Chinese Dragon associated with the Dragon Boat Festival

Chinese Dragon

Dragons have a long association with Chinese history and culture. Unlike the dragons in European mythology which are depicted as standing on four legs and supposed to be evil and unholy, Asian dragons are regarded as wholesome and benevolent, and thus worthy of veneration, not slaying. In Chinese tradition, dragons are symbolic of good fortune. In China, the Imperial Dragon ("Lung" in Chinese), is regarded as the primary of four beneficent spiritual animals, the other three being the phoenix, the unicorn and the tortoise.

In primitive days, the Chinese people considered their Emperors to be human embodiments of "The Imperial Dragon" or the "Son of Heaven". As if to support this belief, the Chinese Emperors used to sit on a dragon throne, ride in a dragon boat and sleep in a dragon bed. Hsi, the first emperor of China, was said to have a dragon's tail. Shen Nung, his successor was supposed to have been fathered by a dragon. Even the commoners here liked to refer to themselves as "dragons", drawing a parallel between their strength and the power and vitality of the dragon. Even today, many Chinese people often use the term "Descendants of the Dragon" as a sign of their ethnic identity. To them, the dragon stands for the masculine principle or "yang" in the Chinese ideology of harmony.

The Chinese dragon has long been a potent symbol of auspicious power in Chinese folklore and art. In ancient days, it was drawn as having the head of a horse, the body of a snake, wings of a bird and four or five legs. If it was an Imperial Dragon, it was shown as having five claws on each foot; otherwise it would only be four claws. In modern times, the Chinese dragon (or Oriental dragon) is portrayed as a long, scaled, snake-like creature with four legs - each of them having five claws.

In China dragons are known as "Lung" and supposed to be the controllers of the rain, the Monsoon winds, the clouds and the places of the Gods. As per Chinese culture, there are four main kinds of Lung - The Celestial Dragon ("Tien-lung", who supposedly protects the places of the Gods), the Spiritual Dragon ("Shen-Lung", who is said to control the wind and the rain), the Earth Dragon ("Ti-Lung", believed to be the controller of rivers and water bodies on the Earth) and the Underworld Dragon ("Fut's-Lung", thought to be the guardian of precious metals and gems).

Chinese mythology counts at least five Sea-dragon Kings as part of the Chinese pantheon. These divine immortals were later adopted by Chinese emperors as the imperial emblem and thus the dragon evolved to become a symbol of power, wealth and prosperity.

The tradition of dragon boat racing during the annual Chinese Dragon Boat Festival is believed by many to have started as a way to appease the "Shen-Lung", the benevolent spirit of the wind and the rain. The ancient Chinese, most of whom were involved in agriculture and highly dependent on the weather for their livelihood, worshipped the dragon during the Summer Solstice with requests for a balanced rainfall. The boat festival has always been held during the same period, after the spring planting, when people had time to relax and needed rain for their crops. The race of the dragon-shaped boats during this festival represented a real dragon fight in the heavens, and was meant to appease the Dragon deity to avert misfortune and calamity and bring in rainfall to the earth which is always necessary for the fertility of the crops and thus ensure the prosperity of the agrarian way of life. The Chinese believed that paying a homage to the River Dragon would protect them from its scourge.

The erudite Chinese scholar and poet Professor Wen Yiduo (1899 – 1946) once theorized that the "Duan Wu" celebrations were originally held to mark the birthday of the dragon, which according to a traditional Chinese belief, falls during the period of Summer Solstice (which is also the time of observance of the Dragon Boat Festival). He indicated that the close association of the festival with dragon may be due to the fact that two of the most important activities of the festival, dragon boat racing and eating zongzi, are related to dragon.