It brings rain instead of fire, lives in rivers instead of caves, and has never once hoarded gold. On the Chinese dragon, the long, and why the West's word for it was always a poor translation.
In 1987, archaeologists excavating a burial at Xishuipo in Puyang, Henan province, found a man laid out between two figures made of white clamshells pressed into the earth. On one side, a tiger. On the other, a long, low creature with a snake's body, a head held high and four short legs. The grave is roughly six thousand years old. The clamshell figure is often called the earliest dragon in China.
Whatever the people of Xishuipo called it, the animal they laid beside their dead has never really left. It went on to become the most important creature in Chinese art: on bronze and jade, on silk and porcelain, on the robes of emperors and the roof ridges of village temples. Its name is long. English calls it a dragon, and that is where the trouble starts.
Not that kind of dragon
The European dragon is a monster. It breathes fire, sleeps on stolen treasure, burns the countryside and waits for a hero. Fafnir in the Norse sagas, the nameless beast at the end of Beowulf, the dragon under St George's spear: all of them are something to be killed.
The long is almost the opposite. It is a creature of water, not fire. It lives in rivers, lakes, the sea and the clouds. It rises into the sky in spring and sinks into the deep in autumn. When it moves, the rain comes. In a farming civilisation that lived and died by the rains, an animal that commanded water was not a threat to be slain. It was the one you prayed to.
Across China, towns and villages built temples to the Dragon Kings, the rulers of the four seas and of local rivers and wells. In years of drought, people carried the Dragon King's image out into the fields so that he could see for himself how dry they were. The dragon was powerful, sometimes dangerous, and quick to anger if neglected. But it was on the side of life.
An animal made of nine animals
Ask a Chinese painter how to draw a dragon and you may be told about the nine resemblances. The list is often traced to the Han dynasty scholar Wang Fu and was recorded in a Song dynasty dictionary: the horns of a deer, the head of a camel, the eyes of a demon, the neck of a snake, the belly of a clam, the scales of a carp, the claws of an eagle, the soles of a tiger and the ears of an ox.
Read it slowly and it stops being a monster's recipe. It is a list of the best of everything: the antlers of the forest, the scales of the river, the grip of the sky's hunter. The dragon is what you get when every creature gives it something.
The emperor's animal
Over the centuries the dragon became the emblem of the throne. Emperors were said to have dragon faces and to sit on dragon thrones; their robes were embroidered with dragons rising through clouds above the waves.
By the Ming and Qing dynasties, rules of dress spelled out exactly who could wear which dragon. The five-clawed dragon was largely reserved for the emperor and his closest family. High officials could wear a closely related creature with four claws, called a mang. Using the wrong number of claws was not a matter of taste. It could be treated as a claim to authority you did not have.
The emperor's seal belonged to the same world. A decree was only binding when the seal came down on it, and imperial seals were often crowned with dragons. The dragon was authority as a living presence; the seal was authority set down in ink.
Dotting the eyes
There is an old story, told in a Tang dynasty history of painting, about a sixth-century artist named Zhang Sengyou. He painted four dragons on the wall of a temple in what is now Nanjing, and left them without pupils. When people asked why, he said that if he painted the eyes, the dragons would fly away. Nobody believed him. So he took his brush and dotted the eyes of two of them. Thunder broke the wall, the two dragons rose into the clouds, and only the two without eyes were left.
The phrase hua long dian jing, "painting the dragon, dotting the eyes", still means the final touch that brings a whole work to life. It is why, on our Dragon Ring, the 24K gold goes exactly where the face lives: the horns, the brow, the eyes and the two long whiskers. Everything else stays silver, so that the gaze is the first thing you see.
Dragons in the Buddhist world
When Buddhist scriptures were translated from Sanskrit into Chinese, the translators needed a word for the nagas, the serpent beings of springs, lakes and the underworld. They chose long. So the serpent who sheltered the Buddha in a storm became, in Chinese, a dragon king, and Chinese temples filled with dragon protectors of the teaching. We wrote about the nagas and their Tibetan cousins in our piece on the serpent.
The dragon also took its place in the old Chinese map of the sky. The Azure Dragon guards the east and the season of spring, opposite the White Tiger of the west. It is hard not to think of the clamshell dragon and tiger at Xishuipo, laid out on either side of a man six thousand years ago.
Where you still see it
The dragon has never become a museum piece. It dances through the streets at the Lunar New Year, carried on poles by a line of people. Dragon boats race on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month. And every twelfth year is a Year of the Dragon in the Chinese zodiac: the most recent was 2024, and the next will be 2036.
The dragon we carved
Our Dragon Ring is cut from solid S925 sterling silver with the head carved fully in the round, antlers standing free of the skull. Refined red copper flames climb both shoulders, auspicious clouds run down the sides of the band, and a small fire-gilded seal sits flush in the polished panel, answering the dragon the way an imperial seal answers a decree.
We make no claim that wearing a dragon brings power, rain or fortune. What we can tell you is what it has meant to the people who carved it for six thousand years: strength turned toward the good of others, and the oldest creature in Chinese art, still moving.
In the West, a dragon is something to be killed. In China, it is the one who brings the rain.
Dragon Ring · Taotie Bangle · All pieces
More from the Journal: The Taotie: A Face Nobody Wrote Down · The Naga Serpent · The Luoshu and the Nine Palaces