The land of China from ancient times to the present has no shortage of legends of gods and ghosts, known as the "kingdom of animals and plants" yunnan is naturally also "gods and ghosts", today let's talk about Yunnan in recent decades more famous legendary creatures - vampire blankets.
Vampire blankets, also known as mats, suction mats, water mats, land rolls, etc., are mysterious creatures circulating in Yunnan Province, especially in xishuangbanna, which often appear in magazines of hunting curiosity, but there is no physical photo, only one or two imaginary pictures.
But whenever I see urban legends or mysterious creature legends on the Internet, I will search for Tianya, because Tianya is the birthplace of many urban legends in China, and many of the legends that are now in the dust are created by the authors on Tianya more than ten years ago. But I didn't find any posts about monsters like the "vampire blanket" more than a decade ago, only a few reprints from other places in recent years. Tianya disappointed me this time, this legend did not originate in Tianya.
I had to look for it elsewhere.
In the "Nature" section of Friends of Science in 2004, there was an article called "The Legend of the "Ground Roll", which tells the story of the vampire blanket, which is described.
The locals call this monster "vampire blanket", its shape resembles a blanket, the size is about two meters square, mostly living in the deep pools of the rainforest or in the crevices of rock formations; there are fine moss-like hairs on the back, and there are several suction cups the size of lamps on the abdomen; if the suction cup is sucked on the body of a person or animal, like a locust sucking blood, it has been sucking the blood of the captured object dry.
On March 15, 2000, a hunter named La Maoli in Xishuangbanna was fishing in the river, and at night he found a boxy thing floating in the river, he thought it was a blanket discarded by others, so he went up to check it out, only to find that one corner of this "blanket" had two small shiny eyes, a slender tail on the other corner of the symmetry, and two other horns were its wings. La Maoli realized that this was not a blanket, but a living thing. He picked up the stone and threw it over and hit the living creature, which suddenly flew up and glided on the surface of the water for a while and quickly disappeared. In the middle of the night he heard his dog barking, came to check, and saw his beagle being wrapped in a "blanket" and dragged into the water.
In the autumn of that year, a pair of Dai brothers caught a stone frog in a cave in the Ta Luo River, the younger brother saw a "blanket" on the ground in the cave, so he went forward and kicked it, and as a result, the "blanket" suddenly flew up and wrapped him, he shouted loudly, the brother heard the noise and rushed to see his brother wrapped in a green and leisurely "blanket", afraid of accidentally hurting the younger brother, he took a torch to roast the "blanket", the "blanket" screamed strangely, let go of the brother, jumped into the nearby waterhole and disappeared. Afterwards, it was found that the skin on his brother's legs had been almost completely peeled off by the monster.
Some people on the Internet also claim that his grandfather witnessed this mysterious creature in the 1940s when he was a soldier in Pu'er Menglian, Yunnan. At that time, several soldiers from the Yangtze River area went down to swim in the water, and the local veterans warned them that there were "mats" in the deep pool and not to go into the water, but they did not listen, and one of them was unfortunately wrapped in the "mat" and dragged into the deep water, and everyone shot into the water, to no avail. He reported to his superiors, who instructed him to throw grenades into the water, and as a result, the "mat" was shaken out of the water and wrapped around the dead creeps. The creep's body was covered with eyes, and he had lost his blood color. The body of the "mat" is about 10 centimeters thick, extremely elastic, the mouth is yellow-brown, and the whole body has black and green hairs. Later, the body of the "mat" was lost.
The "mat" described by this man has many similarities with the "blanket" encountered by Ramoli, but like many legends, there is no guarantee of authenticity. If the story is not true or badly distorted, it is difficult to analyze the prototype of the monster. And there's no physical or photographic image of the "vampire blanket," so what the prototype of this monster is is only a guess.
In addition, some people think that the "vampire blanket" has similarities with the "dustpan turtle" recorded in the Qing Dynasty scholar Yuan Ming's Zhiwei notebook "Zi Bu Yu".
The story of the "Dustpan Turtle" takes place in the Spring of Qianlong, that is, in 1771. When Liu Jiyun, a Jiangyin man, crossed the Zhenjiang River by boat, he saw many boats being blown over by the wind, and a lot of goods floating on the river. At that time, there were people living by the river who made a living salvaging goods, and they were very water-oriented and were called "water ghosts". After the passenger ship capsized, the water ghosts flocked to negotiate the price with the cargo owner and then went into the water to fish for the goods. When the water ghost came ashore, he found that there was one less person, and suspected that this person hid valuable things under the water and wanted to take it for himself, so the water ghosts went into the water to find him, but did not find, but saw a large turtle-like thing, "red, larger than the bathtub, flattened like a dustpan, headless, tailless and footless", the missing water ghost was bitten by it. The crowd pulled the monster and found that it could not be pulled open, so they had to use an iron hook to pull it ashore with the people.
After going ashore, everyone found that this guy had hundreds of holes in his body, all of which were his mouth, and the blood of the people who was bitten by it had been sucked dry, and this thing could not let go of its mouth, and it did not react to stabbing it with a knife, so it had to be burned together with the dead person, and the stench could be smelled for miles. As for what this monster is, Yuan Ming records in the book, "Or: This is the greatest person who covers the fish in the pot, especially in the Yanzhou River."
Pot lid fish are stingrays such as the Red Ray (Dasyatis akajei), which usually live offshore and occasionally enter rivers. Therefore, it is not unreasonable for people to speculate that the "dustpan turtle" is a large individual in the genus fish.
If we compare the "vampire blanket" and the "dustpan turtle", we can find that the two do have many similarities, such as the appearance of the two is relatively flat, large, can suck blood, and can suck people to death.
Since it is speculated that the "dustpan turtle" is a large ray that enters the fresh water, the "vampire blanket" can also speculate in that regard.
Many people are indistinguishable, both flat as a blanket, but the two are more distantly related, and the stingrays belong to the myliobatiformes under the order Cartilaginous fishes - Rays, also known as qualins and stingrays. Rays belong to the order Rajiflumes under the order Cartilaginous fishes- rays.
In general, rays have a thick tail, a caudal fin or dorsal fin, and no stingers.
▲ Stingray tail is thin, most do not have tail fins or dorsal fins, poisonous spines.
There are many freshwater species of stingrays, some of which are not small, and often appear on the freshwater fish size rankings.
For example, the Jaffe narrow-tailed stingray (Urogymnus polylepis), Wikipedia says it is up to 600 kilograms, but the more recognized record is 2.4 meters wide and weighs 265 kilograms, and the amount of the tip of the tail can exceed 4 meters. Chafi narrow-tailed stingray is distributed in the Indochina Peninsula and Borneo, as far north as the Mekong river section in northwestern Laos, very close to Xishuangbanna, but there is no record of this fish in China.
▲ The Chaffy narrow-tailed stingray caught by Jeremy Wade in "River Trolls: Deadly Freshwater Stingray", which is 1.91 meters wide and weighs about 180 kilograms.
Potamotrygon brachyura, with a maximum width of 2.6 meters and a weight of 260 kg, is distributed in South America.
Pastinachus sephen, up to 1.8 m wide and weighs 250 kg, generally lives in the ocean and has access to fresh water.
Dasyatis thetidis, with a maximum width of 1.8 m and a weight of 214 kg, generally live in the ocean and can enter fresh water.
But these big guys are not distributed in Xishuangbanna, and it is not okay to think of Zhang Guan Li Dai.
So are there freshwater stingrays in the rivers of Xishuangbanna? There really is.
According to the Yunnan Fish List published in Zoological Research in 2013, there is a species in the lower reaches of the Lancang River in Xishuangbanna called Dasyatis laosensis, which was later changed to Hemitrygon laosensis. There is also a tbash in Ruilijiang.
Laotian stingray is a new distribution species found in Xishuangbanna in China this century, and a specimen was collected in April 2008 in the Guanlei section of the main stream of the Lancang River in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan Province. Wikipedia describes its maximum width at 62 centimeters and a weight of up to 30 kilograms.
Little is known about the habits of the Lao stingray, and it is estimated that it, like other stingrays, feeds on benthic animals and small fish and shrimp, and will stab people with stingers, but it will not suck blood, cannot fly, and whether it will wrap people is unknown. If it's the prototype of the "vampire blanket," then these skills must have been "stitched together" (a web term that refers to piecing together elements). For example, the blood-sucking one may be leech; the hairy one on the back may not know what it is; it may be the algae on the stingray; the flying may be bats; the suction cup and the wrapper are a bit like cephalopods, but the cephalopods have no freshwater species.
It may also be that the rumor of the "vampire blanket" has been distorted in word of mouth, and everyone always likes to add subjective creations when relaying things, and the more they spread, the more outrageous, such as "the east village is dead sheep, the west village says dead mother", many internet legends are like this.
What the prototype of the "vampire blanket" is uncertain, but the closest thing from the appearance description is the Lao stingray or other undiscovered freshwater stingrays distributed in Xishuangbanna, especially if it is almost consistent with the appearance of the "blanket" witnessed by La Maoli. It is just that its habits are far from the "vampire blanket", and it is estimated that it is distorted in word of mouth.
In addition to the Lao stingray, the rivers of Xishuangbanna may contain larger freshwater stingrays waiting to be discovered.