Yong

Mount Lingqiu bears no vegetation and burns with constant fires; from the Middle Valley on its south side blows the northeast wind. Here lives the yong. The Classic of the Southern Mountains describes an owl-like bird with a human face set with four eyes, and ears plainly visible on its head; its call, 'yong, yong', is its own name. The closing clause carries the weight: when it is seen, great drought comes to all under heaven.

That scope places the yong in the heaviest class of the book's portents — those whose effects reach the whole world rather than a single county. Its counterpart in the west is the six-legged, four-winged serpent Feiyi of Mount Taihua, another harbinger of universal drought, while within this same volume the ape-like Changyou brings floods to whichever district it visits: water and drought each have their appointed monster. Fittingly, the yong roosts on a mountain already scorched and grassless, as if the drought were written into the landscape before the bird arrives. Illustrated editions draw a four-eyed, human-faced owl squatting on bare earth — in a world that lived by rainfall, a bird to lose sleep over.