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The Chinese Dragon: Couperie

The Yih King is one of those books specially excepted from the general destruction of the books. References in it to the dragon are not numerous, and will be found as quotations in the extracts from the large encyclopædia Yuen Kien Léi Han, given hereafter. This work has hitherto been very imperfectly understood even by the Chinese themselves, but the recent researches of M. Terrien de la Couperie lead us to suppose that our translations have been imperfect, from the fact that many symbols have different significations in the present day to those which they had in very ancient times, and that a special dictionary of archaic meanings must be prepared before an accurate translation can be arrived at, a consummation which may shortly be expected from his labours. I find in my notes, taken from the manuscript of a lecture given before the Ningpo Book Club in 1870, by the Rev. J. Butler, of the Presbyterian Mission, that "the way in which the dragon came to represent the Emperor and the Throne of China* is accounted for in the Yih King as follows:- The chief dragon has his abode in the sky, and all clouds and vapours, winds and rains are under his control. He can send rain or withhold it at his pleasure, and hence all vegetable life is dependent on him. So the Emperor, from his exalted throne, watches over the interests of his people, and confers on them those temporal and spiritual blessings without which they would perish." I abstain from dwelling on this or any other passages in the Yih King, pending the translation promised by M. De la Couperie, the nature of whose views on it are condensed in the notet attached, being extracts from his papers on the subject. * In China the dragon is peculiarly the emblem of imperial power, as with us the lion is of the kingly. The Emperor is said to be seated on the dragon throne. A five-clawed dragon is embroidered on the Emperor's court-robes. It often surrounds his edicts, and the titlepages of books published by his authority, and dragons are inscribed on his banners. It is drawn stretched out at full length or curled up with two legs pointing forwards and two backwards; sometimes holding a pearl in one hand, and surrounded by clouds and fire. † The Yih King-extracts from papers by Monsieur De la Couperie, in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. "The Yih King is the oldest of the Chinese books, and is the mysterious classic which requires ‘a prolonged attention to make it reveal its secrets'; it has peculiarities of style, making it the most difficult of all the Chinese classics to present in an intelligible version." "We have multifarious proofs that the writing, first known in China, was already an old one, partially decayed, but also much improved since its primitive hieroglyphic stage. We have convincing proofs (vide my 'Early History of Chinese Civilization,' pp. 21-23, and the last section of the present paper) that it had been borrowed, by the early leaders of the Chinese Bak families [Poh Sing] in Western Asia, from an horizontal writing traced from left to right, the pre-cuneiform character, which previously had itself undergone several important modifications. "At that time the Ku-wen was really the phonetic expression of speech. (By an analysis of the old inscriptions and fragments, and by the help of the native works on palæography, some most valuable, I have compiled a dictionary of this period.) "If the kwas, which were a survival of the arrows of divination THE ANNALS OF THE BAMBOO BOOKS.

These are annals from which a great part of Chinese chronology is derived. Mr. Legge gives the history of their known to the ancestors of Chinese culture before their emigration eastward," &c. &c. -Vol. xiv. part 4. "This mysterious book is still avowedly not understood, and we assist, now-a-days, at a most curious spectacle. There are not a few Chinese of education among those who have picked up some knowledge in Europe or in translations of European works of our modern sciences, who believe openly that all these may be found in their Yih. Electricity, steam power, astronomical laws, sphericity of the earth, &c., are all, according to their views, to be found in the Yih King; they firmly believe that these discoveries were not ignored by their sages, who have embodied them in their mysterious classics, of which they will be able to unveil the secrets when they themselves apply to its study a thorough knowledge of the modern sciences. It is unnecessary for any European mind to insist upon the childishness of such an opinion. Even in admitting, what seems probable, that the early leaders of the Bak people (Poh Sing) were not without some astronomical and mathematical principles, which have been long since forgotten, there is no possible comparison between their rude notions and our sciences. "It is not a mysterious book of fate and prognostics. It contains a valuable collection of documents of old antiquity, in which is embodied much information on the ethnography, customs, language, and writing of early China. "Proofs of various kinds-similitude of institutions, traditions and knowledge, affinities of words of culture; and, in what concerns the writing, likenesses of shapes of characters, hieroglyphic and arbitrary, with the same sounds (sometimes polyphons) and meanings attached to them, the same morphology of written words, the same phonetic laws of orthography-had led me, several years ago, to no other conclusion than that (as the reverse is proved impossible by numerous reasons), at an early period of their history, and before their emigration to the far East, the Chinese Bak families had borrowed the pre-cuneiform writing and elements of their knowledge and institutions from a region connected with the old focus of culture of south-western Asia. "Numerous affinities of traditions, institutions, and customs, connect the borrowing of script and culture by the Chinese Bak families with the region of Elam, the confederation of states of which Susa was the chief town, and the Kussi the principal population. "What are the historical facts of this connection we do not know. discovery, as related in the history of the Emperor Woo, the first of the sovereigns of Tsin, as follows: "In the fifth year of his reign, under title of Hëen-ning* [=A.D. 279], some lawless parties, in the department of Keih, dug open the grave of King Sëang of Wei [died в.c. 295] and found a number of bamboo tablets, written over, in the small seal character, with more than one hundred thousand words, which were deposited in the imperial library."