Xiao

Also Known As: 囂, variant 嚻; also read Ao; Wade-Giles hsiao; the word means “clamour, hubbub, din”, and is rendered “Hubbub” by Anne Birrell and “Noisy-Ape” and “Raucous-Bird” by Richard Strassberg
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Chinese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: The Xiao is named for the noise it makes rather than for anything about its body, and the name is attached in the Classic of Mountains and Seas to two unrelated animals, a long-armed ape that throws things and a four-winged, one-eyed bird whose flesh is medicine.
Role in Mythos: It is a mountain animal in a catalogue of mountain animals, listed for what it looks like, what it sounds like and, in the bird’s case, what eating it will cure.
Relation to Humans: Neither Xiao is described as hunting or harming people, and the bird exists in the record chiefly as a remedy for stomach pain and diarrhoea. The later mountain sprites who inherited the name, the shanxiao, are a different matter, stealing salt from travellers’ camps and raising fevers in anyone who offends them.

On Mount Yuci the lacquer trees run almost down to the river, copper shows on the shaded northern face and good jade on the sunward one, and somewhere above all that, something is throwing stones. It has very long arms and a good eye. The oldest book to mention it spends four words on its body, then gives it a name that has nothing to do with bodies at all. The name is a noise.

Xiao is written 囂, and the character is a picture of exactly that: four mouths crowded around a head. The Shuowen Jiezi, the first Chinese character dictionary, completed in 121 CE, glosses it simply as sound, and adds the odd line that qi is emitted on top of the head. Duan Yucai’s later commentary tidies this into something a reader can hold onto: the noise comes out, and the breath follows it. Clamour, hubbub, racket. The word carries a second sense too, haughtiness, the loudness of a man who thinks well of himself.

The Classic of Mountains and Seas, the Shanhaijing, hands the word out freely. There is a River Xiao, a Mount Northxiao, and two animals. Seventy li west along the western guideway stands Mount Yuci, and on it, the text says, is a beast shaped like a yu-ape but with longer arms, adept at throwing things, and it is called the Xiao. That is the whole entry. No colour, no size, no behaviour beyond the throwing.

The throwing is enough to build a picture from. Late afternoon on a scree slope, the rock still holding the day’s heat. The animal shifts its weight back onto one foot, a fist-sized stone cocked in a hand at the end of an arm too long for the frame it hangs from. The stone goes out flat and fast and cracks against something below. Then the shouting starts, and the whole hillside knows.

Three hundred and fifty li north, on Mount Liangqu, where nothing grows and the rock is thick with gold and jade, the same name is fixed to something else entirely. There is a bird there shaped like Kuafu, with four wings, one eye and a dog’s tail. Its call is a magpie’s. Eating it cures pain in the belly, and it will stop a flux. A traveller doubled over on a cold slope with cramps working through him, a small fire, a carcass with two pairs of wings splayed over the coals: the Shanhaijing is a pharmacopoeia as much as a bestiary, and a great many of its stranger animals come with a use.

The comparison is the strange part. Kuafu is the boastful giant who chased the sun, drank the Yellow River and the Wei dry and died of thirst before he caught it. He is enormous and roughly human. Nothing about him accounts for four wings on a magpie-voiced bird. Guo Pu, who annotated the text in the early fourth century, knew an earlier version that read not Kuafu but Jufu, the Lifter, another creature from Mount Chongwu shaped like a yu-ape, with leopard and tiger markings on its forearms and, once again, a gift for throwing things. Hao Yixing, going over the same passage fourteen centuries later, put the confusion down to the two names sounding alike. Somewhere along the line an ape appears to have turned into a giant because someone misheard.

Yuan Ke took the suspicion a step further and proposed that the name itself is a slip, 囂 xiao standing in for 夒 nao, a kind of monkey. The graphs are close, and Axel Schuessler’s reconstructions put the Old Chinese sounds in the same neighbourhood. If Yuan is right, the long-armed thrower of Mount Yuci was never called Hubbub at all, and a copyist gave a monkey a name meaning racket and made it stick for two thousand years. There is no way now to settle it.

The name spread regardless. Across later Chinese writing, xiao attaches itself to a whole family of small, loud, hill-dwelling nuisances. The shanxiao, the mountain xiao, are the best documented. The Shenyijing, attributed to Dongfang Shuo and probably second century CE, puts them deep in the western mountains: naked, roughly a foot tall, turning over stones in the streams for frogs and crabs and roasting them. They are not shy of people. They come to a traveller’s fire to cook their catch on it, and they wait for the men to look away before stealing the salt. Offend one and you get a fever. Ge Hong’s Baopuzi, written around 320, lists four of them under the heading of mountain essences and supplies the counter-measure: learn the creature’s name, shout it, and it cannot touch you. Li Shizhen swept the whole muddled tradition into the Bencao Gangmu in 1578, one leg, reversed heel, knee height, salt thief, and concluded with visible impatience that these were all ghosts and devils and he was recording them for reference only.

Wolfram Eberhard, sorting the names in the 1960s, found that the xiao series came out of the languages of the Yue and Yao peoples of the south while a second series, kui and hui, came from further west, and that the creatures were less malicious than impish: short, one-legged, living in trees, monkey-adjacent, frightened of sudden noise and fond of music. Jan de Groot, half a century before him, had read the same accounts and seen something colder in them, the possibility that some of these hill-spirits were real people, mountain communities outside Chinese culture, raided and punished and afterwards written down as monsters.

One more distortion belongs on the record. Somewhere in the twentieth century the Wade-Giles spelling hsiao was misread, most likely by a scanner, as hsigo, and the error bred. Thousands of pages now describe the Hsigo as a Chinese flying monkey with a man’s face, a dog’s tail and the wings of a bird, complete with confident etymologies. Victor Mair went looking for its source in 2013 and found none. There is no such Chinese word, hsigo is not a possible romanisation of anything, and the flying monkey has no ancestor but a typo.

What the Xiao can actually do is small and specific. The ape throws, accurately and at range, which in a mountain bestiary is a real weapon and puts it well above most of its neighbours. The bird flies on two pairs of wings and its body is medicine, which is a power of a kind, though not one that does the bird any good. The shanxiao who inherited the name can raise a fever in anyone who crosses them, move like the wind, and turn up anywhere in the hills.

The limits sit right beside the powers. The bird’s whole virtue is that it can be caught and eaten, which is the only reason it is in the book. The ape has an arm and nothing else, no venom, no omen, no cosmic office, just a good throw and a loud mouth. And the shanxiao, for all the fevers and the stolen salt, are undone by exactly the thing their name means. Green bamboo goes into the fire, the joints burst, and the bang drives them off the hillside. The creature named for noise cannot stand a louder one.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Xiao in Chinese mythology?

The Xiao is a creature named in the Shanhaijing, the Classic of Mountains and Seas, and the name is used for two different animals. One is an ape on Mount Yuci with unusually long arms that is skilled at throwing things; the other is a bird on Mount Liangqu with four wings, one eye and a dog’s tail. The word xiao (囂) means clamour or hubbub, so both are effectively named after the noise they make.

What does the Xiao bird look like and what is it used for?

The Xiao bird of Mount Liangqu has four wings, a single eye and a dog’s tail, and it calls like a magpie. The Shanhaijing compares its shape to Kuafu, the giant who chased the sun. Its listed use is medicinal: eating it cures abdominal pain and stops diarrhoea.

Is the Xiao the same thing as the shanxiao?

No. The shanxiao, the mountain xiao, are separate beings that share the word: small one-legged mountain sprites of southern and western China who catch frogs and crabs, roast them at travellers’ fires and steal salt. They are described in the Shenyijing, the Baopuzi and the Bencao Gangmu, and they raise fevers in people who offend them. Shouting a shanxiao’s name, or bursting green bamboo in a fire, drives it away.

Is the Hsigo a real Chinese mythological creature?

No. Hsigo is a ghost word, a misreading of the Wade-Giles spelling hsiao that spread across the internet as a supposed Chinese flying monkey with a human face and bird wings. The sinologist Victor Mair examined the claim in 2013 and found no Chinese source for it, noting that hsigo is not even a possible romanisation of Chinese.

Why do scholars think the Xiao’s name might be a mistake?

The Chinese mythologist Yuan Ke suggested that xiao (囂) is a copyist’s error for the graphically similar nao (夒), a kind of monkey, which would mean the ape of Mount Yuci was never called Hubbub at all. Separately, Guo Pu recorded an early version of the bird passage comparing it to Jufu, an ape, rather than Kuafu, a giant, and Hao Yixing attributed the swap to the two names sounding alike.