Things related to the emperor are also marked with dragons, such as "dragon bed", "dragon face", "dragon robe" and "dragon chair". Influenced by China culture, the monarchs of Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Ryukyu and other countries with Chinese cultural circles also regard dragons as a symbol of power. On the other hand, the dragon is also the spiritual symbol of China culture.
other
Dragon ranks fifth in the traditional Chinese zodiac in East Asia, and the corresponding earthly branch is Chen. In the homologous Indian Zodiac, the corresponding one is Nagarosaurus.
Dragon, phoenix, unicorn and tortoise are also called "four great beasts", and the banknotes issued by Standard Chartered Bank of Hong Kong from 65438 to 0979 are all based on these beasts. (There are also many ancient books and history books that refer to the "four auspicious beasts" as: caring for each other, nurturing, caring for each other and caring for each other. )
Qinglong and Baihu, Suzaku and Xuanwu are the four astronomical phenomena in China.
Extended data:
First of all, archaeological discoveries
The earliest dragon-shaped pattern found at present comes from the Chahai site in Xinglongwa Culture about 8,000 years ago. It is located in Aohan, Inner Mongolia, near Fuxin, Liaoning Province. It is a dragon-shaped sculpture, that is, a dragon piled up with reddish-brown stones, with a total length of nearly 20 meters and a width of nearly 2 meters, located in the central square of the village site; However, dragons placed in earth and stone are easy to be faked. Dragons were faked in the 1980s and 1990s.
Earlier dragons found in the south include the Shenglong and Gonglong at Yingpanshan site in Pukou about 5,000 years ago, and the Yuzhulong at Liangzhu site in Yuhang.
Second, the process of dragon transformation
Two of them are widely circulated: one is that the dragon was originally a snake on the ground, and after a long time of collecting the aura of heaven and earth and the essence of the sun and the moon, it became a dumpling, and the dumpling finally became a dragon after transformation, with the ability to take charge of wind and rain and fly, which is the so-called "Five hundred years of Cheng Jiao, a thousand years of a dumpling into a dragon, a hundred years of Yi Long Pentagonal Dragon, and another thousand years" ancient "Qi Lu Deng".
Another way of saying it is that in ancient times there was a door in the sea called Longmen. This dragon gate is too big to see the whole picture. One day, a carp swam under the Longmen and was stopped. Carp wants to jump over the dragon gate and swim to other places.
After numerous jumps, the carp finally jumped over the Longmen, but at this time, it became another image. Its long body is covered with scales, its head has two horns like antlers, four legs and eagle claws. It can soar above the sky and dive into the bottom of the sea, which is called rain. This legend later became the story of "Fish Jumping at the Dragon Gate".
References:
Baidu encyclopedia-dragon