Yinglong

Yinglong is the winged dragon of ancient Chinese myth, a rain-bringing servant of the Yellow Emperor who killed the rebel Chiyou and, in other accounts, used its tail to help Yu the Great channel the Great Flood.

The Story

Yinglong appears in the oldest layer of Chinese myth, in stories about the sage-kings who shaped the world. In the Shan Hai Jing (Classic of Mountains and Seas), the war god Chiyou rises against the Yellow Emperor. The emperor orders Yinglong to attack him in the wilds of Jizhou, and the dragon gathers up the waters. Chiyou answers by calling on the Wind Earl and the Rain Master, who unleash a great storm, so the Yellow Emperor sends down his daughter Ba, a goddess of drought, to stop the rain. Chiyou is then killed.

Another passage of the same book says Yinglong lived at the southern end of a mountain in the far northeast. After it killed Chiyou and the giant Kuafu, it could not return to the sky. That is why droughts happen below, the text says, and why people make an image of Yinglong when the rain fails. The commentator Guo Pu (276–324) added that the earthen dragons used in rain rituals of his own day began with this custom.

Yinglong also helps Yu the Great. The poem "Tianwen" ("Heavenly Questions") in the Chu ci asks how Yinglong drew its lines and how the rivers and seas ran their courses. The Han commentator Wang Yi explained that the dragon marked the ground with its tail to show Yu where to dig channels for the floodwaters.

Appearance and Powers

Yinglong is the best-known winged dragon in Chinese tradition, which is unusual because most Chinese dragons fly without wings. Guo Pu describes it simply as a dragon with wings. A later book, the Shuyi ji, gives a ladder of transformation: a water snake becomes a jiao after 500 years, a jiao becomes a lóng after 1,000 years, a lóng becomes a horned dragon after 500 more, and after another 1,000 years it becomes a yinglong. In this scheme the winged dragon is the oldest and most powerful of all.

Its main power is over water: storing it, releasing it as rain, and guiding it across the land.

Legacy

Winged dragons appear in Han dynasty art, but they later became rare in Chinese decoration. Yinglong survives as a figure in retellings of the Yellow Emperor and Yu legends, in modern Chinese fantasy, and in games. Our page on Yu the Great tells a popular version of the flood story.

Related

• Lóng (Chinese dragon): The lóng is the Chinese dragon: a long, scaly, usually wingless creature with four clawed legs that rules rain, rivers, and seas and became the emblem of the emperor and of Chinese culture.
• Zhulong (Torch Dragon): Zhulong, the Torch Dragon, is a giant red dragon of ancient Chinese myth with a human face and a serpent's body, whose opening and closing eyes make day and night in a sunless land of the far north.
• Jiaolong: The jiaolong, or jiao, is a Chinese water dragon of rivers, lakes, and floods, often described as scaly and not yet fully a dragon, and feared for drowning people and overturning boats.
• Dragon Kings (Longwang): The Dragon Kings are the dragon rulers of the seas, rivers, and lakes in Chinese religion and folklore, rain-giving lords who live in crystal palaces, take human form, and answer to the Jade Emperor.
• Dragon Species
• Chinese Dragons
• Famous Dragons

Sources and Further Reading

• Anne Birrell, trans., The Classic of Mountains and Seas (Penguin Classics, 1999)
• David Hawkes, trans., The Songs of the South: An Ancient Chinese Anthology of Poems by Qu Yuan and Other Poets (Penguin Classics, 1985)
• M. W. de Visser, The Dragon in China and Japan (Amsterdam: Johannes Müller, 1913)
• Anne Birrell, Chinese Mythology: An Introduction (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993)

Cite this entry: “Yinglong,” Draconika Encyclopedia of Dragons, https://www.draconika.com/dragons/yinglong.