Xuangui

The Guai River rises on Mount Niuyang and flows east into the Xianyi, and its waters teem with dark turtles. The Classic of the Southern Mountains names them the xuangui: a turtle-shaped creature with the head of a bird and the tail of a hui, a venomous snake, whose cry sounds like timber being split. The entry closes with two uses — worn on the body it keeps the ears from going deaf, and it can treat zhi, which early commentators read as the hard calluses of the foot. A beaked, serpent-tailed reptile thus doubles as a hearing charm and a foot remedy.

The creature is not confined to the south: the Classic of the Central Mountains reports xuangui in the Hao River near Mount Mi, bird-headed and soft-shell-tailed, with the same wood-splitting cry, suggesting a whole family of such turtles in the imagined waterways. Later lore drew them toward the flood legends: Wang Jia's Shiyiji pictures Yu the Great taming the waters with a yellow dragon dragging its tail ahead of him and a dark turtle hauling green clay behind, and readers have long linked that burden-bearing turtle with the dark turtles of the Guai River, folding the xuangui into the iconography of the flood.