In spite of the fact that modern zoölogy has never included in the
pages of its textbooks descriptions and pictures of the dragon as a
creature of reality, yet there are men in China to-day who claim to
have seen these animals, some of which have been described very
accurately. The writer has had the pleasure of conversing with several
Chinese who assert that they have seen the dragon at close range. He
has also secured, at secondhand, information from others who are said
to have looked upon this most marvelous of creatures. All of the men
whom the writer interviewed were of sound mind and were accredited by
their acquaintances with being men of reliable character. There is no
reason to believe that any one of them were inebriate or under the
power of hallucination at the time they witnessed the creatures of
their description.
A teacher in a Tientsin school related that he once saw a dragon in his
native province, Shantung. The animal had been killed, so it was
believed, by the order of heaven, as a punishment for some misdeed, and
had fallen to the earth, where it lay as the center of attraction for
hundreds of people who came in crowds from that whole countryside. Its
appearance was identical with that of the popular pictures with which
we are familiar. A school servant, who was also a native of Shantung,
and whose home was near the sea, declared that he once saw a dragon. He
told the writer that it was about fifteen feet long and that it fell to
the earth during a severe rainstorm. It, too, attracted a large crowd
of spectators. Although this man was unable to give very satisfactory
details, yet his unusual earnestness and apparent sincerity were
convincing evidence that he had really seen a monster of a remarkable
type.
A third person, an elderly gentleman, who is a teacher of classics in
one of the schools of Nanking, informed the writer that when he was a
young man a dragon fell one night from the sky and lay for twenty-four
hours near his home. The country folk respectfully covered it with
matting, but he managed to raise the covering and saw its great cowlike
head, its four legs, and its scale-covered body. It was about fifty
feet long and blue in color. As in the other two cases, this dragon
disappeared from the earth during a heavy storm. It was generally
believed that it came to life again and was taken up into the heavens
upon a cloud, which formed beneath its body.
The artist who drew the picture of the cloud dragon recounted that,
during the thirty-fourth year of the Emperor Kuang Hsu, while he
himself was on his way to Peking to receive the seals of a district
magistrate, he came across a dragon lying upon the banks of the Yellow
River in Shantung province. It was blue in color and was several tens
of feet in length. The whole air was filled with a very offensive salt
sea odor, and out of respect for the creature, which was supposed to
have fallen from heaven, the crowd of people that stood around was
busily engaged in sprinkling water upon its body. The head resembled
that of a cow and the artist said that except for the long eyebrows the
picture of the cloud dragon represented very faithfully what he
actually saw.
Another Chinese has related that a business partner of his, while on a
journey up the Yangtze River, saw three dragons crossing a mountain
range near the shore. Every person on board was spellbound as they
watched the three monsters—one yellow, another white, and the third
blue—as they majestically made their way with great undulating strides
up the mountain side. The dragons passed by so near the boat that the
observers saw every detail of their heads and the lacelike scales of
their bodies. The boat was respectfully stopped in mid-river, and only
when the dragons had disappeared over the ridge did the boatmen resume
their task at the oars.
Various stories have come to the writer, of dragons which have been
seen either riding upon banks of fog or dangling from passing clouds
during great windstorms or rainstorms. Invariably these have been
described as having scale-covered bodies. One reasonable explanation
for the suspended dragons may be found in insipient tornadoes and water
spouts which never reach the ground. There seems, however, to be no
explanation for the dragon visits described by the five observers,
unless it be that strange monsters of the deep either crawled up out of
the river and lay on the bank, in a dormant state, or were sucked up by
ocean- or river-water spouts, and when the columns of water broke over
the land the creatures were dropped far from their natural habitat. Two
difficulties at once present themselves to combat this hypothesis. The
first of these is the improbability that there are such creatures in
existence, and the second difficulty lies in the strangeness of their
disappearance after coming to the earth. As a possible explanation of
the first difficulty, we wish to ask whether it is not possible that
there are still existing in the depths of the sea and in great rivers
curious reptiles and strange monsters such as no human beings now
living have ever seen, the descendants of the mighty saurians which
lived upon the earth long ages ago, and which geologists tell us later
entered the sea, making that their more secretive habitat?
As an explanation for the disappearance of the dragon in these three
instances the writer notes two facts. The dragons in each case were
seen on the banks of great rivers and in each case disappeared after a
heavy rain. Might it not have been that the monsters were in reality
not dead but only unconscious, and that the heavy flood washed the
creatures back into the river whence they were carried out to sea?