Chinese Dragon Sightings in the Historical Record

Thoughts on Interpreting these Reports

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One of the nine dragons on the Nine Dragon Screen, Forbidden City, Beijing

One of the wonderful things about exploring Chinese history is that there are always new and exciting l things to uncover. And not too long ago, I learned that the official Chinese records of several Imperial Chinese Dynasties include reports of dragon sightings. (see Readings from an early Chinese Gazetteer -Natural Disasters in the Hong Kong and Shenzhen region prior to the British )

Naturally, I had to learn more. After a bit of networking on a Facebook group called “Sinologists,” a place where Asian studies professors, translators of Chinese classics, and other such types hang out on-line, I was advised to seek out a book entitled, “The Troubled Empire, China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties,” by Timothy Brook. (2010, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge MA) Brooks is a professor of Chinese history at the University of British Columbia as well as the author of many books relating to Chinese history. [i]

In this book, Brooks discusses conditions in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties. The Yuan was the Mongol Dynasty when the Mongols conquered and ruled China. It lasted from 1271-1368 A.D. The Ming Dynasty which followed was a Chinese dynasty with Chinese rulers and often considered to be one of the greatest and most sophisticated and cultured of all the Chinese Dynasties. It is generally considered to last from 1368 until 1644 A.D., 1644 being the year when the Qing (Ch’ing) Dynasty was established by the conquering Manchus although there were pockets of China that considered themselves part of the Ming Dynasty for decades after the establishment of Qing (Ch’ing) rules, something that becomes important if we want to understand piracy on the southern and southeastern coast of China in the 17^th Century as well as the history of nearby Taiwan.

And just as the book “New Peace County: A Chinese Gazeteer of the Hong Kong Region” says, reports of dragon sightings were not just part of life during this period, they were also carefully documented and recorded by government officials. Keeping careful reports of dragon sightings was considered an important part of keeping a record of “Natural Disasters.” (pages 102-106 in “New Peace County.”)

Brooks’ book includes an entire chapter, pages 6 to 24, on reports of dragon sightings in the official records during the Yuan and Ming Dynasty and their context and interpretation.

Throughout pre-modern Chinese history, people believed in the reality of dragons. Obviously, they did not believe they were common creatures, but they did believe that dragons were living creatures with awesome power who normally kept to themselves and thus whose very appearance was worth recording.

Some will ask if the pre-modern Chinese saw dragons as supernatural creatures or not. I would respond that that is a question rooted in modern conceptions where the value of the scientific method is recognized, and thus the world is divided into things that are natural, meaning recognized, measure, and defined by science, and things that are supernatural, meaning not recognized, measured, defined, or behaving in ways and producing actions definable by science. Having acknowledged this, the dragons that the ancient and pre-modern Chinese believed in were definitely beings whose actions and behaviors were intertwined with floods and rain (dragons being categorized as linked with the “water” phase of the five phases) and whose appearance and subsequent behavior was seen as indicative of the general sense of how Heaven might view the fitness of the empire and imperial officials.

As for their reality, there was no reason for anyone to really doubt the existence of dragons. In pre-modern times, before the days of modern media and photography, a great deal of anyone’s conception of the greater world around them was taken on faith or word of mouth. As for physical evidence of dragons, evidence of their existence appeared in the form of large whole or partial skeletons of what clearly appeared to be dragons. And, arguably, these were “dragons,” as Chinese (as well as Vietnamese) does not distinguish clearly between dinosaurs and dragons. 恐龍 vs龍 , “Kǒng long” vs “long”, with dinosaur being a “fearful dragon,” and a dragon being simply “a dragon.” When such bones were found, and fossils of any kind were commonly referred to as “dragon bones” ( 龍骨 ) regardless of what form they had, and then sold to be ground up and used as medicine. [i]

The sale of these fossils is a subject that was discussed at length in my master’s thesis, easily found on-line. [ii]

According to Brook ( p. 6), the first dragon sighting during the Yuan Dynasty was in the year 1292 A.D. Like most recorded Chinese dragon sightings, it appeared at the edge of a large body of water, Lake Tai, part of the Yangtze River Delta. The dragon reportedly rose into the air, unleashing huge quantities of water, which then flooded the area submerging nearby fields and turning farmland into marsh.

The second appeared on August 25, 1293 A.D. around noon and manifested itself as a storm with great quantities of thunder, lightning, and wind with two dragons in the midst of the storm. As the event was recorded 75 kilometers Southeast of the previous sighting at a decaying shrine called “the Temporary Palace of the Dragon Lord” by repair crews and painters, it is not surprising that they claimed to have seen the dragon lord himself and his young son.

The Emperor Kublai Khan, famed grandson of Genghis Khan, died two years later.

In 1297 A.D., several dragons reportedly appeared over Lake Poyang, downriver from Lake Tai, creating a rainstorm produced widespread flooding. (p. 7)

According to Brooks, Yuan Dynasty records did not record further dragon sightings until July 29, 1339 A.D. when a fearsome dragon appeared in Fujian near the coast producing a torrential rain that flooded out 800 homes and 1,300 hectares.

Brooks records several more dragon sightings from that point on up unti the end of the Yuan Dynasty in 1368. Each was linked with unusual weather, strange occurrences, or disaster although not always floods. Sometimes they were linked with lightning strikes of landslides, for instance.

But dragons were not always seen as harmful in this context. The first Ming Dynasty Emperor recorded that in the fall of 1354, before he founded the dynasty but while he was actively leading a rebellion against the Mongol Yuan Dynasty, he was campaigning in a drought ridden area west of Nanjing again not too far from the Yangtze River Delta. Local elders told him that despite the drought, a dragon had frequently been seen in the nearby marshlands and asked that he pray to the dragon to bring rain to the region. According to Brooks (p. 8), years later Zhu wrote of the experience “At the time I believed them so I went to pray to it. After the third day, it in fact responded to my request.” Rain fell and a ceremony was held to show gratitude and appreciation. “On this occasion,” wrote Zhu, “the dragon has listened to Heaven’s mandate and the spirits are all aware of this.” Zhu wrote a poem of the event, and his prestige and the belief that he had the mandate of Heaven, a concept that will be discussed her more shortly, and was thus destined to become Emperor of China grew with the belief that he was also someone able to convince dragons to do his bidding.

There is a recognized link between Chinese emperors and dragons. According to Chinese mythology, the mythical founders of Chinese civilization subdued the dragons, an awesome natural force, before converting marsh into farmland enabling Chinese agriculture. And therefore, in China, appearances of dragons were considered signs of the way nature, cosmos, and Heaven was reacting to the actions of the emperor and indicative of whether or not the emperor was in the good graces of Heaven.

In traditional belief, the Emperor’s mandate to rule China came from him having a mandate from Heaven giving him the right to rule. If events were taking place such as earthquakes, floods and typhoons, droughts, and, yes, dragon sightings, then it might easily be interpreted as a sign of Heaven’s disfavor with the politics and rulership of the empire and the people might begin wondering if it was time to replace the emperor with one who appeared to better show the mandate of heaven.

BUT WHAT WERE THEY REALLY SEEING?

This is a fascinating question, and one Brooks does not spend much time on. However, like most such widespread seemingly counterfactual reports of events, it is important to recognize that multiple sightings of something that seemingly was never there by large numbers of people over a long period of time, probably do not stem from a single cause. It also needs to be recognized that from our contemporary viewpoint centuries later, and no real photographic or other tangible clues, all we can really do is speculate.

Obviously, many of the statements about dragons seem to be more of a theological or cosmological attributive description of events and were not really intended to be argumentative in nature. Something like a modern person saying "I was in a terrible car accident where the car rolled over three times, but God saw fit to spare me from harm.” Obviously, the person making the statement believes in God, but his or her statement that God spared him from harm during a car accident is not intended to provide definitive evidence for God to a non-believer. It is his or her interpretation of an agreed upon event, stated in a way intended to provide thanks and recognition to a supernatural being that the speaker believes aided him or her, as well as perhaps show shared community and world view with his or her audience. i.e. “We prayed to the dragon lord, and it rained,” is a similar sort of statement and should be interpreted in the same light.

Other reports show a clear link between dragon sightings in the sky and a sky full of stormy weather and an intense downpour that obscures clear vision and shimmering rains that produce visual anomalies such as rainbows and more.

And it does need to be recognized that these official reports in the documentation are not first hand reports by eye witnesses to the event. They are at least second or third hand reports. Nor were they intended to be seen or used as part of any investigative process.

And finally, if one looks at eye witness reports of multiple events, be they escaped convicts or escaped zoo animals, sasquatch, loch ness type lake monsters, cryptids of all kinds, ghosts, and flying saucers (yes, I am intentionally avoiding the term “UFO” as despite being a neutral term indicating an unknown object somehow it has become synonomous with alien space ships) people will report seeing things that are simply not there. (i.e. a convict escapes, he is caught somewhere to the south of the area he escaped from, nevertheless eyewitnesses have reported seeing the escaped convict in areas where they never were such as in this hypothetical case the north, east, and west of the area they escaped from).

I am sure I have written about this somewhere in one of my two “Scams from the Great Beyond” books, but can’t find it at the the moment. If it’s important, contact me and I will try to find it. In the meantime, it is just part of the human condition that people occasionally seemingly truthfully and without intent to deceive, state they saw things that were not there.

Therefore, I think in the absence of hard evidence otherwise, we can assume that the ancient Chinese reports of dragons in the historical record, do not indicate evidence of actual dragons or dinosaurs in those places and times. (despite occasional claims from Creationists and others otherwise. [i] And while Brooks spends little time on this aspect of things, he never argues that these were real creatures.

He does share an interesting historical fact, though, and that is that at the same time, many Europeans also believed in the reality of dragons. He cites the works of Edward Topsell, a 17^th C zoologist whose 1608 work “The Historie of Serpents” devotes two full chapters to reports of dragons that the author had found. [i]

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ENDNOTES

[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Brook

[i] For instance there are some examples in this children’s book: Goodreads page -The Great Dinosaur Mystery and the Bible

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[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_gu

[ii] If you would like to view my master’s thesis on the history of paleontology in China and the Peking Man digs: Chinese and Western Interactions Surrounding the Preparations for the Peking Man Digs of the 1920s

[i] Wikipedia - Edward Topsell

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UPDATE

Future plans for this publication still consist of hoping to get ahead of the curve and get posts written a few weeks ahead, allowing me to write long connected essays and then share excerpts as free content and some of the longer, better done essays as paid content. Having passed the state, but not yet the national certification exam for the Advanced EMT class that I recently finished, I think I am getting closer to achieving that.

Interestingly, after doing this for over 9 months with at least one offering each week, there is no shortage of ideas for future columns.

I do hope to return soon to doing more work on 16th to 19th C pirates of the south China coast and more on Chinese during the California Gold Rush and the American Old West. And there are countless subjects that I have touched upon that I would love to return to and share more. Please consider supporting this project and staying along for the ride.

Peace.