In the Country of the Giants the people stand fifty feet high, their footprints six feet long, and they live out eighteen thousand years behind iron gates set in the mountain passes of North-eastern Asia. Their teeth, the witness says, are "like those of a saw"; their finger-nails "present the appearance of hooked claws"; and their bodies are "covered with long black hair resembling that of the bear". This is the ogre of the shelf's single served witness here — a portrait, not a plot, drawn from the Shan hai ching, the Hill and River Classic whose maps were said to adorn the nine tripod vases of the Great Yü, first emperor of the Hsia dynasty. It comes to us through Myths & Legends of China (a compilation of Chinese myth, published 1922), the volume behind this address.

What is striking is the giants' restraint. Their "diet consists wholly of uncooked animal food", and they are man-eaters — yet "Though cannibals, they never eat members of their own tribe", the account insists, "confining their indulgence in human flesh chiefly to enemies taken in battle". The cannibal here keeps a law: he devours the foe, not the kinsman. Even his fortress obeys a canny logic — the iron gates in the passes are "easy to close, but difficult to open", so that neighbours with large standing armies have never conquered him.

Stith Thompson (1885–1976), the American folklorist whose motif-index gives this shape its number, gathers the man-eating giant across many lands — Icelandic, Irish, Indian, Easter Island — but only this Chinese page is wired to served text today; the other authorities wait unread. The one witness we have is enough to raise a quiet oddity: why does the monster who eats human flesh draw the line at his own tribe — and what does a cannibal with a code stop being?