The eternal attraction of a Chinese dragon

Thus comes their well-earned place in the Chinese zodiac, which assigns an animal and its reputed attributes to each year in a repeating 12-year cycle. The dragon is there with the tiger, the ox, the horse, and eight others, the only one absent from real life.

Yet the dragon seems to have worked that absence to its own advantage, engaging the creative imagination of Chinese artists and artisans from time immemorial.

Take for example the world-renowned bronze wares made throughout the Shang and Zhou dynasties between the 17th century and third century BC. It was on the surfaces of these wares that dragon images effectively went into a visual explosion, their bodies undulating and intertwining with remarkable grace and precision.

The complexity of the patterns points to the sophisticated thinking behind the painstaking effort the making of such extravagant wares must have entailed. These were sacrificial bronzes used during rituals by the same people who had engraved the word dragon on oracle bones for augury purposes.

The Shang people, in their endeavor to communicate with heaven and earth and those who preceded them, seemed to have once again turned to the dragon that, by traversing the space between the terrestrial and the celestial, also helped to bridge the worlds of the human and the divine, the mortal and the eternal.

Inseparable from that sense of divinity was a permanency that people had always longed for themselves. For members of the ruling elite who lived during the Western Han Dynasty, one way to achieve it was to be laid to rest with a casket laden with jade, a material that, as with the dragon, Chinese culture has treated with reverence.

From the burial ground of a vassal king in today's Xuzhou city, Jiangsu province, archaeologists unearthed what is believed to be some of the most majestic jade dragons yielded by any Han Dynasty tomb, or for that matter any ancient Chinese tomb.

Horned and bearded, with flowing mane on the back and upwardly curled tufts of hair sprouting from the ankles, these S-shaped dragons are an amalgam of fantastical details, all contained within the graceful curves which in turn were realized with powerful simplicity. Their task was to carry the soul of the deceased to heaven while keeping the body intact, until the two were reunited.

Nobleness, the very quality the ancient Chinese associated with jade, was exactly what they expected from the dragon. Since the concept of "rule by virtue" was deeply embedded in Confucianism, it seems only natural that the dragon, a symbol of moral strength, would gradually evolve into an emblem of royal power.