CHAPTER 3 Dragons and Bugs
In the early summer of 1519, after heavy rain in Jiangxi, Poyang Lake rose, and Xiaogu Mountain disappeared. After the water receded, one dead black dragon and over twenty water monsters were found. Soon after, Zhu Chenhao rebelled and was captured in Fanyang.
—Shen Defu, Unofficial Gleanings from the Wanli Era
Lantai said that once, on a clear day, he looked up and saw a dragon flying from west to east. Its head and horns were roughly the same as those depicted in drawings, but its four legs were spread out and shaking, as if it were rowing a boat with four oars. Its tail was flat and wide, gradually becoming thinner at the end, resembling both a snake and a fish. Its belly was pure white like a piece of silk. Seeing a dragon during rainy weather is not uncommon, but to witness one with such clarity on a day without clouds, wind, rain, lightning, or thunder is truly remarkable. Recording this enriches knowledge about the natural world.
—Ji Yun, Perceptions
Dragons were a category problem. Many texts agreed that “nothing is as ling as a dragon,” but what did that mean?1 Ling referred to numinous or spiritual things that were imperfectly knowable and likely associated with other powerful but unseen forces. But ling also meant “potent” or even “lustful,” as made explicit in texts such as Xie Zhaozhe’s Five Miscellanies, which asserts that nothing is as lustful (yin) as a dragon. It seems contradictory that something can be both the most numinous creature and the most mundane in its desires. Yet in a world in which transformation was the dominant paradigm, what was strange? What was contradictory?
This is not to say that dragons were all things. They had properties and proclivities. They could be classified among those things they were related to or with whom they associated. Many texts that classified dragons did so at the beginning of chapters on “things” (wu). These chapters, or those of similar title and content, followed those focused on larger, more important topics—heaven, earth, and humankind—and preceded “accounts” or “mundane affairs” (shi). “Things” usually meant living things—animals, then plants—but also at times encompassed matters of connoisseurship—ink stones, the best hair for calligraphy brushes, and so on. In the sections on animals, authors often began with dragons and ended with bugs. We see this categorical impulse in materia medica, brush notes, and daily use texts, too. They open with the most important, powerful, lofty thing and work their way down to the most mundane, most easily investigable one. Though separated by this textual space, dragons and bugs had a great deal in common. Both were simultaneously visible and invisible, both invaded the human body, both hibernated in winter and awoke in spring at the call of thunder, both could cause great destruction on their own and at the behest of others.
The dragon was “the chief of the creatures with scales,” according to Li Shizhen, though he claims he was the first to make this distinction, since “in Tang and Song bencao bugs and fish were not disambiguated [chong yu bufen],” and he introduces a section covering “[creatures] with scales [linchong]), including dragons, snakes, fish, and fish without scales.”2 Although he places dragons in this new category, he says in his chapter on insects that “even though chong are small creatures and cannot be grouped together with creatures such as lin, phoenix, tortoise, and dragon, … still all these wrigglers have some numinous potential.”3 Numinous things (lingwu) such as dragons and snakes and animals living in the waters, “even though they are different kinds, they are interrelated through their changes and transformations. The fact is their substance differs while their resonances are identical.”4 Though chong can mean simply “creature,” if it refers to a category other than “bug,” it is usually modified, such as “creatures with scales” (linchong) or “creatures with shells” (jiechong). When the word chong appears in the Systematic Compendium by itself, it invariably means “bug.” Hundreds of the medicines in the Systematic Compendium are said to be able to “kill chong” (shachong), by which Li certainly means insects, bugs, and worms that invade the body. These chong did share properties, transformations, and resonances (gan) with other small creatures that wiggle or slither, belying traditional materia medica categories that grouped them together. But all of these are distinct from fowls, mammals, and humans. Even though dragons were the chief of creatures with scales, reclassifying them into a new group did not entirely disentangle them from their prior status as bugs/worms, primarily because of their shared potential for transformation.
The mundanity and omnipresence of chong paradoxically hinted at the numinous power of dragons. In this way, chong were like chickens, which, though ubiquitous, could also pull away the screen that hides the unseen realm. Li tells us that chickens, while food for people, are also numinous creatures. Chickens would fly away from a household in which a magical poison (gu) was at work. If a chicken feather is burned, the wind will rise, wishes will come true, and evil will be warded off.5 Bugs, too, in their tininess and weirdness, pointed to something much larger. Chong, with or without scales, born from eggs or water or transformation, poisonous or nonpoisonous, were a glimpse into the numinous underpinnings of the mundane world.
Reconciling Information about Dragons
Records of dragon sightings taper off in histories and gazetteers in the late nineteenth century. The last sighting of a dragon listed in Draft History of the Qing (Qing shigao), for instance, was 1905 (the only one of that year), where the same text records at least seventy-seven prior dragon sightings since 1644.6 In the late nineteenth century, there were many requests to the throne for inscribed plaques to be placed in the temple of the dragon king. These plaques were a way of honoring and thanking the dragon for appearing and making it rain in response to the prayers and sacrifices of the locals. Records of these requests become relatively fewer in the 1890s.7 If dragons did indeed disappear from the historical records, there are some compelling explanations for this.
One could argue that in the literati appropriation of dragons as metaphor—“hidden dragon” meaning unsung talent, “real dragon” referring to the emperor, and a thousand more terms including the word “dragon” alluding to striving for or holding official power undermined its reality—the signified obscured the signifier. The fall of empire—the fact that China no longer had an emperor, the “true dragon”—coincided with the general period in which dragon sightings reported in gazetteers, newspapers, and semi-official histories diminished. With no “true dragon,” how could there be any other dragons?
Another explanation for the disappearance of dragons in China is the long-term success of those who adopted Jesuit notions that sought to undercut a qi-based worldview in favor of a more Christian-friendly Aristotelianism. This vision sees the gradual acceptance, over many years, of what would become meteorology. The scientific principles undergirding meteorology did not become widespread until the late nineteenth century, when the translation of Western meteorological books, such as the influential Meteorology from the Encyclopedia Britannica (Cehou congtan, 1877), became more common. In the early twentieth century, when they were reflected in and propagated by modern textbooks such as Illustrated Character Lessons from Chengzhong Elementary School (Chengzhong Mengxuetang zike tushuo, 1901), secular understandings of weather gained widespread recognition.8
It is also possible that dragons became dinosaurs. At some point after 1841, when Richard Owen coined the term “dinosaur,” or “fearsome lizard,” excavated fossilized skeletons in China of what previously would have been considered dragons were understood to be the remains of dinosaurs, whose modern Chinese name (konglong, lit., “fearsome dragons”), retains this connection. Perhaps when the concept of dinosaurs gained common currency in China, it became gauche to write of dragons. A similar possibility may be that with the popularization of the notion of evolution or with a growing sense that the modern world was a place without magic, dragons simply devolved into, or were subsumed by, snakes, bugs, alligators, and the other “animals with scales” (linchong), with which they had long been associated in discussions of natural history and in materia medica. Perhaps dragons devolved into the ubiquitous, but equally unseen, “nine dragon bug” (jiulongchong) that was the silver-bullet of late-Qing and republican vernacular medicine. Dragons were known to be able to transform into other animals. Perhaps they did it one final time.
To be clear, dragons did not disappear from the world altogether. People in China and Chinese communities still see dragons during storms, and temples to dragon kings still stand. But dragons were discussed less and less in the textual record. This is true not only of dragons but of dragon-like things: turtle demons, water spirits, snake demons, and all sorts of liminally supranatural or numinous creatures.
One more possibility to explain the disappearance of dragons from the textual record, and the idea I would like to pursue in this chapter, is that dragons disappear when they become fictional creatures, and they became fictional creatures only very late, when the texts that contained them became classed as fiction. Texts that modern literary scholars often refer to as “fiction”—brush notes (biji), amazing tales (chuanqi), anomalous accounts (zhiguai), and trivial talk (xiaoshuo)—were read, and likely written, for entertainment. These texts, however, were not considered by many readers to be entirely or even primarily fictional until the twentieth century.9 Entertainment literature lived somewhere between the represented world and the actual world, often explicitly stating that their claims were true facts based on empirical evidence, eyewitness accounts, or reliable gossip. But they also included stories that were constructed literary creations. If we look at dragons in these texts, we see that they were discussed just as they were in decidedly nonfictional texts like histories, almanacs, and materia medica. We also see how dragons were a category problem, as was the entertainment literature that discussed them.
Chinese dragons, though celestial, were decidedly animals—they did not speak, scheme, covet gold, or kidnap princesses as their Western counterparts did at times. Li Shizhen discusses varieties of dragon: long, jiao, diao, tuolong, shilongzi, qiulong, yinglong, quanlong, shanlongzi, tulong, and yanlong. A long does not correlate to Western “dragon,” in the same way that a tuolong was not an alligator, because tuolong had different medicinal properties, origins, and behaviors (they fly horizontally and capsize ships, for instance). Shilongzi does not correlate directly with skink; rather it was something like a small long. These other animals that were qualified long or jiao all shared some of the magical qualities of long, but were smaller, lesser, and more mundane.
Dragons were a category problem for everyone, but particularly for those who sought to set the natural historical record straight. The category in which Li Shizhen placed them—scaled creatures—listed nine kinds of dragon. Li cites Wang Fu in describing the dragon’s nine similarities to other animals: “the head of a camel, horns of a deer, eyes of a demon, ears of an ox, neck of a snake, the belly of a shen [giant clam whose exhalations form mirages of cities], the scales of a [golden] carp, claws of an eagle, and paws of a tiger.”10 Other kinds of dragons in the Bencao gangmu are described in detail, through analogue, but incompletely: “Diao are a variety of dragon—how could they have the body of a tortoise? … Jiaolong resemble snakes but have four feet,” and so on.11 Common knowledge also held that the dragon king had nine sons.12
Many texts were interested in determining dragons’ limitations and their precise location in the natural world. These investigations continued, or even intensified, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Could dragons die? What was their relationship to thunder? Why would they invade the human body? Epistemic and entertainment literature all weighed in. Dragons’ liminal, or hybrid, existence was not inherently strange; it was that dragons’ actions, at times, subverted the dominant paradigm. Were they god-like creatures that defied expectations about life and death, or were they animals that defied expectations of heaven? Authors were wrestling with empirical evidence (or second-hand empirical evidence) that did not conform to received knowledge. They were all contending with outlier accounts, with data points that did not fit known parameters. Brief accounts of anomalies, which derived entertainment value simply by the thought-content they conveyed, satisfied readers’ needs to add more data points to an underdetermined system.
The Question of Dragon Mortality
The patterns and paradigms of dragon bodies and behavior were well known but poorly understood. Li Shizhen summarizes what we know about dragons: they are the leaders of creatures with scales, the qi they exhale generates clouds, and they in turn may change into water. They are also able to change to fire.13 The dragon is a chimera of animals, with the ability to transform itself.
Some believed, however, that the transformations were not limitless. Li relied on unnamed xiaoshuo for some of his information about dragons, writing that he found in them evidence that dragons’ nature is rough and ferocious; they love to eat the meat of swallows, and they fear iron.
Therefore, Li says, those who pray for rain, an occasion in which one wants to curry favor with dragons, use swallow meat, and those who suffer from floods and want to repel dragons use iron. Li records all this information because “when a dragon’s bone is to be used as a drug, doctors should know [dragons’] dispositions.” Dragon bones, ground and administered with wine, had long been used in medical treatment. They were known to be good for treating invasion by spirits and demons. They eliminated accumulations of anger that impeded breathing. Dragon bones were useful for treating paralysis, nightmares, and night sweats. They were prescribed for incontinence and nocturnal emission and to consolidate the soul and support the essence and spirit.14 Moreover, dragons’ teeth treated bug-witchcraft poison (gudu—see chapter 5), relieved palpitations, pacified the soul, and moderated boldness.15
But where did these bones and teeth come from? Li writes that they could be found in mountain valleys in the Jin area in Liangzhou, Yizhong, and Bazhong and in caves in Taishan Mountain. But were they the detritus and slough of dragon transformation, or entire dragon remains? If the latter, that meant dragons could die.
Li and his sources were puzzled by the question of dragon mortality. In his entry on dragon bones and teeth he states, “All these items were shed [by living dragons]—they are not derived from dead dragons.” But he weighs the evidence and quotes Kou Zongshi [early twelfth century]: “Everyone says different things [about dragons], but in the end it is all speculation. There was once a skeleton unearthed from a cliff, complete with limbs and horns, but it is unknown whether it was slough or a deceased body [buzhi tuiye biye]. If it is said to be shed skin, it is a tangible object that cannot be seen [when they are] alive but only after they die. If it is said to be a transformation, then why is its form not transformed?”16 That is, why do we ever see the bones of a dragon? Li struggles not just with mortality but with visuality. He quotes five other sources that contradict each other, and after discussing them briefly, he concludes that “even among dragons, there are those who have died.”17 To see a dragon was to see a dead dragon, and like a fallen star or thunder, they were realized on earth as stone.
FIG. 10A. A page from the Systematic Compendium (Bencao gangmu) featuring a long (upper right corner) a tuolong dragon (upper left corner), and dragon bones (lower right corner). This is the Hu Chenglong engraved edition of 1596, only six copies of which are known to remain. Library of Congress.
FIG. 10B. A page from the Systematic Compendium (Bencao gangmu) opposite the images of dragons and dragon bones in fig. 10a, featuring various bugs from the chapter immediately preceding the chapter on dragons. Library of Congress.
Does “turning into stone” mean something fundamentally different in a culture in which transformation rather than creation was the dominant force of nature? In early modern China, such a transformation would likely have been less wonderous than the possibility of a dragon dying. Shen Gua tells of a county magistrate who determined that a stone dragon found while digging a well was a giant clam-dragon (shen) that had turned into stone, in the same category as the “stone-crab” and other minor dragons.18 Accounts about dragon mortality in Strange Stories from Liaozhai (1766), What the Master Would Not Discuss (Zibuyu, 1788), and Perceptions (Yuewei caotang biji, 1800) focus on the terrifying reality of dragons falling out of the sky.19 These dragons were clearly ailing, unable to fly back up into the sky, and often lay in plain sight in the mud for days. Sometimes flies would gather on them, suggesting injury and oncoming death. Inevitably, it would rain, either fortuitously or because of prayer, followed by a thunderbolt, after which the dragons were able to disappear into the sky.20
In these records, the dragon is acting sick, as if mortal. This is what makes the account anomalous—not that dragons are inherently strange or destructive, but as spiritual beings, they should not be subject to malady. Dan Minglun (1782–1853) writes that this is indeed strange behavior from a dragon, since dragons are usually strong and graceful. He reaffirms that dragons can fall out of the sky and says that observers were right to be afraid and shoot firearms to try to scare off the ailing creature. Some might read Dan’s commentary as an allegory for the fluctuations in peoples’ attitude toward fallen scholars who rise out of ignominy, but this conclusion ignores his other comments on dragon stories that, taken together, demonstrate that he was trying to puzzle out the nature of dragons. He Shouqi takes this account literally when he comments in 1823, “[If] dragons do not control clouds and thunder, how are they different from snakes and worms? As for hibernating dragons, from ancient times until the present, [everyone] has regarded them as spiritual creatures [shenwu].”21 If dragons were celestial creatures, how could they fall out of the sky? The Supplement to “Strange Stories from Liaozhai,” also includes accounts of fallen dragons: “A heavy rain was falling in Yishui, when suddenly a dragon that had no eyes dropped from the sky, barely breathing. On the order of the county magistrate, it was protected with eighty bamboo mats, though they proved insufficient to cover its entire body. People also made sacrifices to it. And every time its tail struck the ground, it sounded like clumps of earth falling.”22 This is the entire entry—scarcely worthy of being called a story. It is just a record of a thing that happened, and it was read as such, at least by some commentators. Feng Xisai (the Yutang commentary) wrote an appendix (fuji) to this record in 1824 in which he details an eyeless dragon falling out of the sky in 1794 in Guangzhou. The crash caused houses in the village to collapse. The dragon lay there, emitting a foul, fishy smell that filled the air.23 It was June, and locals tried to shield the dragon from the sun. They held a sacrificial ceremony to pray for rain. After a few days, there was a heavy thunderstorm, and the dragon rose into the sky and flew away, causing further damage to hundreds of houses.24
The appendix comment to the “Eyeless Dragon” piece is written in almost identical style to the entries in the “disasters and anomalies” section of the official histories. The official history of the Qing dynasty records twenty-four dragon sightings during the reign of Qianlong (though none in 1794), but gazetteers reported many more. The appendix here gives no hint of irony or humor. It simply states an actual event like the record to which it is appended.
Comments usually explain or try to decipher something in the record, as does another comment to this “Eyeless Dragon” piece, which focuses on why the dragon lost his eyes: “[As for] this visit by a perverse dragon (nielong) … heaven took its eyes. [It is like] those who have eyes [yet] cannot distinguish right from wrong. This, then, is why [it was] punished.”25 Although the commentator may be employing a metaphor for a scholar being punished by the emperor and then rising again, he seeks to explain how a dragon might lose its eyes and fall from the sky. These comments do not point out the artistry of the author; they seek only to explore or explain the facts of the matter.
Xie Zhaozhe and Ji Yun also record the strange event of dragons falling out of the sky. Xie includes his account among thirteen other entries on dragons in a chapter devoted to animals.26 Among these entries is one about a dragon who, on a summer morning in 1598, fell from the sky after mating in Jurong. People came from miles around to see it, and after three days, “wind and thunder picked it up,” and it flew off.27 Xie does not question or comment on this account, but presumably he recorded it as evidence that, like other animals, dragons mate and reproduce, can be injured, and perhaps can die.
Whether these divine creatures suffered the limits of mortality, and how one could ever know, was a debate that continued into the nineteenth century. Ji Yun attempts to explain why a dragon fell out of the sky in 1796 north of Caochuan, destroying over a square kilometer of grain in the field with its wriggling and stomping. He concludes that there are two kinds of rain: gentle rain, sent by heaven, and fierce wind and thunderstorms that pass quickly, caused by dragons. Ji writes that both phenomena need to be comprehended together to account for the variability of rain.28 Yet this explanation indicates that there are meteorological forces independent of dragons. If dragons were mortal and not responsible for life-giving rain, perhaps they could not only die, but die out.
Licentious and Lazy, but Proper
Dragons were a category problem in both their phenomenological reality and their behavior. They were numinous creatures that responded to the call of thunder and had great power. But they were also wild beasts that acted as such. How then did curious readers reconcile this beastly behavior with their responsiveness to ritual propriety? It was known that dragons frequently caused floods or neglected to provide relief during droughts, but this was because “dragons are, by nature, extremely lazy.”29 But they could be roused to action when people sacrificed to them at the local temple to the dragon king or threw iron or clay dragons into caves or wells where dragons were hiding.30 These complicated and contradictory behaviors were all encompassed by the concept of a numinous animal (lingwu). Ling can refer to that which animates bodies, a “vital principle,” or to a sacred or spiritual power, or it to both, reflecting the potency of the disembodied world. In the following harrowing, violent account, Ji Yun wondered whether dragons were vicious beasts:
Cattle, sheep, and horses may sometimes give birth to creatures with unicorn horns, or mate with dragons and serpents, but [the offspring] are not true unicorns. The same is true for women who claim to have mated with supernatural beings. However, in the household of the Ma family, there was a tenant farmer who was nearly sixty years old. One day, while he was walking alone in the rain, thunder and lightning obscured his vision, and a dragon claw pressed down on his hat. Thinking that he was about to be punished by heaven, he trembled in fear and fell to the ground. He felt the dragon tear his pants, thinking that it was removing his clothes before executing him. But to his surprise, the dragon turned him over and began to violate him. Whenever he tried to move or turn away, the dragon would roar angrily and grind its teeth against his head. Fearing that he would be devoured, he lay still and did not dare to move. After a minute or two, there was a loud thunderclap, and the dragon disappeared. He groaned and moaned on the embankment, covered in foul-smelling saliva. Fortunately, his son came with an umbrella to fetch him home. At first, he kept the incident hidden, but his wounds worsened, so he had to seek medical treatment and reveal the truth.31
The humanity of this story makes it seem real, with the victim trying to hide the facts of an assault out of a feeling of shame, and the information about dragons’ essential lasciviousness and their status as wild beasts circulating only after the victim seeks help from a doctor.
Collections of texts, whether catalogued as “anomalous accounts” or “local histories,” gathered informational texts, often contradictory, and put them in conversation with each other, sometimes on facing pages. Liaozhai is one text that does this, but unlike Li Shizhen, who feels the need to assess which was correct and to reconcile contradictions, Pu Songling deals in juxtaposition. The textual history of Liaozhai makes it difficult to know if it was Pu or his editors who created the curious entries on dragons, but the collection’s structure hints at these “debates.” In a popular nineteenth-century annotated edition, under one heading there are three items about dragons.32 The first is about a fallen dragon and the second about a dragon that transforms from a snake. The last account finds a woman working in the fields. Dust blows into her eye, causing discomfort. On inspection, it looks like her eye has a red line wiggling in it. Someone says this is a dormant dragon. She fears that this means that she will die, but three months later, there is heavy rain, along with a loud clap of thunder, and the dragon leaves through her eye socket, leaving no trace. To this account, Yuan Xuansi adds that he and others once saw a dragon grip a human head in its talons. Yet no one near had heard of any decapitations.33 He Shouqi remarks, “As for dragons hibernating in the eye, this has happened since ancient times. It can truly be called a numinous creature.” Whether dragons were vicious beasts or agents of retribution was unclear, even in accounts of anomalies.
Dragons were often described as lazy and lascivious, yet they also observed ritual and obeyed heaven’s commands. Among the expressions of numinosity was adherence to ritual propriety. It seemed that dragons were wild beasts but could be subdued by invoking Confucian mores. Commissioner Qu, of Wu- ling County, Shandong, was reading in his study during a heavy rain when he caught sight of a little creature, bright as a firefly, wriggling its way across his scroll, scorching the paper as it went and leaving a trail behind it, like a slug.34 Qu figured that it must be a dragon and, lifting the scroll in both hands, carried it outside. He stood in the doorway for some time holding it solemnly aloft, but the creature coiled in on itself like a caterpillar and refused to budge. Wondering if he had offended the little dragon, Qu donned full official attire, made a deep bow, and carried it once more to the door, where it took off into the air, its body now huge, whirring and emitting a great stream of light. It flew off into the clouds, with a sound just like a thunderbolt, and disappeared.35 Dan Minglun states simply, “Everyone [knows] ritual [should be] performed with sincerity and respect. Dragons, also, follow and accept [ritual] conduct.”36 Dragons inhabit the material realm but communicate with the numinous one.
When Xie Zhaozhe accompanied his uncle on a 1589 diplomatic mission to the Ryukyu Islands, they encountered a furious storm with thunder, lightning, rain, and hail all at once. Three dragons appeared at the front and rear of the ship, their whiskers pulling the sea water up into the clouds. Everybody panicked, but an elder said that the dragons were drawn to the ship because it carried the emperor’s edict. The envoy then wrote a large sign saying, “Court dismissed!” He showed it to the dragons, which complied and withdrew from sight. Xie writes, “The authority of the son of heaven over the manifold spirits is a principle about which there can be no doubt. But if I had not witnessed this [event] personally, I would not have believed it.”37
Xie explains the dragons’ behavior as following a cosmic pattern in which the authority of heaven and the son of heaven align. He is surprised that dragons are not unique in this regard—they are among those beings that abide by a heavenly principle, animals of a higher order that understand ritual propriety.38 Obedience to ritual propriety may have seemed especially strange to those who recorded these events, because it was well known that dragons were extremely licentious creatures. Xie discusses dragons as mating frequently with all kinds of animals, producing hybrid breeds of dragons that share features of both parents.39 “When they mate with a cow, then a lin [unicorn] is born, when they mate with a pig, an elephant is born, when they mate with a horse, a dragon-horse [longma] is born.”40 Xie goes on to discuss how when a dragon sees a woman, it will want to copulate with her. In Lingnan, he says, locals bring rain by exploiting dragons’ lasciviousness. They place a young woman out in the open as bait, and when a dragon descends, they hide her, and the dragon retreats, followed by rain. Some, predictably, wondered what would happen if a dragon and a woman were to conceive. Pu Songling tells of Ms. Li of Xing village, who in 1682 suddenly went into labor. For a day and a half, she was unable to give birth, whereupon a dragon head appeared but then quickly withdrew. Old woman Wang came and burned incense to Yu, the flood queller, and incanted spells. Soon after, the placenta fell out, followed by several scales, each as large as a wine cup. Finally, a baby girl was born, her flesh so sparkling and crystal clear that all her internal organs could be counted.41
Translucency, even transparency, was a mark of beauty, like the luminescence thought to be found in milky-white jade. Another account features a pair of white birds thought to be extraordinarily rare and beautiful. They “had markings around their eyes like black peppercorns. Then they spread their wings, revealing the transparent flesh of their sides, and several of the vital organs inside them.”42 Draft History of the Qing records that a chicken gave birth to transparent eggs. After a few days, the eggs hatched, and five-colored chicks flew away, another instance of transparency as a marker of beauty and special ability.43
By the end of the nineteenth century, doubts began to arise, not about the existence of dragons but about their spiritual nature. A Shenbao article of 1877 typifies this attempt to reclassify dragons simply as animals:
The dragon is nothing more than the leader of aquatic creatures [shuizu zhi chang].… These creatures are simply stupid things, just like flood dragons and snakes.… Their bones and teeth can be used as medicine, and their saliva can be used as incense. These are all common in the world. Why then did earlier generations regard them as numinous creatures? If they are numinous creatures, they should not easily reveal themselves to people.44
Although the author dismisses beliefs that dragons have a numinous quality or special powers, the many recorded sightings of dragons were accepted as proof of their existence. That one could buy pieces of dragons in any market in turn testified to dragons’ mortality and mundanity.
Dragons, Bugs, and Medicine
The logic behind using dragon parts as medicine, as with many medicines, employed literary logic, figurative reasoning, and geographic and elemental correspondences.45 Dragons were thought to be creatures of the east (ocean), and therefore their bones, horns, and teeth were good for treating diseases of the liver, an organ thought to correlate to the east. The liver was the seat of the hun-soul, thus, when “the hun-soul roams and is not fixed, it can be cured with dragon teeth,” based on this resonance.46 Dragon bones were also useful for treating illnesses related to death and the demonic, such as flying corpse (feishi) qi, demon attachment-illness (guizhu), and gu poison (see chapter 5)—which spoke to the persistence of the notion that dragons were numinous and therefore effective in curing the demonic.47
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the vernacular medical community witnessed a popular panacea drug known as “the foreign bug” (yangchong) or “nine dragons bug” (jiulongchong), likely referring to the nine chimeric sons of the dragon.48 It seems to have been mentioned for the first time in Long Bo’s work Investigation of Medicinal Properties (Yaoxing kao), published in 1795 and discussed at length in Supplement to the Systematic Compendium of 1803 and in a number of medical manuscripts held in the Berlin collection, some dedicated exclusively to it.49 Zhao Xuemin writes that “nine dragons bug” originated abroad and was first introduced to China at the end of the Ming dynasty.50 Berlin manuscripts repeat this information, followed by lengthy descriptions of the abilities of the “foreign bug” to nourish yin and supplement yang, to eliminate evil and to end sweating, as well as to regenerate blood and strengthen sinews and muscles.
Three manuscripts contain over a hundred medical recipes each, with the nine dragons bug as the primary or only ingredient in each, beneficial in maintaining health and nourishing life as well as being effective in the treatment of countless illnesses.51 The “nine dragons bug” was popular in folk medicine but received no recognition in orthodox Chinese medical treatises. In the Republican era (1911–49), this enigmatic medicinal seems to have diminished in prominence, as did dragon bones and teeth, until all disappeared from folk medicine by the middle of the twentieth century.52
Bones and teeth weren’t the only dragon products on the marketplace, however. The Systematic Compendium discusses the medical properties of nine kinds of dragon. These mostly describe what we now know as alligators, pangolins, water monitors, and other large lizards. Two marketplace examples from versions of the famous painting Along the River during the Qingming Festival (Qingming shanghe tu) include such smaller dragons hanging in the doorway of medicine shops. In one, the shop’s sign reads, “Authentic Materia Medica” (Daodi Yaocai). Substantiating the claim of authenticity, strings of fresh and dried plants hang from the shop’s walls—as does a tuolong, a kind of small dragon. According to Li Shizhen:
The physical appearance of tuo is that of dragons.… The sound of their voices is extremely terrifying. Those reaching a length of one zhang can spit out qi generating clouds and rain. That is, they belong to the group of dragons.… Tuolong can fly above the ground, but they cannot rise high.… Nowadays, one often sees them hanging in apothecary shops; it is said that they can keep away moths. This, too, is based on the idea that as a medication they kill bugs.53
Dragon traces, and minor dragons, were products of the marketplace—commonplace things that expelled bugs.
Miscellaneous Records [from the Time] of Emperor Ming (Minghuang zalu), records a case in which an imperial gatekeeper who had just returned from Guangdong, in the south, was told by Doctor Zhou Gu of the Imperial Hospital that there was a dragon in his abdomen. The emperor was surprised to hear this and asked the officer if he was feeling any discomfort. The officer reported that after drinking from a mountain stream, he began to feel something in his abdomen like a stone. Doctor Zhou prescribed for him liquified xionghuang (realgar).54 Shortly after taking the decoction, the officer vomited out a small thing with scales, several cun long—the dragon mentioned by the doctor. Li Shizhen points out that from this case, we can conclude positively xionghuang’s function of killing insects and noxious agents, as attested to by many other sources he quotes. That is, when they hibernate in the body, dragons are no different from bugs.55 Elsewhere, Li writes that if chong die from the fumes of heated realgar, you know it is genuine.56 This is also why in “white snake stories” (baishe zhuan), drinking wine with realgar pains Madam White Snake and ultimately forces her to reveal her true form as a snake demon.57 Ever since the lexicon Wings of the Ready Guide (Erya yi) by Luo Yuan (1136–84), dragons were classed as the leading figure among creatures with scales, insects, and worms. But there was no clear understanding of whether dragons were good or bad, and their association with bugs (chong), which were both medicine and pathogen, did not clarify anything. In late imperial vernacular literature, chong, including dragons, were the solution almost as often as they were the problem.
The pharmakon of dragons was expanded by Supplement to Systematic Materia Medica (preface 1765), a further appendix to and critique of Li’s text.58 Zhao Xuemin culled much of his information from travel accounts and local gazetteers from distant reaches of the empire, including the first detailed instructions in a Chinese text for smoking opium and a now famous account of cinchona bark (jinjilei) that served as a cure for malaria and an antidote to the effects of wine. Many of the added drugs came from foreign countries, such as “protects-from-fright” stone from Spain, and “wonderfully effective stone” from somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. Among his several emendations was a set of notes on parts of the dragon that Li had missed: dragon’s saliva and semen longxie that solidified into chunks patterned with a spiral design like elephants’ ivory. One could distinguish real dragon ejaculate from fake by placing a small bit in boiling water, where it would immediately emit a cloud of mist, which would then encircle the hair of any woman standing nearby—“possibly due to the dragon’s lustful nature.”59 It is somewhat surprising that Li Shizhen did not include dragon saliva in his Bencao gangmu, since it appeared in xiaoshuo that he drew upon heavily.60 As Li had done for many other drugs, Zhao noted ways to tell the real spit (a solid thing) from the fake in the marketplace, especially important because many specimens came from faraway places like Africa, Spain, Ceylon, Mogadishu, Sri Lanka, Lhasa, and Hormuz.
Zhao was also concerned with the veracity of claims of dragon semen, particularly regarding the belief that dragon semen fell from the sky when dragons encountered a woman.61 Consistent with sympathetic logic, dragon semen was good for strengthening the uterus and as an aphrodisiac. But this potency is confounding, Zhao writes. He says a friend had seen pieces of dragon’s (hardened) blood the size of chess pieces, smooth and reflective and cool to the touch, like ice. He writes that dragons are supposed to be pure yang, which was puzzling to him because their blood was uniquely cold, and he admits that “it’s unclear what dragon excretion is—whether it’s saliva, blood, semen, or urine. These accounts are preserved here awaiting further verification.”62
When asked why he would bother wasting time trying to go beyond the Systematic Compendium in making a supplement to it, Zhao replied, “With the passage of time, species and categories become more numerous. Even ordinary people are curious about extraordinary things [sushang haoqi], so surely [I should] collect [and describe] them in all their utmost complexity.…These then are new sorts and varieties. If I do not describe them, whoever will get to know them?”63
Whether publications like the Dianshizhai Pictorial were primarily news or entertainment, they presented and interrogated information about the natural world and reflected a commercial desire to learn more about them. Newspapers and secondary schools in Shanghai and other large cities increasingly taught about science and technological advances.64 But curious impulses and new information also faced backlashes at times, as seen in some defenses of dragons in the face of new Western knowledge:
Westerners, known for their precision and rigorous reasoning, deny the existence of dragons.… Recently, a Western newspaper reported that a steamship traveling off the southern coast of Africa suddenly saw tumultuous waves with scales and claws angrily poking out. At first, it was thought to be a large fish, but as they approached, both the head and tail were revealed, rising more than twenty feet above the water. They estimated that the body was no less than a hundred feet long. Thus, Westerners, who claim there is no such thing, want to confirm the truth. It’s said they will not believe without evidence. People in China understand that dragons are unpredictable, they move freely above and below, wind and clouds protect their bodies, and thunder and rain amplify their powers. They symbolize supreme dignity, so how could they be compared to ordinary things we usually see? The saying, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do” does not necessarily mean that we must change to the Roman way.65
FIG. 11. An article, “Westerners See Dragons” (Xiren jian long) and image from Dianshizhai Pictorial, 1886. Bavarian State Libraries.
Dragon Mirage
To think about the problem of understanding a creature that was inherently transformative, consider the shen. A shen was a type of flood dragon that could create mirages floating over the sea. They are mentioned in History of the Former Han and other ancient texts and were discussed and debated until the twentieth century. The qi of the shen was thought to produce vaporous offshore cities, castles, and pavilions called shenlou “shen buildings,” a word we now translate as “mirage.” These were also known as “shen qi buildings” or shen cities in the sea (haishi shenlou).66 Shen Gua either suspected that these mirages were independent phenomena or doubted that the animals producing these cities were confined to the sea, writing, “In the sea near Dengzhou, there is often cloud qi that resembles palaces, towers, city walls, people, carriages and horses, and ceremonial caps and gowns, all vividly visible. These are called ‘cities in the sea.’ Some say they are the transformations of ‘flood dragon and shen [jiaoshen] qi,’ but this is doubtful.”67 Ouyang Wenzhong observed similar phenomena far inland, and the locals there also called it “cities in the sea” (haishi). Xie Zhaozhe reiterates the common saying, “Dragons follow flood dragons [jiao] and shen in their transformations.”68 Li Shizhen appends shen to the end of his entry on flood dragons, describing them as looking like a large snake with dragon horns and a red mane. They are “capable of emitting qi forming shapes of cities with inner and outer walls and tall buildings that are visible when it is going to rain. They are called shen buildings and sea cities.” Xie argues that it is not the qi from shen that creates the towers and terraces over the sea in Dingzhou, but the qi of the sea itself. “In general, the essence of seawater [haishui zhi jing] can form shapes when it condenses and light when it disperses. All things in the sea, when their qi becomes old, can change, and transform, not just the shen.” Ji Yun, writing another century and a half later, tried to puzzle out why the city of his ancestors, Jingcheng, was still vaguely discernable as a shadow in the mist, “with towers and battlements that are a kind of shen qi [leihu shenqi].” Ji writes that many books have recorded this phenomenon but that its reason was still unknown. He postulates, that “everything that has a form must have essence and qi, and where the soil is thick, the vital energy of the earth gathers, just as humans have souls.” He explains that the city of his ancestors stood for a thousand years, soaking the ground with vital energy all that time, which then takes many years to disperse. Just as ghosts retain the shape of their human selves, so this image emanates after the city’s destruction. Yet not all ancient cities manifest their form like Jingcheng. Ji asks, “What is the reason for this? When a person dies, sometimes there is a ghost, sometimes there is no ghost. And when a ghost exists, sometimes it is seen, sometimes it is not. It is just like that.”69
It was difficult to delimit the transformations of the world. Dragons, often seen only obscurely, could not only transform but produce illusions. Li Shizhen was keen to disambiguate between two animals that were both called shen. One was a type of flood dragon that created images of cities, complete with horses, carts, and people bustling about, and the other was an enormous clam that produced pearls that emitted light. Shen needed explanation, and reclassification.
Consistent with other entries, Li gathers claims about shen from earlier texts, all of which discuss various mechanisms in which the progeny of snakes and pheasants transform into shen transforming after their eggs lie in the soil for hundreds of years, responding to thunder, and so on. Li writes, “Seen from these various reports, flood dragons and shen belong to the same group. They may be born [from eggs], and they may be the result of transformation.” Shen were like bugs in that they could be “born” from water, eggs, or transformation.70
Shen were real creatures that produced mirages, which were real phenomena made of real qi that depicted images of cities that may or may not have had substance. Liaozhai wrestles with the simultaneous phenomenological reality and unreality of shenlou: “The Mountain City of Mount Huan is acknowledged to be one of the wonders of my home district, even though many a year goes by when it is not seen at all.” He goes on to describe how a friend witnessed, on the mountainside opposite their drinking party, a pagoda. There was no monastery in that vicinity. Subsequently, a host of palaces and halls sprang into view, and it dawned on them that this was the mountain city of Mount Huan. High walls and battlements became visible, and within the walls, they could distinguish countless storied buildings and residential districts, with people moving about, some hurrying about, others leaning and standing in a variety of postures. Then suddenly, a great wind arose, the air grew thick with dust, and the city could scarcely be seen any longer. By and by, the wind subsided, the air cleared, and the city vanished.71
Pu Songling, as Historian of the Strange does not provide interpretative comments on this account, as there is no moral to the story the reader might miss.72 He rarely weighs in on curious accounts of real things. But in a more fully fleshed-out story, “Rakshas and the City in the Sea” (Luosha haishi), cities made by shen are not mirages but actual cities in the sea, lost paradises in which talented scholars are recognized for their contributions but from which the protagonist needs to escape, having loved ones back in the human realm. Lamenting the choice between a scholar’s paradise and a world of mundane disappointment, Pu discusses the deceptions and indignities of the world and concludes, “Alas! If one wants to achieve fame, wealth, and honor, he should look for it in the shen buildings and cities in the sea!” Cities in the sea are both the perfect place and no place. Mirages are real things that people experience and overly perfect things that call into question the quotidian world. In Liaozhai, the mirage is a real phenomenon, but it contains a fantasy. A shen produces a shenlou—a dragon produces a mirage.
Whether or not readers generally understood shen to be a type of dragon, most often the shen was depicted as a large clam-type creature producing a mirage represented with swirls and clouds. Though the notion of a city on the sea—one that seemed alive, beautiful, tranquil, and elusive—was a metaphor pregnant with meaning for many authors of entertainment literature, it was also considered by many to be a reality they longed to see. In 1890, Dianshizhai huabao, published an entry:
It is traditionally said that the shen city [mirage creature] exists in the mud, with its vapor and qi forming buildings and towers. These can occasionally be seen over rivers and seas, but not frequently. Near the sea in Ningbo, there’s a place called Xiepu, where recently, at dawn, the mirage has been appearing frequently with buildings, pavilions, people, and their unpredictable transformations and illusions [bianhuan wuchang]. One day at dawn, someone saw a beautiful woman with bright eyes and white teeth weaving in a high tower, with two other women and a dozen children playing and running around.… These kinds of illusions, with their miraculous transformations—if someone skilled in photography were to take their equipment there and capture these scenes one by one, it would certainly make a truly natural landscape picture! How fortunate one would be to personally witness such an extraordinary sight!73
The wish for a photograph to validate this illusion, inscribed on a published line drawing, suggests a longing for veracity. This particular mirage was a traditional male fantasy, with beautiful women spinning and children playing. The print does not suggest mirage or dream (as would be indicated by swirly lines to clue the reader that this is an illusion), but the excitement on the faces and in the body language of the male onlookers reinforces the text’s desire for proof that this kind of traditional utopia can really exist. What is captured in this image is the fervent excitement for the past and the fear that its reality, like the minor dragon that produced it, might be ineffable, illusory. It also encapsulated the paradox of studying dragons, rarely seen creatures that were emblems of traditional culture and glory and which could produce mirages. The notion of capturing this mirage of a dragon on film reflects a tension implicit in anomalous accounts, Systematic Compendium, and other texts. Readers were transfixed by the fantastic, fascinated by realism, convinced by the arguments, understanding its elusiveness, but longing for proof of the unseen.
FIG. 12. A shen producing a mirage in Night Parade of One Hundred Demons: A Sequel (Hyakki Yagyō Shūi) by Toriyama Sekien, 1712–88 (Japan). Toriyama quotes Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian: “Shenqi take the form of buildings and towers.” He explains further, “The shen is a giant clam. Exhaling its qi upon the sea, it generates the image of a multi-storied city. This phenomenon is called shenqi buildings. It is also known as ‘city on the sea.’” Courtesy Waseda University Libraries. See also figure 1.