Chasing Dragons
I’m still there, 17 years old, sitting on the shores of Erhai Lake looking out across the water, watching dragons. Hundreds of miles long they curled around the Cangshan mountains in the distance. Leviathan snakes, swimming through the air, diving into the valleys and reappearing on the other side, dancing between the peaks. The most beautiful sight I have ever seen in my life.
This is why the Chinese believe in dragons, because they actually exist here.
Lavender introduced me to some of her friends over dinner in Shanghai, a professional face reader slash cosmetic consultant with very obvious and very well done plastic surgery, and her partner, a young specialist in the art of Feng Shui. His clients would take his auspicious guidance on how to best lay out their offices. I tackled him with a few light questions from what I thought I knew about Chinese philosophy, and particularly the symbolism of dragons.
He told me, “Dragons are the great inexplicable forces of heaven manifest in the world. They are creatures of the sky, but they reside in the great rivers, where they birth great civilisations, and when they take flight empires fall. Shanghai has a dragon, London has a dragon, all the great cities of the world have dragons.”
“And we can see them?”
“Only Kings. Kings, it was believed in the times of them, were the embodiment of dragons on Earth. They communed with them. Indeed, only a King may see a dragon and live.”
I journeyed into the secrets of the Tao: the delicate winding path between the Yin and the Yang, characterised as a dance between the Dragon and the Phoenix, or birth and death, or the Heavens and the Earth.
Dragons never die. If they once ruled the Earth then they still do.
Above is an excerpt from Chasing Dragons. It starts with dragons and ends with the most delicious thing I have ever tasted: a bowl of noodles in a back alley in southwest China. It’s currently out on submission, but if you’d like to read it, email me and I’ll send you a copy.
