Are Dragons Real?
It is difficult to know for sure if the Chinese people thought that dragons were actual living, breathing animals or creatures of myth. It has been said that there is an "off-handed casual acceptance of their presence" among the Chinese and the tone of many of these early dragon stories is deadly serious. When asking a Chinese friend if she had any input that she'd like to give for this site she stated very matter-of-factly that the Chinese were direct descendants of the dragon. I asked if she meant that literally and she said, "it's just something that we all except." Not to mention that there have been reported sightings. One of the earliest of these sightings was documented around 540 AD in the Fujian region of China. The History of Fujian, volume 271, states "In the sixth year of the reign of the Dadong emporer, nine dragons gamboled in the morning in the West River at Changzhou." This same text reports that in the year 1528, "at Shouning the dragon appeared and there was a great hail storm." Much more recently there was a citing recorded in Nagel's Encyclopedia Guide in which a teacher claims to have seen a baby dragon fall from the sky and linger within the area for twenty-four hours. Described in detail, this baby dragon had the head of a cow, four feet, and a scaly body that was 15 metres long and bluish in nature. More recently we have Englands' own Lochness Monster, which some people believe to be an actual modern day dragon.
|
