Bruce was born on American soil on November 27, 1940 in the year of the dragon according to Chinese lunar calendar. Was it why he was named as the little dragon like many boys in other Chinese families when they are born in the dragon's year?

In the mentalities of the Chinese people, the year of the dragon is not specifically lucky. It is a year of challenge. However, it is always a successful year for tough people.

This year i.e. 1998 is the year of tiger.

The Chinese lunar years go in the following repeating sequence:

What is a dragon in the common Chinese understanding? How important is it to the Chinese? How ancient is the origin of the dragon? Why most of the internet sites dedicated to Bruce Lee are mostly decorated with dragons? This short essay is trying to answer the mentioned questions briefly for our Bruce Lee fans.

In Chinese, dragon is pronounced as "long". And in Chinese culture, the dragon has a snake's body, fish scales (but with the extruded scales something like band saw teeth in a line on the middle of his back leading from his neck to his tail), tiger's legs, eagle's claw, lion's tail, two horns of a deer and nose of a bull. He also has mane like lion's. What is more he has long curly feeler each on one side of his mouth. Only the eyes are his own. He does not have (and does not need) wings. He can fly in the sky and spurt fogs, clouds and rains and launch lightning and thunderbolts. Some can also spurt fires :-). He can dive and live in the deepest ocean and generate the most dangerous waves and launch floods. He can change his body smaller till he could hide in a sesame seed. He can change his body bigger till it fills up the whole universe. The dragon represents Yang, the heaven, the male, the supreme power, the emperor, the administration, and the justice... The ancient Chinese people had endowed the dragon with all the properties of a saint god with various almighty capabilities.

Normally, the Chinese dragon either has a large perl already in his mouth or in his claw or playing with one in the clouds. What is the purpose of this perl? Is it his power, his secrets, or his responsibility?

The common Chinese people are reluctant to accept the dragons described in the western cultures: something like a dinosaur with a bird bill and bat's wings. They consider it as a ghost or a monster, not a dragon.

Scientifically, dragon does not exist. But then why the Chinese people insist that their dragon should be like what they described? For a reply, it is necessary to begin with the very ancient Chinese history and ancient Chinese charaters.

The dragon was an ancient totem to the Chinese people. The very original totem was a snake. Like other ancient peoples in the world, the ancient Chinese people would try to understand the natural phenomenon such as thunder, rain, dangerours animals etc. with superstition. They believed that a god made all this possible. They worshipped all the dangerous things, and a poisinous bite by a snake could be a most dangerous one. One tribe (group) of the ancient Chinese people lived in a area where the poisinous snakes were often found. They worshipped the snake as their totem. This tribe was the largest tribe then in the middle area of China.

There were other tribes in other areas who had but different totem of their own. There were wars among the tribes. The defeated smallest tribes had to accept the total snake totem, and the defeated smaller group would have to accept the snake totem as a whole but had added little symbols to the snake totem. Gradually, the snake totem would have a lion's tail from a tribe who had perhaps worshipped the lion as their totem before their defeat which made them a part of the snake's tribe, which was growing larger. It would be possible that the snake first had the four tiger's legs though.

The Chinese feudalist society began with the transference of the title as a king to his first son by the first king of Xia Dynasty about four thousand years ago instead of to any capable successor as before . From then on, the whole country became the private property of the king's family. This feualist system carried on till the first Chinese Republic founded by Mr. Sun Jetsun (Sun Zhongshan) in 1912. The said first king of Xia Dynasty is called 'yu'. According to the reliable modern Chinese dictionary, 'yu'is the name of the first king of Xia Dynasty. There is no other meaning.

However, this character is very ancient. Referring to this character carved on the turtle's shell after the time of Xia Dynasty, it is easily recognized that the character is very much like a coiling snake. (A Chinese character is a rough sketch of a picture.) Yes, it is like a snake coiling exactly as the dragon on the top right corner of this page. Now you know why I put it there :-).

A character with no other meaning than the name of the king of Xia Dynasty, but looks likes a coiling snake. Why did a king got this name? Is it his given name or a name of a kind of poisinous snake? Or the people named their king in respect with a name of dangerous snake which was their totem? In the rarely remaining relevant Chinese written history, in the time of the Emperor Shun, a reign in China before Xia Dynasty, once there were a terrible floods, Yu was ordered to harness the floods. Yu worked nine years till the floods were harnessed. During the time, three times he passed his house door and did not enter for the sake of work. No doubts he was respected by his folks, and Emporor Shun later transferred the title of king to him. After more than four thousand years, his work of floods harnessing is still remembered by people and recorded as legend in any Chinese historical book. Why was he capable to harness floods. Was it

character 'yu'

because the snake is capable in water? To find replies to the above belongs to the professional scope of the historians. It however has left us a lot of imaginations and curiosities. The Chinese character Yu (yu) and snake (she) look similar. Partly each has the same sketches in itself from the other. And the character dragon (long) appeared in a bit later time.

All right. You are a praying mantis kungfu trainer and a fan of Bruce Lee, how come you went into such a depth of this dragon stuff? Oh yes, beyond martial arts, this is one of the other things I like to research. Remember, Bruce Lee also studied philosophy.

Gradually, the snake became a dragon and could fly.

In the eastern area of China there were tribes that worshipped the hunting birds. Through the wars, one tribe became larger and larger compared to their neighboring tribes and their totem was added with more beautiful feathers from the other totem birds of the smaller tribes defeated by them. Finally, they defeated all their neighbors and their totem became the king of all birds called the phoenix ('feng' in Chinese). Has anyone seen a living phoenix in his life? No. It does not exist either. It was an ancient Chinese totem.

Unlike the dragon, the phoenix have male and female. The male one is called 'feng', and the female one is called 'huang'. If you are a Bruce Lee fan, by now you would perhaps know his mother once named him with a girl's name 'cai feng' in a Chinese superstition to protect him. 'Cai Feng' in the Chinese commoners' understanging means 'a beautiful (or little) phoenix', 'cai' along means 'beautiful, colorful'.

However, in the Chinese intellectual understanding 'feng' can only name a man as it is the male phoenix! In Chinese history, there were many famous people (men) used the character 'feng' as their names.

Using the dragon to represent 'male' and phoenix 'female' is a much, much later mistake. This idea became official in Qing Dynasty about three hundred years ago. In the forbidden city in Beijing, China, on the pavement in the middle of the two side stairs, the relief on the stones are dragons flirting the phoenix. Stupid! How stupid was the Qing Dynasty! They strengthened the confucianist education but forgot the true meaning of this ancient Chinese charater 'feng'. Another laugh was the Empress Dowager Ci Xi who even ordered the change of the relief on some of such pavements into a phoenix flirting a dragon, because she considered herself as a phoenix. When you some day visit the Beijing Forbidden City in China, don't forget to ask the guide to show you where the said relief is (I hope he knows). The guide would then respect you as a Chinese expert!

There are many women in the low educated countryside areas in China named 'feng'. They actually thought wrongly that such a beautiful bird like phoenix should represent a female beauty (and never know that only the peacock, the male displays the plumage not peahen, the female.). They really think the 'feng' is a female as they never named themselves with 'huang', the correct name for a female phoenix! The contemporary saying in China to use a dragon and a phoenix to respresent the luck of a marriage is wrong. And an opera with the name "three 'feng' wooing one 'huang' describing three gentlemen loved one gentlelady is correct. Seldom is a man named 'feng' nowadays in China :-((, I hope those who are are still referring to its original meaning:-DDD.

Why this long talk of the phoenix? The answer is: because it is one part of the dragon.

Some Chinese scholars say that the two Chinese characters "long (dragon)" and "feng (phoenix)" could actually represent the whole ancient Chinese culture. To this I would probably say yes. However, to trace out their origins and the allied meanings, a reseach has to go through the most ancient Chinese histories and cultures. There are piles of relevant books in most of the Chinese libraries. You would rather continue with your hard un-stop-training for three days than to read all of them.

There came one day that the two largest tribes, the snaks (almost a dragon now, except the lack of the ability to fly.) tribe and the phoenix tribe met in wars. As both are largest tribes, naturally no one could completely wipe the other out. However, the snake tribe won. By then, the snake had already had limbs that did not originally belonged to him such as the lion's tail, the tiger's legs, the deer's horns etc. He then again changed the tigers' paws into the eagle's claws and had obtained the eagle's ability to fly from the phoenix.

The snake finally became a dragon and is living still today. The dragon, an totem of the ancient Chinese in the prehistory, is still the soul and spirit of the contemporary Chinese people now.

Among many other things, flying was one of the most mysterious for the ancient Chinese people to understand. Their final totem - the dragon therefore had to have the ability to fly like the phoenix. That's why the dragon is often seen on the paintings, porcelains etc. among the clouds or near the sun or moon.

The one question may be asked is why the ancient Chinese did not add two phoenix wings to the dragon to indicate his ability to fly? To answer this, we agaom have to refer to the ancient Chinese philosophy. The ancient Chinese philosophy believed that the nature (or universe) was a changing balance as the Yin and Yang, which theory can be seen easily by observing the moon. The moon wanes inevitably but the dark moon always changes back into a bright one again. Between the black and the bright, there is the balance in the change. When the ancient Chinese applied this philosophy to the animals, they found out those animals with two wings had only two legs. Those with four legs would have to loose the wings. Those that swims well can not run fast. Those that can run, fly and swim at the same time can not do any of the three sports better than those are only good at one of them. The balance would be destroyed badly if a tiger has two extra wings or a eagle has two more claws. Therefore, the dragon, their totem, the god, though supreme almighty even with the great flying capability in the universe, still would not look natural to have two more wings, as he already had four tigers legs! On the one hand, they wished their god to be supernaturally powerful, and on the other, they kept his appearance as possibly natural as they liked.

Would you like to prove this ancient Chinese philosophy in your daily life once or twice? It is ancient but it is practical. So the blind hears better and the deaf sees more, and therefore those who can see and hear sees and hears less.

What do you feel if you look now again at the western dragon that has four legs and extra two wings?

In some of websites for Bruce Lee, there decorated are western dragons. I am not qualified to blame their web masters for this, most of whom are busy with practising or teaching martial arts. It is already a great efforts to master a kind of martial art, it is therefore not fair to request them again of knowing all this much stuff of the dragon.

The dragon as a totem was still evident even in the Spring and Autumn period in the Chinese history about 2500 years ago in the Chu state area (now Hubei province in China). The local people then often tattooed themselves with the style of the dragon's scales all over the body. As the area have many lakes and rivers, people lived almost daily in water. They believed the dragons also lived there in their waters. With the dragon tattoo, they made the dragon in the lakes or big rivers recognize them as their kin i.e. also the dragon. Like saying to the dragon, 'do not eat me up, I am also a dragon'. At the same time, being looked like a dragon, they could also scare other dangerous fishes. Like saying to the fish, 'go away, you lousy fish, we are dragons, more powerful than you'. It was a superstition but served as a supporting evidence to our subject.

In the later Chinese legends, the dragon had nine sons though no female dragons were expressively described therein. The nine dragon babies have different powers and excercise different office of jobs. An author in Tang Dynasty about one thousand year ago wrote a romance in which a scholar married the dragon king's daughter :-). Since then, miss dragon had always been a beautiful, powerful and kind girl who married only with the most intelligent man. Then the dragon families began to have normal members like us.

Gradually, the dragon became much more humanized and had the title as the Dragon King. He even had his own temples here and there in China. When there were a draught or a floods, the farmers would go there to worship him with sacrifies for his help. Most of those temples had been pulled down during the 'cultural revolution' arround nineteen seventies in China. Yet in a travel to China, if you were lucky you might still happen to see one. The Dragon King in such a temple would have a human body with a dragon's head. As an honour, he always had the emperor's crown.

You may ask me which dragon I like, the ancient dragon or the dragon king? I like the ancient dragon, he is saint, natural and mysterious. Though he really could not do anything to help the ancient Chinese people, but he was always their hope and encouragement. But the later Dragon King is too human, and even too political. He served as a tool for the feudalist emperor, because the emperor always forced the people to believe he was also a dragon born from the heaven to rule the human's world.

The dragon appeared then in all spheres of the Chinese lives. To paint a dragon was a special school of painting arts. The job was philosophical or even saint other than artistic as a dragon does not actually exist in the real life. So what should a dragon look like? The poor ancient Chinese painters tried the theme with all their might. Some classical paintings already became arts treasures of the country. I have seen one in a Hamburg Museum in Germany by Qi Baishi and another in New York by a painter earlier than Qi Baishi (sorry to have forgotten the painter's name). The one I recently found on internet was a scroll of nine dragons painted by Chen Rong in Southern Sung Dynasty in the year of 1244. The dragon painting embeded in this page is a part of it. There are still more impressing classic Chinese paintings in China and in the other countries.

I have no prejudice at all against the paintings of the dragon by the Japanese, Korean or Vietnamese painters, they are also great in their own ways. Their paintings belong to other style or school of art in which the dragons have more animal properties in certain extent between a Chinese dragon and a western dragon.

To judge a good Chinese painting of dragon, you have to try to feel the saint, mysterious and philosophical atmosphere in them. In that sense, painting of a dragon is not only a practice of art, it is a baptizing of the soul, the tempering of the mind, purifying the sentiment and strengthening the aspiration. There is also Tao (Do) in it!

In internet, there are introductions that the dragons in China, Japan and Korea differ from the numbers of toes in one claw. Hence the dragon in Japan has three toes, in Korea four toes and in China five toes. This is not always true. For instance, the Chinese dragon painting I embedded here has four toes! And this Chinese painting is already known to the whole world in the art circles.

A few points of the traditions of painting the Chinese dragon might not be more boring if you have already read the essay this far. And if you are a fan of Chinese kungfu, you would realise that in a wider concept the Chinese painting and kungfu belong to one philosophical essence. There were cases that a poet improved his intelligence in versification after watching a sword training performance and a sword fighter improved his fighting skill after scrutinizing a famous piece of calligraphy. Thereof what they got was only the concept or philosophy.

The first phenomena: The Chinese painters were always reluctant to paint the tail of a dragon. There was a saying: "You might see the head of dragon, but not his tail." Why, I do not know. In the Kungfu legends, after a kungfu master rescued a person from the danger, he would simply leave without leaving the person his name etc. with which the rescued person could later return his thanks. Could you relate this with the dragon's habit of not showing his tail? In most Chinese paintings of dragon, the tail is hiding in clouds or water.

The second phenomena: The most difficult part of a dragon to be painted are his eyes as they are the only original parts of a dragon. The traditional Chinese painter would paint them at the very last. The Chinese would emphasize a last piece of very important work in a complete project as: "painting the dragon's eyes". In an ancient legend, a painter famous for painting the dragon once left a painted dragon without eyes for days on a wall. When asked why, he said the dragon already had his spirit, if he had again his eyes, he would fly away. Upon constant urge by the onlookers, he quickly brushed the eyes of the dragon, and the dragon did immediately fly away with lightning and thunders leaving a collapsed wall. The eyes are the windows of our soul, so are the dragon's.

With the above legend, we wish all our martial art fans to find your own philosophy out of the painting of the dragon's eyes, so that your accomplishment would be a Chinese dragon flying to the sky leaving you the collapsed walls within which you trained youselves everyday. It is a flying dragon you want to be, not the wall, isn't it?

How significant is the meaning of the dragon to a Chinese? This could be symbolized by one fact. Be a Chinese in main land China, in Taiwan, Singapore, San Francisco, or London or anywhere, he would admit proudly that he is one of the descendants of the dragon.

As a dragon, a man has to be wise, powerful, brave, hardworking and just, a man has to be ready to endeavour all his efforts for his aim in life. From time to time, the Chinese have a saint dragon growing up among them, Bruce Lee is one.