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After two thousand years of scholarship, the Shan Hai Jing still holds secrets that no one has cracked. Who were the original authors? How did they obtain geographical knowledge of regions they could not have physically visited? Why does the supreme god Di Jun appear in this text and nowhere else? What are the Strange Countries really describing? Why do the creature descriptions match shamanic visions reported in cultures that had no contact with ancient China? And perhaps the deepest question: is the Shan Hai Jing mapping physical places, spiritual dimensions or something that is both at once?