Xiangxi

What cinnabar is

Cinnabar is mercury sulfide — the colour of arterial blood, and just as toxic. Xiangxi sits above one of the largest deposits in China. The Miao people have mined it for over two thousand years. Taoist priests used it to write the names of the dead on ritual paper. Imperial courts used it to stamp edicts — the red seal on every document of consequence. Embalmers packed it into body cavities to slow decay. The colour red in Chinese ceremony is, in many cases, the colour of this mountain.

The miners who worked the deep seams rarely left. The mercury vapour accumulated in the lungs over years. They died young, and they died far from home.

The rules

In Taoist belief, a soul that dies away from its ancestral ground cannot rest. It must be walked home. This is the origin of gǎn shī — corpse driving — a profession that existed in Xiangxi for centuries and appears in no official record.

The gǎn shī rén walked only at night. The bodies were bound upright with bamboo rods, dressed in the dead man's own clothes, hats pulled low. Small copper bells were tied to their wrists — not to warn the living, but to keep count. A gǎn shī rén carrying seven bodies rang seven sets of bells. He knew by sound if one had fallen behind.

He carried a red lantern. He did not speak. He did not look back. If he encountered a living person on the road, he extinguished the lantern and stepped into the trees and waited.

There was one rule above all others: a gǎn shī rén could not walk his own family home. The reason given was ritual contamination. The real reason, the older practitioners said, was simpler — a man who knows the face too well cannot keep the correct distance. And distance, on that road, was everything.

One man

His name was Teng Huaisheng. He learned the profession from his uncle at fourteen, the way other boys learned carpentry or medicine — by watching, then by doing, then by being left alone with it in the dark.

He worked the road between Jishou and Guzhang for thirty years. He was known for being reliable — the families who hired him said he always delivered, always on time, always without incident. He charged a flat rate regardless of distance. He did not negotiate.

In the winter of 1931, his younger brother died in a mine collapse outside Chenxi. The body needed to come home.

He hired another gǎn shī rén first. The man took the deposit and disappeared. There was no time to find another — the body had already been waiting three weeks, and the family could not afford to wait longer.

He walked the road himself. It took four nights.

He never spoke about what those four nights were like. When his apprentice asked, years later, he said only: the bells sounded different.

Luxi County, 1923

A magistrate recorded the following in his personal journal:

“Woke at the third watch. Heard bells on the north road. Counted seven sets. Did not go to the window. In the morning, the road showed no footprints. The ground had been wet.”

He wrote nothing further on the subject. Eight years later, when his collected journals were published posthumously, his family noticed that three pages had been torn out — the pages dated that same week. No one asked about it. Some things are easier if you don't have to explain them.