Due to the influence of Hong Kong cinema, it is typically depicted in modern popular culture as a stiff corpse dressed in official garments from the Qing dynasty.

[2] In both popular culture and folklore, it is either represented as anthropophagous (i.e. man-eating), therefore resembling Slavic vampires, or as killing living creatures by absorbing their qi, or "life force".

The belief in jiangshi and its representation in the popular imagination was also partly derived from the habit of "corpse-driving",[6][7] a practice involving the repatriation of the corpses of dead laborers across Xiang province (present-day Hunan) to their hometowns for burial in family gravesites.

Some causes are described below: In both folklore and popular culture, the appearance of a jiangshi can range from that of a recently deceased person in a state of rigor mortis to that of horribly decayed and rotting corpse.

[14] De Groot observes that unburied corpses studded the landscape of imperial China, causing great fear and nourishing "an inveterate belief in these specters".

The priests would transport the corpses only at night and would ring bells to notify others in the vicinity of their presence because it was considered bad luck for a living person to set eyes upon a jiang shi.

Some[21] speculate that the stories about jiang shi were originally made up by smugglers who disguised their illegal activities as corpse transportation and wanted to scare off law enforcement officers.

[22] Those born as illegitimate children, with abnormalities, or on inauspicious days, or who were victims of murder, drowning, suicide, curses, or the Black Death were thought to have had the potential to be a vampire.

Slavic folklore references vampires and preventions dating back to the 11th century with Drawsko, Poland being home to some of these burial sites and early discoveries of such practices.

They have a paper talisman (fulu, with a sealing spell) attached onto and hanging off the forehead in portrait orientation, and wear a uniform coat-like robe and round-top tall rimmed hat characteristic of a mandarin (Chinese official from during the Qing dynasty).

The influence of western vampire stories brought the blood-sucking aspect to the Chinese myth in more modern times in combination with the concept of the hungry ghost, though traditionally they feed solely on the qi of a living individual for sustenance and in order to grow more powerful.

Attempts to experiment with the genre by producing pure horror movies, such as Tsui Hark's The Era of Vampires without the comic elements, have met with criticism and lacked the same popularity.

Today, jiangshi appear in toys and video games, such as Hsien-Ko from Darkstalkers, Qiqi in Genshin Impact, Chiaotzu in Dragon Ball, and Yoshika Miyako from Touhou Project.