Hiderigami (Hanba)

In Chinese primeval narratives the figure linked to drought emerges from the mythic battles of culture‑heroes: after conflicts involving Chiyou and Huang Di a goddess named Ba (later called hanba) is associated with that martial sequence and, in some accounts, with the loss of godly power and subsequent association with dry regions. Mythic cosmology contrasts hanba with rainbringing beings such as Yinglong (a dragon associated with floods); traditions report that hanba remained in the north, a region traditionally prone to drought. In later Chinese imperial legend an episode during Emperor Zhenzong's reign recounts a hanba striking Yanchi and removing its water, an event that provoked ritual/official responses including consultation of a Celestial Master and the deployment of the culture‑hero Guan Yu as a repelling agent.

Descriptions vary across time and tradition. Early Chinese accounts present hanba in a goddess form, often as a woman in black. Later medieval and early modern sources shift the image toward ghostly and then vampire‑like traits; late Qing accounts add claims of shape‑changing into a hou (monkey‑like creature). Edo‑period Japanese citations (via the Wakan Sansai Zue quoting Bencao Gangmu) describe a small creature 60–90 centimeters long with eyes on the top of its head and moving quickly like the wind. Toriyama Sekien's Illustrated One Hundred Demons labels the creature 魃/旱母 and depicts an artistic variant as a one‑armed, one‑eyed beast—an Edo pictorial rendering rather than a single canonical bodily form.

Primary reported agency is meteorological: sources attribute to hanba the ability to cause severe drought and to 'take' or dry up water from places (the Emperor Zhenzong account states a hanba struck and took the water of Yanchi). It is described as moving swiftly 'like the wind' in some texts. Over time folkloric descriptions incorporate vampiric and shape‑changing characteristics (including late claims of transformation into a hou), and narratives record human attempts to repel or defeat it—ranging from ritual specialists dispatching culture‑hero figures to communal calendrical supplication for rain.