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I wonder if there’s any etymological connection between “jiangshi” and “nzambi” (the word in an African language that evolved into “zombie”)
About impossible I think. The only chance is that if some Chinese voyager met Africans who spoke of nzambi, understood what they were talking about, told about other Chinese people about this, and the concept got popular and widely diffused enough that it was adopted into Chinese folklore.
The belief in jiangshi and its representation in the popular imagination was also partly derived from the habit of “corpse-driving”,[6][7] a practice involving the repatriation of the corpses of dead laborers across Xiang province (present-day Hunan) to their hometowns for burial in family gravesites. The corpses were trussed up against bamboo sticks and carried by professionals known as corpse-drivers and transported over thousands of miles to their ancestral villages, which gave the impression of a hopping corpse. These professionals operated during the night to avoid crowds during the day, which served to amplify the fearful effects of their trade.
