Forget the dragon of Western fantasy — the winged hoarder on a mountain of gold. The Chinese long (龙) is something else entirely: a god of water, and a member of the celestial civil service.
Every body of water has its dragon. The Four Seas are ruled by four Dragon Kings, brothers, each holding court in a crystal palace at the bottom of his sea; every great river and lake has its own — the Dragon King of Dongting, the Dragon of the Qiantang. Their jurisdiction is the water-cycle: rain, flood, drought, tide. When a district needs rain, it petitions the dragon as it would petition a magistrate — with offerings, with processions, and in hard times with threats (more than one folk tradition includes beating the dragon-king’s statue when the rain fails). Dragons, in turn, answer upward to the Jade Emperor: rainfall quotas are issued from heaven, and a dragon who rains too much, too little, or in a temper is prosecuted. Several stories begin with a dragon-king beheaded or chained for flooding the wrong county.
In form the long is the great chimera of China — the classic description gives it the horns of a stag, the head of a camel, the eyes of a demon, the neck of a snake, the belly of a clam, the scales of a fish, the claws of an eagle, the palms of a tiger and the ears of an ox. It can shrink to a worm or fill the sky; it flies without wings; its element is the cloud and the storm. It is, in sum, the animal shape of weather itself.
The dragon courts mirror the human one, and the stories exploit this: dragon kings have ministers, armies of shrimp-soldiers and crab-generals, marriage alliances, feuds, and family disasters. Liu Yi’s tale turns on a dragon princess abused by her dragon husband — a domestic drama conducted at the scale of typhoons. The Qiantang dragon’s rescue of her is at once a family intervention and a natural catastrophe.
Politically, the dragon became the emblem of the emperor — the Son of Heaven as the land’s counterpart of the water-lords. But the story-tradition kept the older, earthier dragon: powerful, official, occasionally foolish, and always, at bottom, answerable — like everything else in this universe — to the ledger of consequences.