Lóng

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Names & Creature Profile

Lóng, written 龍 or 龙, is the Chinese dragon: a being of water and clouds, a figure of sovereignty, and a character capable of entering human households. A winding body with horns, claws and scales is familiar, but the stories do not keep it permanently in that shape. A dragon may appear as a young woman, a robed king or a force large enough to overwhelm the countryside. [2][6]

The family story below follows “The Disowned Princess” in Richard Wilhelm’s Chinese Fairy Book, translated into English by Frederick H. Martens in 1921. Its messenger is Liu Yi, written Liu I in that edition. Dongting Lake appears there as the Sea of Dungting; the king’s volatile brother keeps the edition’s name, Tsian Tang. [6][7]

Tales & Encounters

Liu Yi is returning home after failing his examinations when a startled horse carries him far off course. On a hillside he finds a young woman tending sheep. She explains that she is the youngest daughter of the Dragon King of Dongting. Her husband has mistreated and rejected her; his parents defend him and punish her complaints by sending her into the wilderness. She asks Liu Yi to deliver a letter. When he wonders why dragons keep livestock, she tells him these are rain-sheep, thunder rams. Their proud, fierce movements suddenly look less ordinary. [6]

She directs him to an orange tree on the lake’s southern shore. A month later he finds it and strikes it three times with his belt. A warrior rises from the water, makes the waves into a firm road and leads him to the palace. White quartz columns are inlaid with jade; coral seats stand beneath crystal curtains. While Liu Yi waits, his guide explains that the king is discussing fire with a human priest. Dragons command water and people wield fire; the two are considering how those opposed powers might work together. [6]

The king arrives carrying a jade sceptre. After reading the letter, he hides his face in his sleeve and blames himself for choosing the husband. News passes into the inner rooms, where lamentation breaks out. He urgently asks for quiet. His brother Tsian Tang must not hear: an earlier fit of anger caused a vast flood, and the king has been made his keeper. The brother is chained to a palace column. [6]

The warning comes too late. A red dragon erupts amid smoke and cloud, dragging both chain and column behind him. Lightning, thunder, snow and hail surround his thousand-foot body. Liu Yi falls in terror; the king helps him up as the dragon disappears toward his niece’s place of exile. When Tsian Tang returns, he looks like a young man with a sword, and the rescued princess follows him. Asked what he has done, he reports six hundred thousand slain, fields damaged for eight hundred miles, and the husband eaten alive. The king rebukes him for his excess.

Homeland & Tradition

Dongting is the home the princess wants to reach. In the story, distance has helped her husband’s family keep her powerless: her father does not know what has happened, and she needs a stranger travelling toward the lake to carry the news. The aquatic kingdom has ministers, marriage alliances, family quarrels and a ruler who must answer for his choice of a son-in-law. Its splendour does not protect everyone who belongs to it. [6]

Historical Record

The dragon appears at the beginning of the Yijing, the Book of Changes. Its first hexagram is a figure of six unbroken lines, read from the bottom upward. In James Legge’s 1882 translation, the lowest position gives a dragon concealed in the deep: action must wait. The next brings it into the field; the fourth suggests a leap still within the depths; the fifth places it in the sky. At the top it exceeds its proper limits and incurs regret. The third line speaks directly of a vigilant person rather than naming a dragon. [1]

Linguist Marjorie K. M. Chan traces Liu Yi’s story to a Tang-period marvel tale by Li Chaowei and a thirteenth-century dramatic adaptation by Shang Zhongxian. The twentieth-century fairy-book version used here is one later telling in that history. Its dialogue and sequence belong to Martens’s text, rather than a newly translated Tang original. [7][6]

Appearance & Signs

A passage translated by scholar Marinus Willem de Visser in 1913 gives nine likenesses for a painted dragon: stag horns, camel head, demon eyes, snake neck, clam belly, carp scales, eagle claws, tiger soles and cow ears. He traces the quotation through an intervening work that attributes it to Wang Fu. This is an account of how people represent a dragon; the separate parts contribute the majesty or strangeness of familiar beings to one composite form. [2]

Claws can also communicate a wearer’s position. A summer court robe in the Smithsonian, dated about 1820–1875, combines eighteen dragon roundels with five-clawed dragons for a first-rank Qing prince. Silk gauze carries embroidery in silk and metallic-wrapped thread. In the museum’s account of nineteenth-century usage, four-clawed dragons instead mark lower royalty. The convention describes this courtly setting and period, rather than every dragon in Chinese art. [3]

Nature & Powers

Dragon imagery also answered drought. De Visser translates passages about earthen figures used to draw clouds and rain. The explanation attributed to Dong Zhongshu invokes the connection between a creature and its likeness: an image could invite the dragon, and clouds would follow. De Visser also quotes a story in which a winged dragon can no longer ascend after its exploits, leaving recurrent drought; a likeness restores the desired rain. These accounts put the made image to work within a relationship between dry ground and the absent sky. [2]

Landscape & Associations

Not every encounter ends in the dragon’s household. De Visser preserves a dike story set in 762: whenever repairs approach completion, the embankment breaks again. Someone remembers an earlier Liang-dynasty precedent, and the superintendent has iron buried beneath the works. Underground thunder retreats, allowing the repairs to hold. The quoted explanation suggests that the metal hurts dragons’ eyes and drives them away. Neither river nor superintendent is named. Unlike Liu Yi, these workers need the water’s hidden inhabitants to leave so that ordinary life can continue beside it. [2][6]

Variants & Kindred Beings

The winged yinglong appears among the forms de Visser records. In one scheme it comes after a dragon has lived through successive transformations; another list defines it by its wings. The sources offer different ways of arranging dragon kinds, rather than one consistent life cycle. A wingless painted lóng and a winged yinglong can therefore belong to the same broad tradition without either invalidating the other. [2]

The pearl beside a dragon raises a different question. Art historian Helmut Nickel compares interpretations of it as sun, moon or precious object, then proposes a Central Asian connection for the paired motif. One piece of his argument is a sword pommel dated around 600, whose two dragons once faced a pearl, now lost. He describes the weapon as probably Chinese work, with a ring pommel and scabbard fittings derived from steppe designs. The proposed route remains an interpretation of objects and similarities, not a settled origin for every dragon-and-pearl image. [5]

Meaning & Belief

Legge reads the Yijing’s dragon as an image of a capable person whose power must suit the moment. Concealment need not mean failure; height need not mean safety. His explanation of the final line turns to a bow that cannot remain drawn indefinitely. Strength requires an ability to stop using it. The warning belongs within the dragon’s splendour, rather than arriving from an enemy who must defeat it. [1]

The princess’s rescue puts another strain on power. Tsian Tang acts decisively where her husband’s parents refused to act, but his violence harms a vast landscape. Gratitude then becomes pressure when he attempts to arrange her next marriage. Liu Yi refuses to make his kindness a claim upon her. Her later disguise complicates the happy ending in turn: their declared happiness follows her admission of what he did not know when he married. [6]

Later Retellings & Reception

In Zhang Yucai’s Beneficent Rain, ink on silk gives the dragon and its surrounding vapour a shared medium. The Met dates the handscroll to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century. Zhang led the Zhengyi Daoist community at Mount Longhu and received imperial commendation for rainmaking and overcoming a tide monster. His reputation places the painted weather beside claims of power over actual water. The handscroll is viewed from right to left, revealing the sinuous, scaled creature through successive portions of the image. [4]

Liu Yi’s letter also travelled onto the Cantonese stage. Chan’s conference abstract identifies Tan Qingshuang’s opera, first performed in 1954 with Luo Jiabao as Liu Yi and Lin Xiaoqun as the princess. She compares a seven-act handwritten script with later six-act versions, noting changes in language, dialogue and lyrics. The continuing story has been reshaped for particular readers, performers and audiences. [7]

Evidence & Open Questions

Even a short classical line can direct readers toward different dragons. Where Legge connects the dragon’s appearance in a field with the advantage of meeting a great person, de Visser separates the phrases: the dragon brings advantage, and a great person will appear. He associates that advantage with rain and harvest. This is his proposed reading, not a recovered explanation guaranteed by the Chinese words. The difference matters: one emphasis directs attention to human encounter, the other to crops waiting for water. [1][2]

Martens’s ending returns to something small beside a dragon’s long life: grey hair. The cousin measures separation in years; Liu Yi feels scarcely any interval. Neither the palace’s wealth nor its radiant company makes the relative’s ageing disappear from the reunion. His gift can postpone its effects, but the encounter has already shown what leaving the human shore changes. [6]

Sources & Manuscript Notes

Martens supplies the complete princess narrative; Chan identifies its literary and theatrical continuations. Legge’s translated lines and commentary remain distinct from de Visser’s interpretations and collected passages. The museum records identify the particular robe and handscroll. Nickel’s article explains his proposed connection between dragon-and-pearl designs. [6][7][1][2][3][4][5]

The Yî King: I, The Khien Hexagram ↗
Yijing textual tradition; commentary by James Legge · Internet Sacred Text Archive · 1882 · Sacred Books of the East 16 · English translation of Chinese · Translated by James Legge
Hexagram 1, printed pp. 57–60
Legge’s English line statements and his accompanying interpretation are distinguished in the text.
Checked 2026-10-09
The Dragon in China and Japan — Chinese portion ↗
Marinus Willem de Visser · Bibliothèque Chine ancienne; original Johannes Müller, Amsterdam · 1913 · Chinese portion re-typeset by Chine ancienne · English
Printed35–37 (classical readings);69–73 (iron, nine likenesses, kinds);113–114 (rain images)
Earlier Chinese works are represented through de Visser’s translations and discussion. His source for the nine likenesses is an intervening work that attributes the description to Wang Fu.

Artwork

Illuminated folios

Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.

A sinuous emerald Chinese dragon with antler horns and whiskers coils through moonlit rain clouds above a river, within a dark vine-and-star frame. — An original interpretation of the Chinese dragon’s rain-and-cloud associations, drawing on Zhang Yucai’s Beneficent Rain. Colours, pose and ornament belong to this new composition.

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