There is a country, the Chinese record says, where a man is only half of himself. Beyond the land of the Long-legs live peoples split down the middle: some "have but one arm and one leg," carrying a right arm with a left leg, or a left arm with a right leg, and others with both limbs on a single side, so that they "go in pairs, / like shoes". The strangest of these clans is halved through the very face — a creature with "one arm and one leg," made "of such fashion as to have but one eye, one nostril, and beard / on but one side of the face". Rights and lefts, the account explains, "the two in reality being one," and it is only by joining that they walk whole.

This witness comes from Myths & Legends of China (a compilation published in 1922), which files these half-men in a wider atlas of the monstrous: neighbours who have "one head with three bodies," people pierced clean through the chest so they can be carried on a pole, a kingdom of women who conceive by the south wind. The catalogue is deadpan, almost geographic, as though the surveyor were simply reporting what lies a little further east — and it is precisely that flatness that makes the split body uncanny. The wonder is not violence but arithmetic: a person who is exactly one half, and whose missing side is not a wound but a partner walking beside him.

Stith Thompson (1885–1976), the American folklorist whose motif-index gives this shape its address, gathered the same figure across a wide arc — the apparatus files it among the Votiak and Ostiak of the Finno-Ugric north, in Indonesia, among the Zulu and Basuto of Africa — but only the Chinese surveyor is wired to served text here; those other authorities wait unread. What does it mean that so many traditions imagined the half-person not as broken but as one of a pair — that to be whole, in these tales, is to be found again by your other side?