Not just a metaphor: Dragons of imperial China show us how people lived

This Week in China’s History: July 7, 1517

This column has mentioned the Huai River — a tributary of the Yellow River — several times, somewhat improbably for one of China’s lesser-known watercourses. In those other cases, it was because of flooding, in the 19th and 20th centuries. The Huai’s other claim to prominence has to do with its intersection with the Grand Canal, causing some hydrological engineering feats to keep the rivers flowing.

But in the summer of 1517, the area around the Grand Canal and the Huai River was noteworthy neither for flooding nor for grand infrastructure. According to the Míng Shílù 明实录 (the Veritable Records of the Ming dynasty), on July 7, 1517, no fewer than nine dragons darkened the skies north of Nanjing. As described by historian Tim Brook in his history of the Yuan and Ming dynasties, the nine sucked water from the Huai, creating a waterspout that pulled a canal boat from the river. A woman on board was spared injury when the dragon responsible set the boat down softly.

A year later, dragons came again, to worse effect. This time, Brook writes, “three fire-breathing dragons descended through the clouds over the Yangzi delta and sucked two dozen boats into the sky.” More than 300 houses were destroyed, and not only did many die falling from the sky, but even more perished from fright at just seeing the terrifying spectacle.

And less than a year later, dozens of dragons engaged in an enormous battle in the skies over Lake Poyang — reprising one of Ming founder Zhū Yuánzhāng’s 朱元璋 greatest battles on his way to overthrowing the Yuan. The fight is said to have resulted in floodwaters that submerged several islands in the lake, never to reappear.

Of course, to most modern readers, the idea that dragons exist (or existed) at all is a non-starter, let alone the claim that they were responsible for waterspouts, floodwaters, red rain, or any of the dozens of other phenomena laid at the winged serpents’ clawed feet. But Tim Brook is a serious historian, and he begins his volume (in the prestigious Harvard History of Imperial China series) with an entire chapter on dragons. What gives? As Brook himself asks, “Do dragons belong in this history?”

As you might imagine, he believes they do. The first chapter of the book is called “Dragon Spotting,” and is, according to his notes, a compilation of nearly 100 different dragon sightings, from the Yuan and Ming, found in dynastic histories, local gazetteers, and other sources. Their importance is, to Brook, obvious, and it has little to do with whether dragons were “real,” or even if the people writing about them believed in them. “Whether the people of the Yuan and Ming believed in dragons is immaterial,” he writes. “They were observing phenomena that mattered to them, and if these events mattered to them, they should matter to us” — a succinct explanation of historians’ values.

For the Chinese of the late imperial era, dragons were not to be doubted, though they were shrouded in mystery. Tracts were written trying to discern their origins, their physiology, their habitats, their eating habits. Do phoenixes feed on dragon brains? Are they born live or from eggs? How do we account for the fact that their ability to breathe fire suggests they have an extreme yang nature, while their constant appearance in rain and in flood suggests the very opposite, a powerful yin essence? The authors resigned themselves to leaving many of the crucial questions unanswered until more evidence, or smarter investigators, could unlock some of the mysteries.

The catalog of dragon sightings offers a range of spectacles, from the Yangtze Delta sightings that sucked up rivers and threw boats into the air to fire breathers who scorched trees and monasteries to beasts that threw up floods that drowned thousands or caused winds that leveled villages.

Brook runs through the typical ways moderns explain — or explain away — mythical creatures and how they apply to dragons. Mass hysteria? Metaphors for extreme weather? Both are certainly plausible, and it’s not hard to see how a tsunami, or a thunderstorm, or a flash flood, or a mudslide can be attributed to something supernatural. Even today, survivors of such extreme weather events are often reduced to metaphor or anthropomorphization when trying to explain their experience: Tornadoes often sound like “freight trains”; hurricane winds “scream” through trees; skies turn “evil” shades of green.

Brook is quick to note that even if we understand dragon attacks to have “really” been bad weather, we can still make progress in understanding the Chinese past. Bad weather is a fundamental part of human existence, and the further back in time we go, the more essential weather and climate become for day-to-day survival and flourishing. Surely weather and climate are as important to daily life as emperors and government officials, yet history has usually preferred ideology to meteorology when looking to explain the past. If it takes dragons to help correct this, perhaps it is worth the suspension of disbelief.

But Brook suggests that there is something more in “the fearsome antics of dragons” in imperial China. The Yuan and Ming, he suggests, were difficult times. In contrast to earlier eras, “autocracy and commercialization…were now present to a degree that was qualitatively, not just quantitatively, different. Social practices diversified. Cultural production took new forms and served new purposes. Philosophers discounted many of the assumptions that had grounded Confucian thought.” It was a time of grave peril. Maybe that meant a mercurial and autocratic state. Or maybe it meant a dragon. “The people of the Yuan and Ming grasped bad weather quite as well as we do,” Brook writes, “but when they saw a dragon, they saw more than bad weather: they saw a cosmic disturbance.”

For the emperor, atop an unwieldy hierarchy that both supported and constrained him, dragons were a threat. The emperor — as “son of heaven” — was meant to mediate between the natural and the supernatural. When dragons were becoming visible to regular folk, as they were in the Yuan and Ming, the supernatural was bypassing its usual channels, dangerous deviations from the usual course of events.

On the other hand, an emperor who could control dragons could make a claim for their own legitimacy. The paranoid Hongwu Emperor made such a claim. So did the last Ming emperor, in the years before he ascended the throne, though such power did not protect him from his grim fate.

The last official sighting of a dragon in China came in the 20th century: November 1905, just six years before the last emperor abdicated the Dragon Throne. In the 21st century, dragons are now reduced to a ubiquitous, often lazy metaphor for China in the popular press, and obviously not something real. But don’t tell that to the folks near Nanjing in the summer of 1517, who watched as the beasts plucked boats from the Grand Canal and set them down just as easily, proving their power.

This Week in China’s History is a weekly column.