals." They're much faster than they appear, and their long claws can drain the player's HP, healing the jiangshi. Negative energy resistance reduces the effectiveness of the latter, and if the player can't actually bleed (e.g. player is in Stone Form, is also undead), then their attacks won't heal them. In terms of art direction, they very much go for Eye-Obscuring Hat, to the point of looking like The Faceless. They appear in the undead-themed Crypt level and can be summoned by any monster with the Summon Undead spell. Since the game's lineup of Classical Movie Vampire-inspired enemies also have this spell, that means you might be attacked by two vampire types at once!
• The fifth Endless Nightmare, Curse, has jiangshis as enemies, including a jiangshi boss. Oddly enough they're simply called "zombies" (considering there are already generic zombies in the same game).
• EXTRAPOWER: Attack of Darkforce: Master Wu's usual method of attack is to raise an army of Jiangshi.
• The final game of the NES Family Trainer series was "Baby Kyonshi's Ladder Adventure". A game played using the powerpad in which a child jiangshi attempted to find his parents. The game, as the title suggests, uses a random ladder based system to determine what areas you enter. Aside from the Kid Hero, the game also features evil jiangshi as enemies.
• A few of these appear in The Temple of Xi'an in Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix. They are invincible and can paralyze you if they hit you.
• Ghostlore has jiangshi enemies in a few stages, where they pursue you while hopping with outstretched arms.
• Hachoo! have chubby jiangshi enemies you can beat up during gameplay.
• Flying Warriors had jiangshi as enemies in the Chinatown level, with a giant jiangshi subboss at its end.
• Gaia Online has a "Gung Xi" set, for males and females. The shoes are described as "Special shoes built for hopping." and all the other items make references to being for dead Chinese people; it's pretty likely they're a direct reference to the Ragnarok Online NPCs.
  • The female set in the link has the same color scheme as LeiLei/Hsien-Ko.
• Genshin Impact: Qiqi is described as a zombie but is based on this trope. She's significantly more "fresh"-looking than most examples of this trope; if not for the Paper Talisman on her forehead, one could easily mistake her for a living person at first glance. Being undead has also made her immortal, but she's generally unable to act without being given orders, cannot age past her childlike appearance, and cannot make new memories, causing her to forget everything that happens to her unless she writes things down in a notebook. She also has an exercise regimen required to keep her undead muscles limber.
• Hades (Yīnyáng pànguān / Yin-yang Judge in China), from the Chinese fighting game The Killing Blade, is an unusual example because he merges the standard film's hero and villain roles into one, as a mysterious and vengeful Taoist priest that looks and behaves as a jiangshi.
• From Kingdom Hearts II, we have the Nightwalker Heartless, which is exclusive to The Land of Dragons, Mulan's homeworld. Some of them happen to be Shang's army, who succumbed to fatigue after marching to the city from the mountains. It's unknown if they were revived upon defeat, though given Organization XIII's desire to collect hearts, it's unlikely.
• Star Wars-based videogame Knights of the Old Republic featured Rakhgouls, a kind of low-level monster which were quite close to the real deal.
• Kung Fu Chaos has a few of these as enemies. They spin like a top when touched, shredding players to gory pieces.
• The Sega Master System game Kung Fu Kid has kyonshi as enemies on nearly every level.
• The Simple 2000 title The Kyonshi Panic, aka Zombie Attack, involves rescuing survivors from a building infested with Jiang Shi.
• In the levels Ruins and Dungeon of Legend Of Hero Tonma, jiangshi spring from coffins. They wear hats that looks more like pirate ones than the usual Qing ones. The hat completely obscure their faces, except for their Glowing Eyes of Doom.
• Leifeng Pagoda, set in the titular location (a heavily-fictionalized version of a real-life location in Hangzhou), has jiangshis as recurring enemies, depicted in traditional forms as pale-skinned, zombie-like creatures with talismans pasted on their faces and chases after you by hopping. Incidentally, they're clad in the black traditional Manchurian-era robes, despite the events of the game taking place three centuries before the Qing Dynasty.
• Martial Champion: A jiangshi named Titi (Chaos in Japan) becomes an expy of Edward Scissorhands. For some reason, he's equipped with Wolverine Claws, which is kind of strange since only half of the cast wields weapons and jiangshi tend to use their own nails as weapons. The game's engine lets him equip other characters' weapons such as nunchucks or scimitars, though.
• Metal Slug Attack: Li Lin is a jiangshi who's part of the undead faction.
• La-Mulana: Jiangshi are minor enemies in the Endless Corridor.
• Legend of Hero Tonma: Jiangshi are fought in both the Ruins and the Dungeon. They emerge from Christian coffins dressed in blue robes and blue hats that obscure everything except their red eyes, white hands, and white feet. Naturally, they come at Tonma by hopping.
• The Legend of Silkroad: Jiangshi are recurring enemies. Their outstretched hands are capable of electrocution if they manage to grab their victim.
• Ninja Master's - Hao Ninpo Cho: Tenhou is blatantly based on Lam Ching-ying's stock Taoist jiangshi hunter of the 80s-90s films, down to the paper seals, wooden sword and bagua mirror.
• A family of them appear in Onmyōji (2016), but unlike most examples, they do have intelligence, are capable of speech and are one of the good characters. Oh, and they don't suck life either, that honor goes to a number of other characters including a Western-style vampire.
• Overwatch: One of the Chinese Mei's Halloween skins is a jiangshi costume.
• Paper Dolls: A jiangshi overlord is one of the bosses, dressed in typical Manchurian robes with a horribly deformed face when you fight it from up close.
• Phantom Fighter: A traveling monk goes around fighting kyonshi. With a special item, a child kyonshi also is playable, as Phantom Fighter was originally an adaptation of Mr. Vampire.
• Putty: The Oriental level has caped jiangshi that hop around and drop other enemies.
• The main humanoid monsters in the old PC FPS, Raising Dead, curiously resembles the traditional jiangshi, having pale-white skin and clad in Manhurian robes.
• Ragnarok Online has male (Bongun) and female (Munak) versions. They bounce to move. Later expansion adds a bishonen one, Yao Jun. Bongun, Munak, and he have a rather sad little love triangle plot. As usual with monsters in Ragnarok Online, you can tame them as pets (Bongun and Munak are tamed with love letters and diaries from each other) and get their hats.
• Jiangshi shows up as Elite Mook enemies in Sega Golden Gun, a rail-shooter dealing with a zombie apocalypse in Beijing.
• Reikai Doushi is a pre-Street Fighter II fighting game, mostly remembered for its digitized puppet sprites, where a Taoist priest fights against eight jiangshi, most notably an axe-wielding Qin Shi Huangdi, a birdlike Genghis Khan, an undead Yang Guifei, and other enemies with punny names based on Mao Zedong, Chiang Kai-shek or Xuanzang.
• Glinka from Rhythm Star is a jiangshi and is depicted wearing Chinese clothing despite the fact that he is based on a real-life Russian man.
• RuneScape: A Jiangshi is an extremely dangerous type of undead that is capable of causing a Zombie Apocalypse. It feeds by draining energy from the living, but if a victim survives being drained they are cursed to slowly turn into a zombie like creature that also feeds on life energy and can spread the same curse to others. The curse can only be cured by having the necromancer that created the Jianshi put it to rest, and if is destroyed by any other means then all the zombies die.
• Shadowrun Returns (specifically, Hong Kong) has Ku Feng, a vampire. As the game is set in Hong Kong, upon encountering her, your character has the option of snarkily pointing out that she should be hopping, not walking.
• Shikinjoh: The first of the five protagonists is a jiangshi. He has to move around mahjong tiles.
• In Shining Force III, one of the maps has you in a grave yard surrounded by zombified villagers who insist on hoping everywhere. You can kill them, but doing so would keep them from being cured and turn the town into a literal ghost town. Luckily, a friendly monk who was just passing by joins your party and has a special ability to cure them.
• Sleeping Dogs (2012) "Nightmare in North Point" DLC features jiangshi. Wei has to beat them up to get enough magic power to defeat the yaoguai, and throw them into the Mook Maker to seal it.
• Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves has praying mantis jiangshi revived by black magic.
• A particular level in Spelunky features jiangshi as relatively weak enemies in a graveyard. There are female Jiangshi Assassins in Spelunky 2, who are more mobile and can flip their own gravity.
• Splatoon 2 held a special Halloween holiday event called Splatoween, during which players could recieve new Halloween-themed gear, such as a headband with devil horns or a hockey mask. One of these new gear items that stands out is the Kyonshi Hat, which is the Chinese Vampire's characteristic round hat and paper talisman.
• Super Chinese Fighter, a fighting game spin-off of Super Chinese World 2, adds four new characters to the series based on the jiangshi films: the vampire Kyonkyonshi, the taoist jiangshi hunter Poi (based on the typical Lam Ching-ying hero role), his granddaughter Rinrin and fake jiangshi boy Bokuchin, the latter two being based on the child protagonists of the Hello Dracula film series.
• Super Mario Land has a jiang-shi enemy named Pionpi as the game's equivalent of Dry Bones; jumping on it squishes it, but it'll pop back up after a short while.
• This is one of Rufus's alternate costumes in Super Street Fighter IV.
• The Capcom side-scrolling beat 'em up Tiger Road had jiangshi enemies on one level.
• Since jiangshi are hopping Chinese vampires, Touhou Project fans once quipped that Supernatural Martial Arts Anime Chinese Girl Hong Meiling - who premiered in a game of two final boss vampires - may Expy one. She doesn't get this as much anymore since fans now equate her to dragons.
  • Thanks to Ten Desires, we now have an actual jiangshi/kyonshi in Yoshika Miyako; she is, however, presented in a way more reminiscent of an American zombie. Justified because of how much more common the typical zombie interpretation is, and Gensokyo literally runs on fantasy (although she is unable to bend her arms).
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines' plot revolves around a conflict between classic Western vampires and Jiangshi, with the latter as the bad guys and the former as the good guys. Well, for a given value of "good", anyway. The game is based on the Old World of Darkness universe, so you may want to check out the Kindred of the East entry on this page for more info.
• Vice: Project Doom also had a Chinatown level with jiangshi in it.
• In the Zombies, Run! Halloween mission Wai Chu Xiao Xin, The Virus has turned the residents of Chinatown into jiangshi. Sam tries to remember the stories his grandfather used to tell him about how to defeat jiangshi, and luckily Sam and Five are in Chinatown to pick up cooking supplies...

Western Animation

• Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai: A hoard of Jiangshi appear as the main threat in episode 5. They originally stemmed from a bureaucrat who was so indecisive, he couldn’t decide whether or not to go to the next life upon death and remained in his corpse. Anyone scratched by the Jiangshi will become a Jiangshi themselves.
• The Jackie Chan Adventures episode "Chi of the Vampire" revolves around a Chinese Vampire as the Monster of the Week. The Jiangshi drains chi via green beams of light from his victims' eyes, which will turn them into his vampire minions if left untreated. He has most of the usual weaknesses, but loses them when he has drained enough chi. Jackie gets frustrated when he learns how bizarre the methods of fighting these vampires are.
  Jackie: Where are you getting these rules from?
• One episode of Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness features these. For the most part, they're a pretty accurate depiction, though they do eat brains instead of chi.
• In My Life as a Teenage Robot, XJ9 a.k.a. Jenny goes to Japan and battles a horde of these. They disappear into a puff of smoke when bonked on the head.
• Jiangshi are featured in the Three Delivery episode of the same name.

Real Life

• Jiangshi stories originated in the Qing dynasty, when many workers were conscripted to work on backbreaking foreign projects. As such, many of them died, with families requesting for the corpses to be returned home for burial. Transporting corpses without government permission was illegal, and so it was done at night by tying corpses to the backs of workers, creating the impression of a hopping, nocturnal corpse.

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