Gui Da Qiang

Also Known As: 鬼打牆 / 鬼打墙, literally “a ghost hits the wall”; usually Englished as “ghosts building a wall”; also 鬼砌牆, gui qi qiang, “a ghost lays the wall”
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Chinese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Undead/Cursed Beings
Mythical Attributes: Not a creature but a thing done to you. The road you are walking closes into a box you cannot see, and every direction you choose returns you to the tree you passed an hour ago.
Role in Mythos: The middle move in a ghost’s small repertoire, sitting between the trick that draws you in and the fright that finishes you. It is how a spirit holds a living person in one place long enough to do something with them.
Relation to Humans: It happens to people walking alone after dark, and by the eighteenth century the phrase was already common speech rather than a scholar’s term. The remedies are all about refusing to hurry: stop, squat, cover your face, look again.

Nobody in China has ever drawn the gui da qiang, because there is nothing there to draw. It is an experience with a name: the night walk that stops going anywhere. You know the road. You have walked it since you were a child. And here is the crooked tree again, and the same stretch of water on your left, and you have been moving the whole time.

The oldest solid record of the phrase is a joke at a ghost’s expense. In 1788 the poet Yuan Mei published *Zi bu yu*, a collection of the strange whose title means “what the Master would not discuss” — a shrug at Confucius, who declined to talk about spirits. In the fourth volume there is a story called “A ghost has three techniques, and past these the ghost’s way is exhausted.”

A scholar named Lü is crossing the western shore of Mao Lake at dusk. He is a *linsheng*, a stipendiary student, and he has given himself the nickname Mr Broad-and-Easy. A woman comes running towards him with her face painted, carrying a rope. She sees him, ducks behind a large tree, and drops the rope on the path. Lü picks it up. It is a twist of straw cord, and it smells, he decides, of the damp underside of things. He knows what he is holding. A hanged ghost’s rope. He puts it inside his coat and keeps walking.

The woman comes out from the tree and gets in front of him. He goes left, she blocks left. He goes right, she blocks right. Yuan Mei’s line is the load-bearing one for this entry: *Lü knew in his heart that this was what people commonly call gui da qiang* — 俗所稱鬼打牆是也. Commonly call. In 1788 the term was already worn smooth by ordinary use, which puts the belief well back beyond the first time anyone bothered to write it down.

Lü walks straight at her. Having failed, the ghost gives a long shriek and becomes the thing everyone is afraid of: hair down, blood on her, tongue out a foot. She leaps at him. And Lü, who has evidently thought about this, tells her the trick is over.

“The powder and the painted brows just now, that was to mislead me. Getting in my way, that was to block me. This ugliness now, that is to frighten me. Three techniques, all finished, and I am not afraid of any of them. I don’t suppose you have a fourth. Do you not know I am called Mr Broad-and-Easy?”

She drops back into her own shape and kneels. She is a woman of the Shi family from the town, she says. She quarrelled with her husband, took the short view, and hanged herself. Now she has heard of another wife east of the lake who is also at odds with her husband, and she was on her way to take her place. It is the *tishen*, the substitute: a hanged ghost cannot move on until someone else hangs in her stead, so she is out on the roads recruiting. The scholar has cut her off and taken her rope. She has run out of ideas and asks him to release her instead — get word to the Shi family, have a rite said, bring in a good monk, chant the Rebirth Mantra enough times and she can be born again.

Lü tells her he is a good monk himself, and sings her a mantra of his own invention:

*What a wide world. No barrier, no obstruction. Dying, being born — where is the need for a substitute? If you want to go, then go. Isn’t that a relief?*

And she understands it. She bows twice on the ground and runs off. Afterwards, Yuan Mei adds, the local people said that stretch had never been quiet before, and after Mr Broad-and-Easy went through it was never troubled again.

The story is doing something sly. It sets up the full apparatus of Chinese ghost belief — the substitute, the mantra, the paid ritual, the professional monk — and then has a layman dissolve it in four lines of doggerel by pointing out that the whole arrangement is a trap the ghost built for herself. The wall was never the road. The wall was the belief that she needed a replacement.

What the wall feels like from inside comes from a foreigner. Robert William Swallow spent years in Peking and published *Sidelights on Peking Life* in 1927, reprinted through 1930 by the French Bookstore; it is a working guide to the city’s habits, and ten of its pages are given to the ghosts of the streets. He liked the wall-building ghost best. People walking alone in the dark, he writes, find themselves suddenly enclosed on four sides and cannot get out. Sometimes it is not a wall but trees. And the way out is not to run: “their best plan is to squat down and look steadily in front of them,” and then, after a while, cover the face with the hands, and look up, and the road will be open.

That remedy is worth sitting with. Every version of it, in Swallow and in the oral advice still repeated today, tells you to stop moving and stop looking. The one thing a person trapped in a shrinking night wants to do is walk faster, and the folklore is unanimous that walking faster is how you stay in the box.

There is a reason it works, and it is not a ghost. In 2009 Jan Souman and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics published “Walking Straight into Circles” in *Current Biology*. They put people in the Sahara and in the Bienwald forest with GPS units and told them to walk in a straight line. With the sun or moon visible, they did. Without it — under cloud, at night, blindfolded — they walked in circles, and often small ones, crossing their own path repeatedly without knowing. The cause is not one leg being shorter. It is that the brain’s estimate of “straight ahead” drifts, and with nothing outside the body to check it against, the drift compounds. Let a blindfolded walker lift the blindfold for one minute in every ten and they set off straight again.

Which is to say: the cure for walking in circles is to stop and take a fresh fix on the world. Squat down. Look steadily in front of you. Cover your face, then look up. Peking street wisdom arrived at the recalibration protocol about eighty years before the laboratory did.

The name has since escaped the roads. Modern Mandarin uses *gui da qiang* for any loop you cannot think your way out of — the argument that comes back to the same sentence, the bureaucracy that returns your form to the desk it came from. In 1988 the artist Xu Bing took a team to the Great Wall and made ink rubbings of a section of it, hung the resulting paper in a gallery, and called the work *Ghosts Pounding the Wall*. The title is the idiom, and the joke is exact: an enormous barrier, reproduced at full size, arriving in America as nothing but a surface, a wall with nothing behind it and nowhere to go.

Across the strait the same experience keeps different company. Taiwanese folk belief hands night-time disorientation to the *mo-sin-a*, the small mountain spirits who lead people off paths and are found afterwards in places they could not have walked to. In the mainland telling there is no creature at all. There is only the wall, and whoever put it there, and the strong recommendation that you sit down in the dark and wait for it to lose interest.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is gui da qiang in Chinese folklore?

Gui da qiang is the experience of being trapped by a ghost while walking at night: the road closes in, or the same trees keep reappearing, and a traveller circles for hours without leaving a small area. The name means “a ghost hits the wall” and is usually translated “ghosts building a wall”. It is an act rather than a being, and there is no creature to see.

How old is the belief?

Older than its first citation. Yuan Mei’s *Zi bu yu* of 1788 uses the phrase and explicitly calls it what people “commonly say”, which means it was ordinary speech by the eighteenth century rather than a literary coinage. The most detailed early account in English is Robert Swallow’s *Sidelights on Peking Life*, first published in 1927.

How do you escape gui da qiang?

Every version of the advice says the same thing: stop. Swallow’s Peking remedy is to squat down, look steadily ahead, then cover your face with your hands, and when you look up again the way is clear. The one thing you are told not to do is hurry, because moving faster is what keeps you inside the wall.

Is there a scientific explanation?

Yes, and it matches the folk remedy closely. A 2009 study by Jan Souman’s team, published in *Current Biology*, tracked people walking in the Sahara and in German forest. With the sun or moon in view they walked straight; without any external reference they walked in circles, because the brain’s sense of “straight ahead” drifts and has nothing to correct itself against. Letting walkers glimpse the sky periodically straightened them out — the same recalibration the ghost story recommends.

What does gui da qiang mean in modern Chinese?

It has become an everyday idiom for any inescapable loop: a circular argument, a process that keeps returning you to the start, a mistake made over and over. Xu Bing’s 1988 artwork *Ghosts Pounding the Wall*, made from ink rubbings of the Great Wall, takes its title from the phrase.