1901年，荷蘭漢學家高延受歐洲「狼人」傳説啓發，在其《中國宗教系統》第四卷用一章篇幅探討了中國古代和中古的「虎人」傳説，主要利用傳統文獻描述了各類虎變相關敘事。近一個世紀後，韓孟又分析了古代中國民間故事中對虎的象徵意義的運用。近年來學界出現一些新發展，一是歷史與宗教研究中的動物研究轉向，二是南亞和東南亞人類學者在過去三十年來對當地虎人研究做出了很大成績。這兩方面因素促成本文重訪有關中國虎人傳説的舊問題，從跨亞洲的新角度再度考察。本文將分兩部分來補論高延和前人沒有充分展開的議題，第一部分考察中國傳統陰陽五行思想在古代社會中對老虎和人之間互相變化的敘事產生的影響及其與佛教轉世輪迴思想的碰撞，旨在揭示虎變現象内在機制的中古轉變。第二部分將虎人傳説置於亞洲的視角之下，考察韓半島、中南半島、南亞地區虎人傳説與中國特別西南地區虎人傳説的聯繫，試圖追溯其歷史淵源。

In 1901, in volume four of his monumental work The Religious System of China, J. J. M. de Groot devoted one section titled “tigroanthropy” to the study of insane weretigers in ancient and medieval China under the light of the werewolf tradition in Europe. Later on, Charles E. Hammond published several articles on this topic. In the past two decades, the emerging field of Animal Studies as well as anthropologists in South and South-East Asia further contributed to the scholarship on the weretigers and made tremendous progress to the field. All these developments warrant a revisit of the weretiger legends in China and beyond. This paper supplements previous scholarship in two respects. First, it offers a new analysis on the weretiger legend as a cultural invention and identifies the Chinese Yin-Yang and Five-Phase theories and the Buddhist thought on karma and reincarnation as providing the intellectual stimuli for its changes over time during the middle ages in China. Second, it takes a trans- Asian perspective by carrying out an investigation of the weretiger legends in Korea, India, and Vietnam. It then seeks to compare these partially overlapped narratives with the Chinese versions and traces the historical connections between them.