Imugi

The Imperial Dragon of Chinese Myth

The Chinese long is the archetypal East-Asian dragon, the source from which the Korean cheongnyong, the Japanese ryu and the Vietnamese long descend. Its image runs unbroken from the Neolithic — the C-shaped jade dragon of Hongshan culture (c. 3500-3000 BCE, excavated at Ongniud Banner, Inner Mongolia, in 1971, now a national first-class cultural relic in the National Museum of China) and the shell-mosaic dragon at the Xishuipo site of the Yangshao culture in Puyang (excavated 1987, c. 5300 BCE) — through Xu Shen's 'Shuowen Jiezi' (100 CE), which defined the dragon as 'chief of the scaled creatures', Wang Fu's 'Qianfu Lun' of the late Han, which first codified the 'nine resemblances' (deer antlers, camel head, rabbit eyes, snake neck, clam belly, carp scales, eagle talons, tiger soles), and Li Shizhen's 'Bencao Gangmu' (1578). The five-toed foot was fixed as the imperial monogram by an edict of the Hongwu emperor in 1393 and remained so through the Qing; princes were limited to four toes and commoners to three. The long is arranged in a five-direction colour system — Azure Dragon (East), White (West), Vermilion (South), Black (North), Yellow (Centre) — and is held to bring rain, govern rivers and embody cosmic justice; it is the only mythical creature in the twelve-animal cycle, and a child born in a Dragon year is reckoned to share the emperor's auspice.

The Sea Dragon of Japanese Myth

The Ryū is the Japanese dragon, descended from the Chinese long imported via Buddhism in the sixth century and fused with native serpent and water cults. The most visible mark of its lower rank in the East-Asian dragon hierarchy is the three-toed foot, contrasted with the five-toed Chinese imperial dragon and the four-toed Korean dragon. The most celebrated ryū in the corpus is Yamata-no-Orochi, the eight-headed, eight-tailed serpent recorded in the Kojiki (712, compiled by Ō no Yasumaro) and the Nihon Shoki (720), defeated by the storm god Susanoo-no-Mikoto after being made drunk on rice wine; from its tail emerged the sword Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi, one of the three imperial regalia. The dragon king Ryūjin commands sea and storm and reigns over Ryūgū-jō, the undersea palace to which the fisherman Urashima Tarō is led. The ryū is a fixture of temple and shrine ceiling paintings — most famously Kanō Tan'yū's 'Naki-Ryū' (1640s) at Nikkō Tōshō-gū — and of ukiyo-e prints such as Hokusai's 'Hundred Views of Mount Fuji' (1834).

The Divine Dragon of Korean Myth

The Korean yong is the indigenous Korean dragon, a benevolent water-deity occupying a distinct position within the East-Asian dragon tradition. It is depicted with a long serpentine body, the branched antlers of a deer, the scales of a carp, the talons of a hawk, the soles of a tiger and — most decisively — four toes on each foot, which mark Korea's rank between the five-toed Chinese imperial long and the three-toed Japanese ryu. The earliest extant records are the dragon-deity passages of Iryeon's 'Samguk Yusa' (1281), book I 'Strange Affairs', particularly the entries on Dongmyeong, King Suro and King Munmu, and the dragon iconography on the Baekje and Silla roof-tile-ends of the fifth and sixth centuries. In Korean myth, the yong is the form an imugi attains after a millennium of practice when it finally wins the wish-fulfilling pearl (yeouiju). The image runs through the royal dragon robe (gollyongpo) of King Jeongjo (reigned 1776-1800, National Palace Museum of Korea) and the twin golden dragons on the throne ceiling of the Geunjeongjeon hall of Gyeongbokgung Palace (founded 1395, rebuilt 1865) and is the antithesis of the malevolent Western dragon — fundamentally good, generous and bound to bring rain to the fields.