Land of the Long-Armed
Mythological Narrative
The Classic of Regions Beyond the Seas: South fixes the country in a single image: its people stand in the water catching fish with their bare hands, one fish gripped in each. No nets, no lines. Guo Pu's commentary records the older tradition that their hands, hanging at rest, brush the ground, and elsewhere gives their arms a length of two zhang, roughly four or five meters.
In later lore the Long-Armed found their natural partners in the Long-Legged, a country recorded in the western chapter of the same book. Guo Pu preserves the folk arithmetic: when it is time to fish, a long-legged man carries a long-armed man on his back and wades far out into the sea; the legs supply the standing, the arms supply the grabbing. The pair became a favorite of Ming and Qing illustrated editions of the Shanhaijing and of novels such as Flowers in the Mirror. The entry shows the logic of the far-country catalogue at its neatest: a fisherman's skill exaggerated into anatomy, then two anatomies dovetailed into a single working team.
Academic Discussion & Critique
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