Why is it so hard to find dragons in modern Chinese mythologies? Insights from Manchu/Jurchen mythologies
All these years, there has been a mystery in my head: Dragon appears to be a key component of modern Chinese culture, but there is practically zero mythology about dragon in Chinese culture! This is in fact wild if you think about it, and the most possible answer is that the dragon concept came from somewhere else, where there are in fact systematic mythologies about what dragons do.
This became clearer as I have started to read mythologies in the Manchu/Jurchen traditions, which are largely oral (as it is for many north Asian traditions): It talks about what dragons do. For example, it talks about that during the flood (lol just so common in human mythologies) Abka-Hehe (the Manchu creation goddess) turned her hairs into dragons that drink the water on the ground. Some of them turned into rivers, and some of these dragons were trying to find their ways back to the sea, and created valleys as they were wiggling towards the sea.
In this case, there is a clear story about what dragons are doing, more than just saying that they exist and are important. If one were to make a guess, it's more likely that the dragon concept came from there but not "central China" (whatever it meant geographically in history). This is in fact in line with the fact that the earliest-known dragon-style jades were excavated in the Manchuria-Mongolia regions (Hongshan culture, 4700-2900 BC), instead of, again, anywhere "central China".
Meanwhile, in "central China", the mainstream mythology about the flood goes that Dayu solved the problem with Xirang, a magical soil that regenerates itself. This is apparently quite different and it does not seem that dragons are playing any role here. It is thus quite possible that the culture that later turns into mainstream Chinese culture got the dragon concept from who later became Manchus/Jurchens, while not knowing too much about its relevant mythologies.
If you go to Liaoning Museum (in the city where I'm from), you will see that they were very seriously and explicitly arguing that Manchuria was where the prototype of Chinese culture and mythologies came from. As a kid I thought this was crazy (as we were always taught and told that of course Chinese culture originated from the middle or south of today's China). But this in fact largely questionable, and may be a manual consequence of the fact that the central and southern dynasties in Chinese history had a particular obsession of writing history books...
Blog background image: https://rmda.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/item/rb00030596
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