Trace the ancient text.循古籍之跡Meet its wondrous beings.見萬物之奇

A connected world recorded through landscapes and directions

The Shanhaijing (山海經)—often translated as The Classic of Mountains and Seas—was not written at one moment by a single author. Scholars broadly place the formation and compilation of its received materials from the late Warring States into the Western Han, roughly the third to first centuries BCE; its authorship and exact dates remain layered questions. Later transmission also left variations in wording and sequence.

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.