Hello and welcome to Chinese Folk Tales.
This is Bei Bei.
Starting today, we're going to talk about some magical creatures in Chinese culture.
As arrogant as humans have become, we have to admit that, besides having a smarter brain, our talents and abilities in many other aspects are nothing worth boasting compared to other animals.
Birds can fly, fish can swim, and alligators can snap your arm right off.
They are powerful in their own ways, and humans admired those abilities in the ancient times.
We even combined some of these amazing abilities in fancy ways to create magical creatures, to pay our respect to them.
For example, the centaur. with its upper body of a human and lower body of a horse.
And the Sphinx, with its head of a human and the body of a lion.
These are creatures of Western creation.
In Chinese culture, the most representative magical creature is undoubtedly the dragon, or 龙 in Chinese.
Of course we don't really believe that a kind of creature that could float through the clouds and dive into the ocean and spit out rain really existed.
More likely, it's a creature that man created with elements from different species.
The body of a serpent, the antlers of a deer, the mane of a horse, and the scales of the fish.
Oh, let's not forget.
The claws from the eagle.
It's all of these elements put together and enlarged probably a few hundred times.
And maybe because different tribes had different animals that they worshipped.
And when the tribes merged, the people added all these elements together to create one holy object for worship.
But this is just a guess.
And also, for a Chinese person, the image of the dragon is so familiar that we feel like it's real.
And maybe it was a flying dinosaur that could zoom from the ocean up into the clouds.
The exact image of the dragon had minor changes over time.
Most of the time it had the body of a serpent, and sometimes it was more like a crocodile or even a lizard.
The earliest archaeological finding of the dragon was found in Henan province, dated 6000 years ago.
Not quite exciting as a set of bones.
Instead, it was an arrangement of shells in the shape of a dragon. with everything except the horns.
It's called the first dragon in China, but the image for the dragon evolved over time.
The locks weren't the only thing that evolved.
The dragon's identity, or more precisely, what it symbolized, changed over time too.
In the ancient times, the dragon appeared mostly as a form of transportation.
If you remember in the earlier episodes, at the end of her life, goddess Nuwa ascended to heaven with two dragons.
The yellow emperor was also carried to heaven on the back of a dragon.
In the story of goddess Xihe and her ten sons.
She drove her sons across the sky on a six-dragon carriage.
So at that time, dragons were more like fancy horses that gods and goddesses used.
There is also an interesting story about someone named Kongjia who raised dragons.
He was one of the emperors during the Xia Dynasty, but not a very good one.
He thought only of how to have fun.
One day, For some reason, two dragons descended from the sky outside the palace, one male and one female.
This thrilled Kongjia.
He was getting bored with all the other fancy things under heaven, but had never had any dragons for pets.
So he asked his ministers Any of you know how to keep dragons?
A man named Liu Lei took up the challenge, saying that one of his ancestors raised dragons for Emperor Shun, and he's got the knack for it too.
Kongjia was very happy to see such talents among his ministers and promptly offered him the job and the dragons to keep.
Liu Lei did pretty well in the beginning, but raising live animals can be risky business.
You never know what might strike.
One day, the female dragon fell sick and no one had any idea how to treat a dragon.
So it died.
What to do?
This Liu Lei guy was no ordinary soul.
Instead of burying it or burning it, he chopped the dragon up into minced meat and made it into a meat sauce.
Can you imagine pasta with dragon meatballs?
Anyway, Liu Lei presented the meat sauce to Emperor Kongjia.
And he happened to like it and wanted more.
Only then did Liu Lei get scared.
He didn't want to chop up the live one.
So he fled overnight.
And that's the end of the story.
From which we can tell that back in the ancient days, the dragon was a magical creature that people worshipped.
Well, at least most people did.
Later, the status of dragon kept rising, especially during the Qin Dynasty, when Emperor Qin Shi Huang united China.
It was during this time that dragons began to be associated with emperors, but not only for emperors.
Back then, according to patterns on clothing, only the clothing of the emperor could have images of the sun, the moon, the stars.
So these had the highest status.
Ministers, however, could wear gowns with dragons on them.
Then, during the Yuan Dynasty, about seven or 800 years ago, an emperor made a decree that only emperors could wear clothing with the image of dragons.
And he also decided that real dragons had five claws, like five fingers.
So the ministers who wanted to keep dragons on their gowns made theirs with four claws instead.
Then during the Ming and Qing dynasties, the dragon officially became an imperial symbol.
The emperor lived inside the Forbidden City and wore silk gowns with patterns of dragons.
In fact, there were dragons everywhere.
On the walls, on the pillars, on the ground.
It's everywhere in the Forbidden City.
The dragon's stern and somewhat frightening image is meant to represent the majesty of the emperor.
Among the common people, the dragon was also worshipped, but not as a symbol of the emperor, but as someone or something that was closely responsible for their well-being.
It was the dragons that were in charge of delivering rain.
And for farmers, almost nothing had more influence on their livelihood.
That's why people made offerings to the dragon, mostly in times of drought, to beg for rain.
There are also stories of bad dragons too, like the one in the story of Nezha, which we will get to in the future.
The end of Qing Dynasty was also the end of hereditary rule in China, and there were no more emperors.
The dragons however, remained a symbol of the power of emperors, but also kind of a symbol for the Chinese people who call themselves the descendants of the dragon.
So this is the story of the dragons.
But the dragons wasn't alone.
Most often, it appeared with another mystical creature.
Not a female dragon, but the phoenix.
We will get to that magical bird next time.
Hope to see you then, and bye for now.
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