Huahuai

Mount Yaoguang yields jade on its southern slope and gold on the northern. Its beast, the huahuai, is shaped like a man but bristled with a boar's mane; it dens in caves and sleeps through the winter, and its cry sounds like an axe striking timber. The final clause is the point: when it is seen, the county will suffer da yao — a great levy of forced labor.

Among the book's catalogued calamities this one is strikingly worldly. Drought and flood are acts of heaven, but corvee labor is an act of government, and the compilers list the state's conscription of workers alongside natural disaster as something a monster can forebode — an admission of how the two weighed equally on the people of the hills. It pairs neatly with the lili of Mount Ju in the same range, whose appearance means heavy earthworks: one beast announces the digging, the other the drafting of the diggers. Even the huahuai's wood-chopping voice reads like an omen fulfilled, since the first sound of any great project is the felling of trees. The creature acquired no later legend, surviving only in illustrated editions as a bristle-backed figure crouched at a cave mouth.