5 REAL Dragon Sightings from Chinese History

on June 16th 2004 an 81-year-old man walked into the history office in yino City Ling Province China he was carrying a box of Bones which he said were dragon bones that he had collected when he was 11 years old now this may sound like a scile old man reenacting a childhood prank but when the deputy director of The Office decided to look up references to dragons in the local newspaper the Shen Jing times he found this article from 1934 when the man would have been 11 accompanying the article a photo of the skeleton that several more living eyewitnesses who were now in their senior years still insisted was a real dragon hey everyone welcome to learn Chinese now my name is Ben and on this channel me and my co-host Jared talk about incredible stories from Chinese history oh and we might teach you a bit of Chinese as well on today's episode we have a a really good one because we are going to be talking about dragons those legendary creatures that have captivated the attention of Chinese Emperors and common folk alike for thousands of years now while you may think that it's all just a legend there are so many accounts of dragon sightings over Chinese history including the 1934 one that it's a little too much to ignore and we're going to go through a load of them in this video but first what is a Chinese dragon or long well this is not the fire breathing dragon that we have in Western myths actually it's more associated with water and dragons have been known throughout history as controllers of the weather especially the rain the classic of dragons or longing describes Chinese dragons as a Divine animal with a head like a camel horns like a deer ears like a cow eyes like a ghost a neck or in this case basically the whole body is the neck like like a snake a belly like a clam scales like a fish claws like an eagle and Palms like a Tiger It's like if you were designing the coolest animal possible using parts of other animals this would be what you'd come up with except for the belly like a clam I'm not really sure what that means oh so it turns out the ancient Chinese word for clam also means something like a sea snake so maybe an eel perhaps it means belly like an eel anyway in the book of Han or hanu the record of the Han Dynasty we find one of numerous accounts of the creatures in Spring the first month of the second year of Emperor H there were two dragons spotted in a well in lantin county in the book of Jin or Jin Shu covering the history of the Jin Dynasty there is another notable account one time there was a black dragon and a white dragon seen at Dragon Mountain maybe they named it that afterwards or I'd be pretty coincidental if it was called Dragon Mountain the emperor personally led a party to to go and observe them when they were around 200 steps away from the dragons they held a ceremony to worship them the two dragons played and circled in the air and then flew off the emperor was very pleased and pardoned some criminals in his territory like I'm not sure whether that was a good idea I mean maybe it was just a few Petty thieves or something he called his new Palace the two Dragon Palace and built longang or dragons circling in the air Buddhist temple on the mountain in the Song Dynasty the artist chunrong painted the nine Dragon scroll it's an incredibly detailed 30t long scroll which passed through the collections of many later Emperors it then ended up in the hands of the art dealer yamanaka sataj Jiro who sold it to the Boston Museum of Fine Art in 1917 for $25,000 which with inflation would be about $600,000 today probably way less than the scroll is worth now so I think they got a pretty good deal it shows Nine Dragons in fine detail playing in clouds mountains and in water the scroll depicts perfectly what we know as the classic look of the Dragon did the artist use his imagination or did he actually see these dragons then we have an account from emperor kangi in the Ching Dynasty which is much more recent in the year 1705 Emperor kangi went on a tour to the south of China and stayed in a temple there one rainy day he went out and suddenly saw a huge Dragon he wrote a poem about it called T longing which could be translated as seeing Dragon trip or the trip on which I saw a dragon the first two lines read in the fields and in the sky a dragon with its changing positions it was taking in and releasing large amounts of pure Yang energy the in the fields part references a line from the ancient text the Joi which reads meaning when a dragon is seen in the fields benefits see important people kangi of course was the emperor thus the most important person in the country so he was certainly thinking that according to the Joey seeing the dragon meant that he and thus the country were going to get some good fortune he goes on to say in his poem Oh My virtue comes from the dragon species now when you consider that in the book of Rights Le by confucious who is basically the teacher to end all teachers in China it's states that when there is a virtuous ruler heaven will send among other things phoenixes and chilin to the Trees of the suburbs and tortoises and Dragons to the Palace ponds these four animals are referred to as sing or the four holy beasts also in the book of writs so since he saw a dragon he took it as a sign that he ruled with wisdom and benevolence for his people and that heaven was rewarding him and indeed the emperor kungi ruled for 61 1 years the longest reign of any emperor in Chinese history it was a period of stability in China's last Dynasty known as the hi ching and he contributed a lot to the Arts and literature compiling the kangi dictionary kangi and the complete anthology of Tong poems thus any mention of seeing a real dragon fills Chinese people with joy and hope because they know what it traditionally stands for a reward from heaven for benevolent governance and this now brings us to 1934 yinko City in leing Province it had been raining for over a month and a pond had flooded some local residents found a creature in the pond that seemed to be dying the locals tried to shade it from the Sun with a canopy they then poured water over it but after a few days it disappeared a few weeks later it was cited again but this time the creature was really dead you can see a photo of the local standing with the dragon skeleton and the headline reads dragon type creature dies of dehydration which is weird because they also stated that it was in a pond and it had been raining for a month but whatever in 2004 the delivery of the bones brought the story back into the national Spotlight Central China television claimed in their report that the bones were actually whale bones but this prompted three more elderly eyewitnesses who saw the dragon in 1934 to go public some witnesses even said they'd seen the dragon flying in the air now in 27 a similar incident happened in another place in China called Jiao and you can see locals posing with a dragon skeleton in this viral clip that circulated on the internet although this clip is believed by many to be a hoax using cow bones to create a dragon skeleton as a prop maybe it was some pranksters trying to create their version of the 1934 story but no matter what it reignited Chinese people's interests in dragons one of their four holy beasts and who knows if benevolent governance returns to China maybe dragons will appear again well that is the video guys thank you for watching and leave your comments below do you believe any of these stories or is it all just made up all points of view welcome I'd love to hear what you think please subscribe to our Channel if you're new so you don't miss my next exploration into mystical creatures from China I just got myself a copy of the shanhai Jing which basically details all of these interesting and Supernatural species that supposedly existed in China like 3,000 years ago so look out for that and we'll see you in the next video bye-bye

Channel: Learn Chinese Now

Views: 310,757

Keywords: learnchinesenow, learn chinese, chinese, mandarin, china, chinese sayings, learn chinese now, Mythical animals, dragon, chinese dragon, dragons, real dragons

Id: 1gXJ0QcqaX8

Length: 8min 39sec (519 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 08 2023