{"id":2325,"date":"2012-01-18T02:22:03","date_gmt":"2012-01-18T07:22:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.froginawell.net\/china\/?p=2325"},"modified":"2014-08-30T13:32:59","modified_gmt":"2014-08-30T13:32:59","slug":"dragons-in-the-news-is-a-long-a-dragon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/2012\/01\/dragons-in-the-news-is-a-long-a-dragon\/","title":{"rendered":"Dragons in the News: Is a Long a Dragon?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Year of the Dragon is upon us \u2013 should we be afraid?<\/p>\n

Around the English speaking world, magazine covers and editorial writers rely on the dragon as a colorful shorthand for “China”:\u00a0 \u201cthe dragon is coming,\u201d the \u201cdragon is waking,\u201d or\u00a0 \u201cthe eagle and the dragon.\u201d In the PRC, Xinhua, the official news agency, reports \u201cYear of Dragon Stamp Arouses Debate among Public<\/a>.\u201d One writer complained: \u201cThe moment I saw the design of the dragon stamp on newspaper, I was almost scared to death.\u201d<\/p>\n

Relax. We will not need a St. George the Dragon Slayer to come to our rescue. The Chinese long<\/em> is a different creature from a dragon.<\/p>\n

Wolfram Eberhard reassures us that in \u201csharp contrast to Western ideas on this subject, the Chinese dragon is a good natured and benign creature: a symbol of natural male vigor and fertility,\u201d a primordial representative of the yang <\/em>side of things.\u00a0

2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Dragons come in all shapes and sizes, and they have the handy ability to expand to fill up all space or shrink as small as a silkworm. For starters there are \u201cheavenly dragons (tian long<\/em>),\u201d \u201cspirit dragons (shen long<\/em>),\u201d earth-dragons (di long<\/em>),\u201d \u201cdragons which guard treasure (fu-cang long<\/em>),\u201d and Flying Dragons (feilong<\/em>). And this is before we even get to the other dragon-like creatures, such as the qilin<\/em>, fenghuang<\/em>, and pixie<\/em>. (If you want to know what a qilin<\/em> looks like, you\u2019ll find one on a bottle of Kirin Beer, since \u201ckirin\u201d is the Japanese pronunciation of qilin<\/em>).<\/p>\n

So \u201cdragon\u201d isn\u2019t a great translation for the Chinese long. <\/em>\u201cA long <\/em>is a long<\/em>,\u201d says Thorsten Pattberg, a scholar at Peking University\u2019s Institute of World Literature, in a good humored column with a serious point in China Daily<\/em> (January 16, 2012) (here<\/a>).\u00a0 He says it\u2019s \u201cmaybe even a tianlong<\/em>, but please, please do not use \u2018dragon.\u2019 That kind of linguistic imperialism happened to your unique Sichuan xiongmao <\/em>once, remember? Now it’s a Western \u2018panda.\u2019\u201d If Westerners used the correct word, long<\/em>, it would remind them that they are facing something culturally new,\u201d not a \u201cdragon.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Pattberg objects that \u201cWestern caricaturists love to depict China as the European-style dragon: huge and red (of course), clumsy and pear-bodied, fierce, with tiny wings and a small flame,\u201d but the truth is that the \u201cChinese long <\/em>are majestic, divine creatures, snake-bodied … and embody happiness, wisdom and virtue. In the West, on the other hand, it’s a virtue to slay the dragon for a happy ending.\u201d<\/p>\n

From the Han dynasty onward, the dragon naturally came to be the symbol of the Emperor. The mother of the founder of the Han dynasty knew that great things were in store when a dragon appeared over her head and she then became pregnant with him.<\/p>\n

But even in China, you\u2019d better not mess with dragons. Dragon spittle was powerful stuff. A girl servant of a Zhou dynasty king was made pregnant by dragon spittle (or at least that\u2019s what she told her father).\u00a0 This early form of sperm donation produced Baosi, who became the concubine of King You. He doted on her so madly that he would light the beacons which warned of oncoming barbarians and make her laugh when his armies came running. After a few times, the vassals stopped falling for the joke, and when the barbarians then did show up, they overthrew the Western Zhou dynasty.<\/p>\n

Another hoary tale is that an artist once painted four flying dragons on the wall of a temple but didn\u2019t put the pupils in their eyes \u2013 \u201cthey will fly away if I do,\u201d he explained. But the crowd insisted. Of course, he gave in, but when he had finished the eyes on the first two dragons, they came to life, brought down mighty crashes of thunder, and flew off.<\/p>\n

Dragons appear in Chinese bathrooms, or at least their heads do: longtou <\/em>(dragon head) means \u201cfaucet.\u201d Don\u2019t get your hopes up if you\u2019re offered a \u201cdragon shrimp,\u201d though, since a longxia<\/em> is just a lobster.<\/p>\n

Things get messy when Westerners use the Chinese dragon. One of the more interesting is Dragon Lady. In the 1930s, a newspaper syndicate commissioned Milton Caniff to produce a topical comic strip about the Orient. He came up with \u201cTerry and the Pirates,\u201d starring a young American adventurer who run up against a number of villains. Caniff recalled that he wanted an \u201cOriental villain who was not a Fu Manchu.\u201d He came up with the Dragon Lady, a Eurasian temptress, since \u201cputting it into a woman made it ten times more interesting, an irresistible combination, mean and beautiful.\u201d3<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 Many strong women were called Dragon Ladies, but the most surprising use of the term was for the CIA\u2019s Lockheed U-2 spy-plane, nicknamed the \u201cDragon Lady<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

I can certainly understand Pattberg’s objection. No self respecting Chinese long<\/em> would want to hang out with rough, low life Western dragons who go around accosting virgins or let themselves be associated with the \u201cGrand Dragons\u201d of the Ku Klux Klan. But it\u2019s too late. We’re stuck with “Chinese Dragon.”<\/p>\n

For a listing of examples showing that “Dragon” has gone native, see the mesmerizing website TVTropes<\/em>, which catalogues \u201cdevices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations.\u201d There are pages on \u201cThe Dragon\u201d (here<\/a>) and \u201cTiger versus Dragon,\u201d (here<\/a>) which clearly are good Chinese long<\/em>.<\/p>\n

If that doesn’t convince you, ask\u00a0 yourself if “Dragon Dance” could really work as “Long Dance”\u00a0 or if \u201cDragon Boat Festival\u201d would work as \u201cLong Boat Festival.\u201d<\/p>\n

UPDATE: The University of Southern California US-China Institute website has its annual collection of Chinese New Year stamps<\/a> from all over the world, including one fascinating one from Tientsin in 1878.\u00a0 Well worth a look.<\/p>\n

  1. Wolfram Eberhard, A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols: Hidden Symbols in Chinese Life and Thought <\/em>(London; New York: Routledge, 1986), pp. 83-86 ↩<\/a><\/p><\/li>

  2. Edward Shaugnessy, China: Empire and Civilization<\/a> (Oxford 2000) p. 6.  ↩<\/a><\/p><\/li>

  3. Robert C. Harvey, Milton Caniff: Conversations <\/em>(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002.)  ↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The Year of the Dragon is upon us \u2013 should we be afraid? Around the English speaking world, magazine covers and editorial writers rely on the dragon as a colorful shorthand for “China”:\u00a0 \u201cthe dragon is coming,\u201d the \u201cdragon is waking,\u201d or\u00a0 \u201cthe eagle and the dragon.\u201d In the PRC, Xinhua, the official news agency,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[165,111,116,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-culture","category-east-vs-west","category-english"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9yoH3-Bv","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2325"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2325\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4562,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2325\/revisions\/4562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}