by Doctor Science
There's a lot of good stuff in The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China by Mark Elvin, which I just finished reading, but I want to pull out one especially notable passage: Elvin's translation of a first-hand description of a dragon.
The observations were made by the Chinese scholar Xie Zhaozhe (謝肇淛, 1567–1624) and recorded in his work Wu Za Zu (五雜俎, ca. 1592), or "Five-Fold Miscellany". Elvin writes [p. 375]:
Xie Zhaozhe was a Fujianese born in Hangzhou sometime in the middle of the sixteenth century. He gained the highest degree in the civil-service examinations, held office as a vice-minister in the Ministry of Works, and wrote on hydraulics, the province of Yunnan, and other topics. ... One of his motives [in writing Wu Za Zu] was to prove that the universe was a more complicated place than the neo-Confucians allowed for with their simplistic invocation of 'pattern-principle' [lǐ (理)], or the traditional metaphysicians with their straightjacketed categories ...
Xie Zhaozhe was, for his time, a skeptic: he didn't necessarily trust recorded events or interpretations, he wanted precise observations from people he could trust. He tested a number of sayings or principles by personal observation, and wasn't afraid to say that something "everybody knows" might not be true. He wasn't a scientist, but he wasn't less "scientific" than most Europeans writing natural history at that time.
And he writes that he saw dragons, on an occasion when other people saw them, too.
The event took place when he was approximately twelve years old, in the East China Sea, probably en route to Okinawa:
I journeyed in 1579 with my paternal grandfather, ...when he was in charge of the official travel arrangements [for the commissioner to the Liuqui Islands]. We were halfway there when a typhoon arose. Thunder, lightning, rain, and hailstones all fell upon us at the same time. There were three dragons suspended upside down to the fore and aft of the ship. Their whiskers were interwound with the waters of the sea and penetrated the clouds. All the horns on their heads were visible, but below their waists nothing could be seen. Those in the ship were in a state of agitation and without any plan of action, but an old man said, "This is no more than the dragons coming to pay court to the commissioner's document bearing the imperial seal." He made those attending on the envoy have the latter write a document in his own hand bringing the court audience to an end. The dragons complied with the time so indicated and withdrew. [1]
In another account of the same experience, Xie Zhaozhe says that the dragons were
suspended upside down from the edges of the clouds, and still more than a thousand feet above the water, which rose boiling like steam or smoke to conjoin with the clouds, the people seeing the dragons with minute particularity. [2]
Obviously this account is extremely useful for writers of fantasy and science fiction. I don't know if the (vast) Chinese literature contains any other first-person accounts of dragons, much less ones recorded by such a careful and specific observer. I'm pretty sure there are no good first-person descriptions from the other end of Eurasia.
Then there's the question of what Xie Zhaozhe "actually" saw. To me it reads as though he's describing waterspouts, as in this image taken on the Great Lakes:
It is certainly true that if you expect to occasionally see dragons in storm clouds, you will see them. For instance, this oncoming storm in the Baltic Sea near Öland, Sweden:
Most interesting to me is the question of when did educated people in China *stop* seeing dragons, and why. Which dragons disappeared first, river dragons or storm-cloud dragons, or did it happen at the same time? Did officials in the provinces stop forwarding reports of dragons to the capital because the capital became less likely to believe them, or did the provincial officials get fewer reports to forward? These questions have the advantage of being answerable, if someone is willing to dig through the enormous number of surviving gazetteers and other reports from the Ming and Qing dynasties.
Nowadays dragons are superficially worshipped in Hebei province, in the "Dragon Tablet Festival", but sociologist Hua Zhiya 華智亞 has found that the deity worshipped is not thought of as a dragon, and indeed the believers
don’t care about what Dragon Tablet is. Instead, their concern is "is Dragon Tablet efficacious?" To them, it is enough to know that Dragon Tablet is an efficacious deity.
So my guess is that at some point in the last 100-150 years Chinese people stopped thinking of dragons as efficacious. And, as the trope goes,
Gods Need Prayer Badly: if people don't pray to them, do gods and other supernatural creatures fade away?
Or are dragons different? In another culture, J.R.R. Tolkien said that in his youth, "I desired dragons with a profound desire." He desired them *because* they weren't efficacious, they weren't practical or useful:
I never imagined that the dragon was of the same order as the horse. And that was not solely because I saw horses daily, but never even the footprint of a worm. The dragon has the trademark Of Faërie written plain upon him. In whatever world he has his being it was an Other-world. Fantasy, the making or glimpsing of Other-worlds, was the heart of the desire of Faërie. I desired dragons with a profound desire. [3]
Keep an eye out for dragons.
1. Elvin p378-9, translating Wu Za Zu (reprinted under the supervision of Li Weizhen; Xingxing shuju: Taibei, 1971), 360-1.
2. Elvin p.379, translating Wu Za Zu, 272.
3. "On Fairy-Stories".
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