Trace the ancient text.
Meet its wondrous beings.

A connected world recorded through landscapes and directions

The Shanhaijing was not written at one moment by a single author. It is generally understood as a layered compilation of materials accumulated, transmitted, and edited from the Warring States through the early Han. The received chapters also reflect later textual history, with wording and order varying across editions.

Usually arranged in eighteen scrolls, the received text brings together the Mountain and Sea traditions. The Mountain texts move through ranges, directions, and distances while recording waterways, plants, animals, minerals, and rites. The Sea texts extend toward overseas, inner, and Great Wilderness realms filled with peoples, deities, heroes, and cosmological narratives.

It is neither a precise modern map nor merely a catalogue of monsters. It preserves ways early communities observed nature, organized space, interpreted danger, and imagined the unknown. Shanhai Wonders begins with public-domain text, separates textual facts from later interpretation and original inference, and turns those layers into a digital bestiary to read, hear, and watch.