The Country with a Hole Through Its Chest / 穿胸国：心一歪，胸前就烂出一个大洞
A Chinese Gulliver's Travels — Episode 10
From Flowers in the Mirror (镜花缘), Chapter 26 · 第二十六回 · 遇强梁义女怀德 遭大厄灵鱼报恩
By Li Ruzhen (李汝珍, c. 1763–1830) · Translated and annotated by Cathay Tales
They do not even go ashore. The ship has just weathered two near-disasters — a princess's private army sent to drag a young man back to the Shushi kingdom, and a flotilla of bandits who very nearly took the cargo — and the three travelers are in no mood for sightseeing. So when the lookout calls out the next country, they only stand at the rail and watch it slide past. Its people walk the waterfront with a clean, open hole running straight through the chest, front to back. Lin Zhiyang, merchant that he is, immediately asks the practical question: if the heart is supposed to be in the middle, where is it? Old Duo Jiugong gives him the whole medical history.
The Story
The chapter does not begin as a comedy.
It begins with women crying on a neighboring junk. Tang Ao, hearing the sound across the water, sends a sailor to inquire and learns that a fellow Chinese merchant ship has been stove in by a storm far out in the ocean. He has carpenters of his own; he delays a day and repairs the strangers' hull at his own expense. That single act of kindness sets the machinery of the chapter in motion, though no one on board knows it yet.[1]The mer-fish subplot frames the Pierced-Chest episode and gives the chapter its title, "Encountering strong bandits, a righteous daughter cherishes virtue; meeting great peril, a spirit-fish repays kindness" (遇强梁义女怀德 遭大厄灵鱼报恩）. The mer-women who save the ship by spouting seawater at the fire-breathing people of Yanhua are the same creatures Tang Ao freed in the Yuangu (元股） chapter, where the crew had netted them; one was nevertheless wounded by a sailor's bird-gun. Duo Jiugong's commentary after the rescue develops Li Ruzhen's argument that "the four kinds of creature — scaled, armored, feathered, furred — share one numinous nature" (种类虽别，灵性则一）, citing the horse's dangling-rein gratitude and the dog's wet-grass devotion. Read back-to-back, the two countries form a matched pair: the Pierced-Chest humans have rotted themselves into wolf-heartedness, while the spirit-fish animals rise to human-grade gratitude. The chapter is a single moral test in two specimens, and the animals pass it.
The repaired ship belongs, it turns out, to a young woman named Xu Lirong (徐丽蓉) — a dead-shot with a pellet bow — and her brother Xu Chengzhi (徐承志), a Tang loyalist who has spent three years trapped in the pedants' kingdom of Shushi, pressed into service as the princess's unwilling consort. No sooner have the introductions been made than soldiers of the Shushi kingdom catch up with them, their general bearing the princess's banner and offering General Xu "instant promotion" if he returns peaceably and his head if he does not. Xu Chengzhi takes his father's old spear off the deck and breaks the charge himself. Bandits follow the soldiers, harder men than the conscripts; the bandit chief is an expert bladesman and Xu Chengzhi can only fight him to a draw until his sister puts a pellet through the chief's face. The brother and sister decide, while the ship is being patched, to press on home under a changed name rather than linger on the sea lanes where the princess's men know their faces. Tang Ao presses travel money on them; Xu Chengzhi accepts the clothes and bedding, declines the silver, and departs.
Duo Jiugong gives the order to cast off. The ship makes what speed it can.
They sail for several days, and pass the Country of Pierced Chests.
Lin Zhiyang is the first to speak.
He is leaning on the rail, watching the shore go by — this is one of the ports the travelers do not enter, and the whole episode unfolds at a distance, the way a diagnosis unfolds when the patient is on the far bank — and the people walking the waterfront are visibly, unmistakably pierced. Not tattooed, not scarred: there is an open aperture through each chest, front and back, and the daylight can be seen clean through it. Some of the wealthier citizens, Lin notices, are being carried in a manner he has never seen anywhere in China: their bearers run a long bamboo pole straight through the hole, front to back, and tote the man between them like a sedan chair without the chair.[2]The country is older than Li Ruzhen by roughly two millennia. The Classic of Mountains and Seas (《山海经·海外南经》), compiled Warring States through Han, records: "The Country of Guanxiong lies east of [the country of Die]; its people have an aperture through the chest" (贯匈国在其东，其为人匈有窍). Guo Pu (郭璞, 276–324), the Jin-dynasty commentator, glosses the line with two earlier sources — the Shizi (尸子), which lists the pierced-chest peoples among the foreign tribes drawn to the Yellow Emperor's virtue, and the Yiwu Zhi (异物志), which claims that when the people remove their clothes the hole looks unnatural, "as though they were merely imitating" the older mythic model. The carried-by-pole detail — nobles borne through their own chest-holes on a bamboo staff — belongs to the later visual tradition and is depicted in the Hu Wenhuan (胡文焕) and Wang Qi (王圻， Sancai Tuhui 三才图会） illustrated recensions. Li Ruzhen writes the name in its later variant 穿胸 (Chuānxiōng, "pierced chest"); 穿 and 贯 are near-synonyms ("thread through," "pierce"). He entirely ignores the Classic of Mountains and Seas's neutral ethnographic tone and replaces it with an etiology of his own.[3]The Classic of Mountains and Seas gives no explanation for the hole. The standard etiology Li Ruzhen would have found in his source library is in Zhang Hua's (张华, 232–300) Bowuzhi (《博物志·卷二·外国》): when the Great Yu (禹） assembled the lords of the empire at Kuaiji, the lord of Fengfeng (防风氏） arrived late and was executed. Later, as Yu's two draft-dragons carried him on a circuit beyond the seas, two of Fengfeng's vassals, enraged at their master's death at Tushan, shot at the imperial envoys; thunder and storm drove the dragons aloft, and the two vassals, terrified, drove their blades through their own hearts and died. Yu pitied them, pulled the blades out, and healed them with the herb-of-no-death (不死之草) — "and these became the Pierced-Chest people." It is a story of culpable violence, guilt, suicide, and a miraculous but disfiguring rescue. Li Ruzhen keeps the structural shape — festering wound, exotic cure, permanent hole — but replaces the feudal-lord tragedy with a bourgeois medical comedy: no lords, no dragons, only people who kept twisting their judgments until their bodies gave way. The demotion is itself the joke. The same Bowuzhi chapter lists the Pierced-Chest among the far-southern peoples alongside the Black-Teeth, Painted-Forehead (雕题), and Stretched-Ears (儋耳) tribes.
"Now look here," Lin Zhiyang says. "I have always heard that a man's heart sits dead center in his chest. These people have a hole clean through the chest. Where, if I may ask, is the heart?"
Duo Jiugong settles himself against the mast, the way he always does when a country requires an explanation.
"Their chests," he says, "were perfectly sound to begin with."
"Then," Duo Jiugong says, "their conduct turned crooked. Every time one of them ran into a situation, he would knit his brows and give his heart a wrench — push it off to one side, or tilt it off to the other. Today a little crooked, tomorrow a little partial. Little by little the heart left its proper seat. The chest had nothing in charge of it anymore.
"On the front of the heart a great boil arose. Its name was the Crooked-Heart Boil (歪心疔). On the back of the heart a great ulcer arose. Its name was the Partial-Heart Ulcer (偏心疽). Day by day they festered. In the fullness of time the two lesions broke through toward one another, and the chest was open from front to back. Medicines did nothing.
"They were saved, in the end, by a master of the Zhuyou discipline (祝由科), the physicians who heal with incantations rather than drugs. He took the heart of a Zhongshan wolf (中山狼) and the lungs of a Persian dog (波斯狗), and by his spells he set them into the wound to fill what had rotted away.[4]祝由科 (Zhùyóu kē) is one of the oldest named healing traditions in Chinese medicine. The locus classicus is the Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon, Basic Questions (《黄帝内经·素问·移精变气论》): the Yellow Emperor asks why the ancients could cure illness "by shifting the essence and changing the breath — by zhuyou alone" (古之治病，惟其移精变气，可祝由而已), while later ages need toxic drugs within and needles and stones without. Wang Bing's (王冰， Tang) gloss reads zhuyou as "uttering prayers that name the cause of the illness" (祝说病由), without medicines or needles — an incantatory, ritual mode of healing that modern readers often compare to psychotherapy or faith healing. The term 祝由科 proper denotes the ritual-healing division that was formally institutionalized as one of the medical sections in the Yuan and Ming imperial medical academies (the Yuan 十三科 and the Ming 太医院十三科 both include it; the Qing later dropped it from the official roster). Li Ruzhen's point in handing the Pierced-Chest cure to a zhuyou master rather than a pharmacologist is pointed: a lesion produced by moral crookedness is not reachable by ordinary drugs — only by symbolic surgery, the literal transplantation of animal organs named in a proverb.[5]The Zhongshan wolf (中山狼） is the canonical Chinese figure of ingratitude. The standard literary version is the classical-language fable "The Zhongshan Wolf" (《中山狼传》), attributed to Ma Zhongxi (马中锡， 1446–1512) and preserved in his Dongtian Collection (《东田文集》). The Mohist scholar Master Dongguo (东郭先生） hides a fleeing wolf in his book-bag to save it from the hunt of Zhao Jianzi (赵简子）; once released, the wolf argues that Mohist universal love requires the scholar to complete his charity by letting the wolf eat him, and is only destroyed when an old passer-by tricks it back into the bag. Earlier vernacular versions circulated from the Song and Yuan, and Wang Jiusi and Kang Hai adapted the story into a zaju (杂剧） drama in the Ming. "中山狼" remains, in modern Chinese, the fixed noun for a benefactor-betrayer. Li Ruzhen's wolf supplies the heart (心） in the transplant: the organ of moral judgment, taken from the animal whose defining trait is that he eats the hand that saved him.[6]The Persian hound (波斯犬/波斯狗） is a documented Tang-dynasty import, not a mythic animal. The Old Book of Tang (《旧唐书·西戎传·波斯》) records that Persia "produced many fine horses and swift dogs; some of the finest could run seven hundred li in a day — these swift dogs are the so-called Persian dogs of today" (骏犬今所谓波斯犬也）. The Tang Huiyao (《唐会要》卷一〇〇） repeats the line almost verbatim, and Edward Schafer's The Golden Peaches of Samarkand identifies the animal, likely a spotted sighthound, as a celebrated Silk Road tribute good, alongside the even smaller "Fulin dog" (拂菻狗， the lapdog presented by the Gaochang king in Wude 7 / 624, six cun tall, able to lead a horse by the rein and carry a candle). Why a Persian dog? Because the punchline requires the exact four-character set phrase wolf heart, dog lungs (狼心狗肺）, and Li Ruzhen, writing in the high-Qing moment of Manchu and Inner-Asian tribute exchange, upgrades the proverb's "dog" to the most glamorous foreign hound his readers would recognize — as though the Pierced-Chest people, being far-southern foreigners themselves, had sourced the transplant organs through their own western trade routes.
"After a time the people recovered. The wound healed. But the heart of that wolf and the lungs of that dog — it turned out — were crooked and partial also. No treatment could make them sit straight. The chest could never be closed again. To this day, the hole remains."
Lin Zhiyang considers this.
"So the phrase is literally true," he says. "Wolf heart, dog lungs — and both of them crooked and partial!"[7]狼心狗肺 (láng xīn gǒu fèi, "wolf heart, dog lungs") is the everyday Chinese idiom for a person of utterly cruel, ungrateful, conscience-free character. The earliest attested literary use is Feng Menglong's (冯梦龙） Xingshi Hengyan (《醒世恒言》卷三十·李汧公穷邸遇侠客， 1627): "Who could have known the scoundrel would turn out to be all wolf-heart and dog-lungs, betraying grace and forgetting kindness" (那知这贼子恁般狼心狗肺，负义忘恩）. Li Baojia (李宝嘉） uses it again in the late-Qing novel Zhongguo Xianzai Ji (《中国现在记》). The great editorial joke of this chapter is that modern dictionaries quote this very sentence of Flowers in the Mirror — Lin Zhiyang's "原来狼心狗肺都是又歪又偏的" — as a standard attestation of the idiom. Li Ruzhen did not coin the phrase; he performed a fake etymology of it, in the voice of a fictional doctor explaining a fictional country, and the dictionaries of the twentieth century quietly promoted the fiction into a citation. The post-Ming colloquial cousin 良心被狗吃了 ("your conscience has been eaten by the dog") works the same semantic field. Note the precision of Li Ruzhen's pathology: the transplanted organs are not merely bad — they are also crooked and partial (又歪又偏）, matching the two named lesions 歪心疔 and 偏心疽. The cure preserves, rather than corrects, the original bias.
The ship holds its course. Several days later they reach the Country of Fire-Breathers (厌火国), where a crowd of famine refugees, refused alms, opens its collective mouth and burns Lin Zhiyang's entire beard off his face; and the chapter's true punchline lands when the ship is saved from roasting by a school of mer-women spouting seawater — the very merfolk Tang Ao released in the Country of Black-Stockings chapters earlier. Goodness paid forward; wickedness made flesh. The two halves of Chapter 26 are one argument in two keys.
But the pierced people stay in the reader's mind. They said nothing. They did nothing. They only walked along the waterfront, carrying their holes, while two Chinese merchants sailed past and diagnosed them from the deck.
Why This Chapter Is Funnier Than It Looks
The technique is the one Li Ruzhen uses throughout the voyage, and by Chapter 26 he has refined it to a single paragraph: take a moral metaphor that every Chinese reader already uses every day, and build a country where it is literally anatomy.
Two-faced kingdom (Chapter 9): the hypocrite who is 两面三刀, "two-faced," wears a second face on the back of his head. No-bowels kingdom (Chapter 14): the careless miser who has 没肠子, "no bowels," has, in fact, no bowels. Tall-people kingdom (Chapter 20): the braggart who 说大话 and has a 厚脸皮, "thick face," is eighty feet tall and his face withstands the stratospheric wind. Here in Chapter 26 the target is the moral vocabulary of the crooked heart. Chinese speaks of a 偏心 person — a piānxīn person, a "partial heart," a biased heart, a heart that favors one side — exactly as English speaks of a "jaundiced eye" or a "tilted judgment." Chinese speaks of a 歪心, a crooked heart, and of 心术不正, heart-craft not upright. Li Ruzhen accepts none of this as metaphor. If the heart is repeatedly pushed off-center, he reasons, then the heart physically migrates. If it migrates, the tissue over it dies. If the tissue dies front and back at once, the two lesions meet. The disease has a name, a course, a prognosis. It reads like a case history in a forensic-medicine manual because Duo Jiugong has spent twenty chapters narrating like a consulting physician.
Then comes the cure, which is the darker half of the joke. The piercing is not cured. It is patched, and patched with the organs of the two animals that Chinese moral language has already convicted of exactly the relevant vices. The Zhongshan wolf is not an ordinary wolf: he is the ungrateful beast of the fable who, having been hidden in a bag and saved from the hunt by the Mohist scholar Master Dongguo, no sooner climbs out than he opens his jaws to eat his rescuer.[5]The Zhongshan wolf (中山狼） is the canonical Chinese figure of ingratitude. The standard literary version is the classical-language fable "The Zhongshan Wolf" (《中山狼传》), attributed to Ma Zhongxi (马中锡， 1446–1512) and preserved in his Dongtian Collection (《东田文集》). The Mohist scholar Master Dongguo (东郭先生） hides a fleeing wolf in his book-bag to save it from the hunt of Zhao Jianzi (赵简子）; once released, the wolf argues that Mohist universal love requires the scholar to complete his charity by letting the wolf eat him, and is only destroyed when an old passer-by tricks it back into the bag. Earlier vernacular versions circulated from the Song and Yuan, and Wang Jiusi and Kang Hai adapted the story into a zaju (杂剧） drama in the Ming. "中山狼" remains, in modern Chinese, the fixed noun for a benefactor-betrayer. Li Ruzhen's wolf supplies the heart (心） in the transplant: the organ of moral judgment, taken from the animal whose defining trait is that he eats the hand that saved him. The Persian dog is not an ordinary dog: it is the celebrated exotic hound of the Tang tribute records, swift and spotted and foreign, and in Li Ruzhen's hands it supplies the lungs to match the wolf's heart, because the punchline requires the exact four-character idiom 狼心狗肺, "wolf-heart, dog-lungs," which every Qing reader knew as the stock epithet for a man devoid of conscience.[6]The Persian hound (波斯犬/波斯狗） is a documented Tang-dynasty import, not a mythic animal. The Old Book of Tang (《旧唐书·西戎传·波斯》) records that Persia "produced many fine horses and swift dogs; some of the finest could run seven hundred li in a day — these swift dogs are the so-called Persian dogs of today" (骏犬今所谓波斯犬也）. The Tang Huiyao (《唐会要》卷一〇〇） repeats the line almost verbatim, and Edward Schafer's The Golden Peaches of Samarkand identifies the animal, likely a spotted sighthound, as a celebrated Silk Road tribute good, alongside the even smaller "Fulin dog" (拂菻狗， the lapdog presented by the Gaochang king in Wude 7 / 624, six cun tall, able to lead a horse by the rein and carry a candle). Why a Persian dog? Because the punchline requires the exact four-character set phrase wolf heart, dog lungs (狼心狗肺）, and Li Ruzhen, writing in the high-Qing moment of Manchu and Inner-Asian tribute exchange, upgrades the proverb's "dog" to the most glamorous foreign hound his readers would recognize — as though the Pierced-Chest people, being far-southern foreigners themselves, had sourced the transplant organs through their own western trade routes.[7]狼心狗肺 (láng xīn gǒu fèi, "wolf heart, dog lungs") is the everyday Chinese idiom for a person of utterly cruel, ungrateful, conscience-free character. The earliest attested literary use is Feng Menglong's (冯梦龙） Xingshi Hengyan (《醒世恒言》卷三十·李汧公穷邸遇侠客， 1627): "Who could have known the scoundrel would turn out to be all wolf-heart and dog-lungs, betraying grace and forgetting kindness" (那知这贼子恁般狼心狗肺，负义忘恩）. Li Baojia (李宝嘉） uses it again in the late-Qing novel Zhongguo Xianzai Ji (《中国现在记》). The great editorial joke of this chapter is that modern dictionaries quote this very sentence of Flowers in the Mirror — Lin Zhiyang's "原来狼心狗肺都是又歪又偏的" — as a standard attestation of the idiom. Li Ruzhen did not coin the phrase; he performed a fake etymology of it, in the voice of a fictional doctor explaining a fictional country, and the dictionaries of the twentieth century quietly promoted the fiction into a citation. The post-Ming colloquial cousin 良心被狗吃了 ("your conscience has been eaten by the dog") works the same semantic field. Note the precision of Li Ruzhen's pathology: the transplanted organs are not merely bad — they are also crooked and partial (又歪又偏）, matching the two named lesions 歪心疔 and 偏心疽. The cure preserves, rather than corrects, the original bias. The shaman transplants the organs of cruelty and ingratitude into the bodies of liars, and the liars walk again — intact, functional, permanently hollow. Li Ruzhen does not say the cure fails. He says something bleaker: the cure succeeds, on its own terms; the patients survive; and the reason the hole can never close is that the replacement organs are as crooked as the originals were. A corrupt character can be kept alive and functional. It cannot be restored.
Notice, too, how short the encounter is. The travelers do not land. There is no marketplace scene, no bargaining, no local notable, no comic misunderstanding with a customs officer. The Pierced-Chest people are the only major country in the first half of the novel that Tang Ao never speaks to and Lin Zhiyang never tries to sell anything to. Structurally this is deliberate. The two-faced men can be met in conversation, because hypocrisy performs itself for an audience; the no-bowels people can be visited at a banquet, because miserliness performs itself over food; but the crooked heart does not perform. It does not know it has a hole. You can only diagnose it from outside, at a distance, in passing. The ship goes by. The natives walk the waterfront. The explanation is delivered at the mast. That is the whole embassy — and the impersonality of it is the satire. A country of biased, dishonest judges and officials is not a country you negotiate with. It is a coastline you note and leave.
The final stroke is Lin Zhiyang's one-line exit: "So the phrase is literally true." This is the narrator's wink handed to the book's simplest character. Lin is the merchant, the comic id, the man who in other chapters proposes to buy local women as concubines and sell Chinese trinkets to giants. He is not supposed to be the literary critic of the trio. But here he articulates the governing conceit of the entire voyage — that the moral language of Chinese is a map of real countries somewhere south of the known world — and then the ship sails on. When the common reader gets the joke in the same breath as the book's plainest man, the joke is certified as universal. The high scholar Tang Ao says nothing in this scene. He does not need to.
Notes & Further Reading
📜 Original Text in Classical Chinese · 文言原文（《镜花缘》第二十六回·穿胸国节选）
【前情提要】 唐敖、林之洋、多九公三人乘船游历海外诸国。此前已历君子国、两面国、黑齿国、淑士国、女儿国、无肠国、大人国、白民国、长人国等。本章唐敖先在海上修好一艘遭风打坏的家乡货船，船主乃神弹女子徐丽蓉；其兄徐承志被困淑士国为驸马多年，此刻携妻逃出。淑士国追兵与草寇先后杀至，徐承志长枪、徐丽蓉弹弓合力退敌，兄妹改名投奔故土。多九公收拾开船——
走了几日，过了穿胸国。林之洋道：「俺闻人心生在正中。今穿胸国胸都穿通，他心生在甚么地方？」多九公道：「老夫闻他们胸前当日原是好好的；后来因他们行为不正，每每遇事把眉头一皱，心就歪在一边，或偏在一边。今日也歪，明日也偏，渐渐心离本位，胸无主宰。因此前心生一大疔，名叫『歪心疔』，后心生一大疽，名叫『偏心疽』：日渐溃烂。久而久之，前后相通，医药无效。亏得有一祝由科用符咒将『中山狼』、『波斯狗』的心肺取来补那患处。过了几时，病虽医好，谁知这狼的心，狗的肺，也是歪在一边、偏在一边的，任他医治，胸前竟难复旧，所以至今仍是一个大洞。」林之洋道：「原来狼心狗肺都是又歪又偏的！」
行了几日，到了厌火国。……（厌火国民众索讨不遂，口喷烈火，林之洋胡须烧得一干二净；危急之际，海中跃出当日在元股国放生的人鱼，众皆喷水灭火，全船得救。多九公曰：「与人方便，自己方便。」林之洋叹：「世上那些忘恩的，连鱼鳖也不如了！」）
【后续走向】 穿胸国之后，三人续经厌火国（人鱼报恩）、结胸国（好吃懒做，胸前积痞高起一块）、长臂国（伸手贪财，臂长两丈）、翼民国（爱戴高帽，头长五尺，卵生能飞）、豕喙国、伯虑国（愁眠不醒而终年不敢睡）、巫咸国、歧舌国等，方入女儿国正章（第三十二回起，林之洋被选为王妃、强令缠足，详 Tale 027 →）。《山海经·海外南经》早有「贯匈国，其为人匈有窍」之载；晋张华《博物志》则记穿胸民乃防风氏二臣以刃贯心、禹拔刃疗以不死之草所化——李汝珍弃旧典复仇悲剧，改作「心歪则胸烂」的世情寓言。
Source: 《镜花缘·第二十六回·遇强梁义女怀德 遭大厄灵鱼报恩》— 清·李汝珍. Public domain. 汉典古籍 · 镜花缘第二十六回 · 古诗文网 · 博物志卷二.
🏛️ Historical Context · 历史背景
The chapter in the novel. Chuānxiōng Guó (穿胸国） appears in Chapter 26 of Flowers in the Mirror (镜花缘， published 1818, Jiaqing 23), in the middle stretch of the voyage (roughly Chapters 8–39) in which Tang Ao, Lin Zhiyang, and Duo Jiugong traverse the imaginary countries of the southern seas. The country is one of the briefest landfalls in the entire voyage — the ship "passes" (过） rather than "reaches" (到）, no one goes ashore, and the whole treatment is four lines of dialogue. Its neighbors in this section are the Shushi (淑士， pedants), Liangmian (两面， two faces) and Yanhua (厌火， fire-breathers) kingdoms, and immediately after it the ship visits the Jiexiongjie (结胸， "knotted chest," gluttons whose food never digests and bulges under the sternum), Longbi (长臂， long arms), and Yimin (翼民， winged) peoples. Li Ruzhen is working a deliberate anatomical run: a chest pierced through, a chest knotted up, arms stretched by greed, a head stretched by flattery, a beak grown from mendacity. Each deformity is the literal form of a Chinese vice-term; the chapters are arranged, in this stretch of the book, like plates in an illustrated moral physiology.
The mythological substrate. The Pierced-Chest country is one of the oldest pieces in the Chinese mythic inventory. It appears in the Classic of Mountains and Seas as Guanxiong (贯匈/贯胸）, listed among the far-southern peoples of the Haiwai Nanjing with a single physical description and no story attached. The Huainanzi (《淮南子·墬形训》) repeats it in the canonical roster of the "thirty-six countries beyond the seas." Zhang Hua's Bowuzhi supplies the etiology that dominated the medieval imagination: the two vassals of the executed lord Fengfeng, their self-inflicted chest wounds healed by Yu's herb of immortality. This is the version known to Tang and Song encyclopedists (the Yiwen Leiju and Taiping Yulan both cite it), and it is the version illustrated in the Ming edition woodblocks. Li Ruzhen knew all of this. His choice to discard the Fengfeng etiology entirely — lords, dragons, imperial forgiveness, resurrection herb — and substitute a bourgeois pathology of biased judgments and proverb-based organ transplants is characteristic of his method across the novel: he treats ancient myth not as canon but as raw material, and reforges it into Qing social satire.
The organ-transplant joke in its medical context. Qing readers would have caught at once that the zhuyou ritualist is healing a condition that ordinary medicine considers hopeless. The Inner Canon passage on zhuyou specifically says that in a later, decadent age — when "anxiety gnaws within and toil wounds without" — incantation alone can no longer suffice. Li Ruzhen sets the Pierced-Chest cure at exactly that late point: medicines have already failed (医药无效）, the patients are terminal, and only the archaic ritual discipline remains. But the ritual's solution is not spiritual purification; it is a substance transplant of moral essences. This is a folk-logic of sympathetic medicine applied to language itself: to fill the cavity left by a crooked heart, use the organ whose name in Chinese means ingratitude. The wolf supplies langxin, the dog supplies goufei; together they fill the literal hole left by the idiom's absence. That the transplanted organs reproduce the original deformity is the joke's moral closing bracket — a society that treats its corruption by swapping in proverbially corrupt parts will keep its holes.
The idiom and its afterlife. 狼心狗肺 is first attested in Feng Menglong's Xingshi Hengyan (1627), making it, in Li Ruzhen's lifetime, a vernacular phrase of roughly two centuries' standing rather than an ancient classical expression — the kind of colloquialism an educated novelist might hesitate to use in serious prose but could put in the mouth of the merchant Lin Zhiyang. The joke works because the novel pretends the phrase is ancient and etymological: the fake shamanic cure "explains" why the language has those exact four characters. Modern Chinese dictionaries, faced with finding citations for the idiom, quote Li Ruzhen's own punchline sentence back as evidence — a small, perfect loop in which a fictional folk etymology becomes a lexicographical attestation. The companion phrase Li Ruzhen activates, 偏心 (pianxin, "partial/biased"), is still the ordinary Mandarin word for favoritism, as when parents are accused of 偏心 toward one child; and 歪心/心术不正 remains the standard charge against a corrupt judge or a scheming official. The country is, in effect, a visualization of routine Qing courtroom and yamen moral accusations.
The real-world target. As with the other satirical kingdoms, the Pierced-Chest people are best read not as foreigners but as Chinese officials in travel costume. Li Ruzhen (c. 1763–1830), a Haizhou scholar with only a minor official career and a long life spent tutoring and writing among the lower gentry, composed the bulk of Flowers in the Mirror across the late Qianlong and Jiaqing decades — the period later historians call the beginning of the "High Qing decline," bracketed by Heshen's corrupt domination of the court (executed 1799), the White Lotus Rebellion (1796–1804), and a magistracy widely accused, in popular discourse and vernacular fiction alike, of systematic partiality. A body of officials whose hearts have literally migrated off-center, whose chests have rotted open from front to back, and whose hollowed-out bodies are kept walking only by the transplanted organs of proverbial beasts of prey — this is not an ethnographic fantasy. It is a departmental diagnosis. The reason the travelers never land is the reason an honest clerk in a Jiaqing yamen might prefer to walk past the courtroom door: there is nothing to trade with, and nothing to say to, a chest that has already decided where its hole points.
Connection to other Cathay Tales. This is the tenth Flowers in the Mirror tale on Cathay Tales. The earlier nine — Junzi Guo (Tale 010), Liangmian Guo (Tale 019), Nü'er Guo (Tale 027), Heichi Guo (Tale 036), Shushi Guo (Tale 044), Wuchang Guo (Tale 053), Daren Guo (Tale 056), Baimin Guo (Tale 070), and Changren Guo (Tale 078) — cover the nine most-quoted imaginary countries of the novel's first half. The closest structural cousin is Tale 053 (Wuchang, "no bowels"), which likewise literalizes a body-vice idiom; the Jiexiongjie (knotted-chest, gluttony) and Longbi (long-arm, grasping) countries that bracket this chapter in the voyage order are natural candidates for a later rotation.
Translator's Note
This is one of the shortest episodes in the voyage and, in the original, one of the densest: four lines of dialogue carry the weight of a two-thousand-year mythological tradition, a chapter of the Inner Canon, an entire Ming fable, the Tang tribute trade in exotic hounds, and the single most useful insult in the Chinese moral vocabulary. I have kept the central passage close to the text — Duo Jiugong speaks in long, diagnostic sentences in the original, and shortening them would lose the joke of hearing a consulting physician describe damnation — while expanding the surrounding chapter material (the Xu siblings, the bandit fight, the mer-fish rescue) enough to show why this tiny country sits where it does, between gratitude repaid and gratitude betrayed. The four-character phrase langxin goufei has no English equivalent of equal compression; "cruel and ungrateful" is the sense, but the literal "wolf heart, dog lungs" had to remain visible, since the whole country is built out of those four characters.
— Wang Cai
Related Tales
If you enjoyed this story, you might also like:
- The Country with No Bowels: A Qing Satire on Misers — the body-vice country that is this tale's nearest cousin
- The Country of Two Faces: A Qing Satire on the Two-Faced Official — where every citizen wears a second face on the back of his head
- The Giant Whose Head Touched the Sky: A Qing Satire on Men Who Talk Big — where a "thick face" becomes literal anatomy
- The Country Where Men Bound Their Feet: A Qing Satire — the voyage's most famous gender-reversal kingdom, reached later in Chapter 32
The mer-fish subplot frames the Pierced-Chest episode and gives the chapter its title, "Encountering strong bandits, a righteous daughter cherishes virtue; meeting great peril, a spirit-fish repays kindness" (遇强梁义女怀德 遭大厄灵鱼报恩）. The mer-women who save the ship by spouting seawater at the fire-breathing people of Yanhua are the same creatures Tang Ao freed in the Yuangu (元股） chapter, where the crew had netted them; one was nevertheless wounded by a sailor's bird-gun. Duo Jiugong's commentary after the rescue develops Li Ruzhen's argument that "the four kinds of creature — scaled, armored, feathered, furred — share one numinous nature" (种类虽别，灵性则一）, citing the horse's dangling-rein gratitude and the dog's wet-grass devotion. Read back-to-back, the two countries form a matched pair: the Pierced-Chest humans have rotted themselves into wolf-heartedness, while the spirit-fish animals rise to human-grade gratitude. The chapter is a single moral test in two specimens, and the animals pass it. ↩
The country is older than Li Ruzhen by roughly two millennia. The Classic of Mountains and Seas (《山海经·海外南经》), compiled Warring States through Han, records: "The Country of Guanxiong lies east of [the country of Die]; its people have an aperture through the chest" (贯匈国在其东，其为人匈有窍). Guo Pu (郭璞, 276–324), the Jin-dynasty commentator, glosses the line with two earlier sources — the Shizi (尸子), which lists the pierced-chest peoples among the foreign tribes drawn to the Yellow Emperor's virtue, and the Yiwu Zhi (异物志), which claims that when the people remove their clothes the hole looks unnatural, "as though they were merely imitating" the older mythic model. The carried-by-pole detail — nobles borne through their own chest-holes on a bamboo staff — belongs to the later visual tradition and is depicted in the Hu Wenhuan (胡文焕) and Wang Qi (王圻， Sancai Tuhui 三才图会） illustrated recensions. Li Ruzhen writes the name in its later variant 穿胸 (Chuānxiōng, "pierced chest"); 穿 and 贯 are near-synonyms ("thread through," "pierce"). He entirely ignores the Classic of Mountains and Seas's neutral ethnographic tone and replaces it with an etiology of his own. ↩
The Classic of Mountains and Seas gives no explanation for the hole. The standard etiology Li Ruzhen would have found in his source library is in Zhang Hua's (张华, 232–300) Bowuzhi (《博物志·卷二·外国》): when the Great Yu (禹） assembled the lords of the empire at Kuaiji, the lord of Fengfeng (防风氏） arrived late and was executed. Later, as Yu's two draft-dragons carried him on a circuit beyond the seas, two of Fengfeng's vassals, enraged at their master's death at Tushan, shot at the imperial envoys; thunder and storm drove the dragons aloft, and the two vassals, terrified, drove their blades through their own hearts and died. Yu pitied them, pulled the blades out, and healed them with the herb-of-no-death (不死之草) — "and these became the Pierced-Chest people." It is a story of culpable violence, guilt, suicide, and a miraculous but disfiguring rescue. Li Ruzhen keeps the structural shape — festering wound, exotic cure, permanent hole — but replaces the feudal-lord tragedy with a bourgeois medical comedy: no lords, no dragons, only people who kept twisting their judgments until their bodies gave way. The demotion is itself the joke. The same Bowuzhi chapter lists the Pierced-Chest among the far-southern peoples alongside the Black-Teeth, Painted-Forehead (雕题), and Stretched-Ears (儋耳) tribes. ↩
祝由科 (Zhùyóu kē) is one of the oldest named healing traditions in Chinese medicine. The locus classicus is the Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon, Basic Questions (《黄帝内经·素问·移精变气论》): the Yellow Emperor asks why the ancients could cure illness "by shifting the essence and changing the breath — by zhuyou alone" (古之治病，惟其移精变气，可祝由而已), while later ages need toxic drugs within and needles and stones without. Wang Bing's (王冰， Tang) gloss reads zhuyou as "uttering prayers that name the cause of the illness" (祝说病由), without medicines or needles — an incantatory, ritual mode of healing that modern readers often compare to psychotherapy or faith healing. The term 祝由科 proper denotes the ritual-healing division that was formally institutionalized as one of the medical sections in the Yuan and Ming imperial medical academies (the Yuan 十三科 and the Ming 太医院十三科 both include it; the Qing later dropped it from the official roster). Li Ruzhen's point in handing the Pierced-Chest cure to a zhuyou master rather than a pharmacologist is pointed: a lesion produced by moral crookedness is not reachable by ordinary drugs — only by symbolic surgery, the literal transplantation of animal organs named in a proverb. ↩
The Zhongshan wolf (中山狼） is the canonical Chinese figure of ingratitude. The standard literary version is the classical-language fable "The Zhongshan Wolf" (《中山狼传》), attributed to Ma Zhongxi (马中锡， 1446–1512) and preserved in his Dongtian Collection (《东田文集》). The Mohist scholar Master Dongguo (东郭先生） hides a fleeing wolf in his book-bag to save it from the hunt of Zhao Jianzi (赵简子）; once released, the wolf argues that Mohist universal love requires the scholar to complete his charity by letting the wolf eat him, and is only destroyed when an old passer-by tricks it back into the bag. Earlier vernacular versions circulated from the Song and Yuan, and Wang Jiusi and Kang Hai adapted the story into a zaju (杂剧） drama in the Ming. "中山狼" remains, in modern Chinese, the fixed noun for a benefactor-betrayer. Li Ruzhen's wolf supplies the heart (心） in the transplant: the organ of moral judgment, taken from the animal whose defining trait is that he eats the hand that saved him. ↩
The Persian hound (波斯犬/波斯狗） is a documented Tang-dynasty import, not a mythic animal. The Old Book of Tang (《旧唐书·西戎传·波斯》) records that Persia "produced many fine horses and swift dogs; some of the finest could run seven hundred li in a day — these swift dogs are the so-called Persian dogs of today" (骏犬今所谓波斯犬也）. The Tang Huiyao (《唐会要》卷一〇〇） repeats the line almost verbatim, and Edward Schafer's The Golden Peaches of Samarkand identifies the animal, likely a spotted sighthound, as a celebrated Silk Road tribute good, alongside the even smaller "Fulin dog" (拂菻狗， the lapdog presented by the Gaochang king in Wude 7 / 624, six cun tall, able to lead a horse by the rein and carry a candle). Why a Persian dog? Because the punchline requires the exact four-character set phrase wolf heart, dog lungs (狼心狗肺）, and Li Ruzhen, writing in the high-Qing moment of Manchu and Inner-Asian tribute exchange, upgrades the proverb's "dog" to the most glamorous foreign hound his readers would recognize — as though the Pierced-Chest people, being far-southern foreigners themselves, had sourced the transplant organs through their own western trade routes. ↩
狼心狗肺 (láng xīn gǒu fèi, "wolf heart, dog lungs") is the everyday Chinese idiom for a person of utterly cruel, ungrateful, conscience-free character. The earliest attested literary use is Feng Menglong's (冯梦龙） Xingshi Hengyan (《醒世恒言》卷三十·李汧公穷邸遇侠客， 1627): "Who could have known the scoundrel would turn out to be all wolf-heart and dog-lungs, betraying grace and forgetting kindness" (那知这贼子恁般狼心狗肺，负义忘恩）. Li Baojia (李宝嘉） uses it again in the late-Qing novel Zhongguo Xianzai Ji (《中国现在记》). The great editorial joke of this chapter is that modern dictionaries quote this very sentence of Flowers in the Mirror — Lin Zhiyang's "原来狼心狗肺都是又歪又偏的" — as a standard attestation of the idiom. Li Ruzhen did not coin the phrase; he performed a fake etymology of it, in the voice of a fictional doctor explaining a fictional country, and the dictionaries of the twentieth century quietly promoted the fiction into a citation. The post-Ming colloquial cousin 良心被狗吃了 ("your conscience has been eaten by the dog") works the same semantic field. Note the precision of Li Ruzhen's pathology: the transplanted organs are not merely bad — they are also crooked and partial (又歪又偏）, matching the two named lesions 歪心疔 and 偏心疽. The cure preserves, rather than corrects, the original bias. ↩