You could say that [the dragon] is the symbol of our nation. But has anyone ever considered why the Chinese adore this terrifying monster?

As the only mythical creature among the twelve Chinese zodiac signs, the dragon occupies a unique position in the Chinese imagination. To this day, scholars cannot agree on whether the dragon was based on any real-life creature. Both pictographic evidence and archaeological discoveries seem to suggest that if the dragon was inspired by any real-life animal, it would have been either snakes or alligators. Though the Yangtze alligator is extremely endangered now (300 in the wild as of 2017), they once populated a region extending far beyond the lower Yangtze area, after which they’re named, to parts of present-day north and central China.[1]

In ancient writings found on tortoise shells or cattle scapula, known as oracle bone inscriptions, the dragon sometimes resembles a python, with a powerful jaw and sharp fangs (see figure 1). At other times, it has the look of an alligator with a long snout, muscular tail, and webbed feet (see figure 2).

In an ancient burial site in Erlitou, Henan province, dating back to 1900-1500 BC, archaeologists have unearthed a magnificent dragon-like artefact over 70 cm long and made up of 2,000-odd pieces of turquoise, coiled up like a python between the shoulder and the hipbone of a male body, who was believed to have been a nobleman (see figure 3).

Erlitou, located on the central plains of the Yellow River, was a large Bronze Age settlement covering approximately 300 hectares. At its peak, it was home to an estimated 18,000-30,000 people.[2] Remains of clustered tombs, pottery workshops, paved roads and what some archaeologists take to be palatial compounds, have led to the hypothesis that this site might have been a later capital of the legendary Xia dynasty. According to the government funded Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project, which was launched in 1996 and mobilised over 200 scholars for five years, the Xia (2070-1600 BCE) was conquered by the Shang dynasty (1600-1046 BCE), which in turn gave way to the Zhou dynasty (1046-771 BCE). For Du Jinpeng 杜金鹏, a researcher at the Institute of Archaeology in Beijing, the discovery at Erlitou was evidence that the dragon was a ‘symbol of royal rights and social status’, a cultural association that endured for several thousand years thereafter. However, this remains a controversial point. In an interview with Science in 2009, Xu Hong 许宏, who directed excavations at Erlitou for a decade, said that research has been overshadowed for too long by such preoccupations with the dynastic tradition. Xu further criticised the Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project as ‘a kind of political propaganda’.

In an even older burial site in Xishuipo, also in Henan, that dates back to 4000-3000 BC, archaeologists found the body of tall adult male, thought to have a tribal chief or shaman, flanked by two elaborately formed shell mosaics (see figure 4). The one to his right depicted a tiger and the one on his left showed a dragon-like figure, which some scholars saw as having the sharp claws and long tail of an alligator.[3] This discovery generated great excitement for not just being one of the oldest representations of the ‘dragon’. The relative positions of the two mosaic animals were also taken by some scholars to be Neolithic origins of ancient Chinese cosmological symbols recorded only some 3,000 years later — with the Azure Dragon 青龍 representing the east and comprising stars from Virgo through Scorpius and the White Tiger 白虎 representing the west, and corresponding to Aries, Taurus and parts of Orion (see figure 5).[4]

Though we may never be certain of the animal inspiration behind the creation of the dragon, or whether it was indeed modelled on any real-life creature, one thing we know is that from as early as the Shang dynasty, the creature known as long 龍 — a term first translated into English as ‘dragon’ in the thirteenth century — had become associated with water and rainfall. Even today, we still find remnants of this belief. A faucet is called ‘the dragon’s head’ 龍頭 in Chinese and the dragon dance 舞龍, performed at Lunar New Year celebrations across the world, find its origin in ancient shamanistic rain dances.

In the Classic of Mountains and Seas 山海經, a ‘geographic survey and folkloric compendium’[5] dating back to the third-century BC, we find the following account of sympathetic magic:

The Yinglong 應龍 [often translated as the ‘Winged’ or ‘Responding’ Dragon] dwells in the Southern extremity. After he killed the gods Chiyou 蚩尤 and Father Kua 夸父, he could not return to the heavens. That is why down on earth there are so many droughts. When there is a drought, people make an image of Yinglong to obtain rain.[6]

We have no way of knowing what this Yinglong originally looked like. In an influential article on the religion and magic of the Shang dynasty, Chen Mengjia 陳夢家 (1911-1966), a poet, archaeologist, and foremost authority on oracle bones and bronze inscriptions, inferred that long was simply a ‘divine title’ 神號 for aquatic creatures used in Shang dynasty rainmaking rituals. According to Chen, the ‘Winged-Dragon’ was an elevated name for loaches and the ‘Hook-Dragon’ Goulong 勾龍, another mythical creature in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, referred to toads.[7]

Despite such humble origins, by the first century, the long had already assumed the form we now associate with the Chinese dragon. Wang Fu 王符 (circa. 85-163 AD), a scholar from the Han dynasty, described the dragon as having:

A camel’s head, a stag’s horns, a hare’s eyes, an ox’s ears, a snake’s neck, a clam’s belly, a carp’s scales, an eagle’s claws, and a tiger’s soles… When rain is to be expected, the dragons scream and their voices are like the sound made by striking copper basins…their breath becomes clouds which in turn conceal them…[8]

It was no coincidence that at around the same time, the dragon, the divine maker of rain, had come to symbolise the Son of Heaven 天子, or emperor. (Like the dragon, the sovereign is almost always male.) The Records of the Grand Historian Sima Qian 史記 (circa. 91 BC) referred to China’s first emperor, founder of the Qin dynasty, as the ‘ancestral dragon’ 祖龍. In a famous allegorical essay, the Tang dynasty statesman and exponent of Confucian rectitude Han Yu 韓愈 (768-824), lamented his unrecognised talents by comparing the emperor to the magnificent dragon, who nonetheless, relies on the clouds i.e. diligent officials like Han Yu himself, to exercise his supreme powers:

By roaring out his breath, the dragon forms the clouds. These clouds possess less spiritual power than the dragon. But it is by mounting these manifestations of breath that the dragon journeys to all corners of the empyrean. He presses close to the sun and the moon and obscures their radiance. He gives rise to thunder and lightning and brings about transformations of nature such that water pours down into the earth, submerging the hills and the valleys. How numinous are clouds![9]

By late imperial China, the dragon had become the most recognisable symbol of imperial power. The emperor alone wore the ‘dragon robes’, ruled from his ‘dragon throne’, and slept in his ‘dragon bed’. As a sign of imperial favour, ministers might be presented with the ‘python robe’ 蟒袍 with dragons pictured on them — but those dragons only had four-claws as opposed to the five-clawed dragon reserved exclusively for the emperor. Inside the Forbidden City, dragon motifs can be found on windows and doors, pillars and roofs, screens and walls. Even the drainage system consists of thousands of marble dragon heads that spout water from their mouths on rainy days. One incomplete count found some 14,986 dragons adorning the Hall of Supreme Harmony 太和殿, where emperors of the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties hosted their enthronement and wedding ceremonies.

After the fall of China’s last imperial dynasty in 1911, the dragon did not simply fade into history. Instead, it was incorporated into the design of the national emblem of the new Republic of China (see figure 6). This marked the beginning of the dragon’s transformation from an imperial symbol to a national — and ethnonationalist — emblem. In the ensuing decades, patriotic Chinese intellectuals, fearing that their new-found nation may be on the brink of destruction at the hands of imperialist powers, turned to the dragon in their search for a unifying national, cultural, and one may also add, masculine identity.

In 1942, five years into the war of resistance against Japanese occupation, Wen Yiduo 闻一多 (1899-1946), a poet and authority on the collection of shamanistic poetry Songs of the South (Chu ci 楚辭), published his influential study on the evolution of the Chinese dragon totem:

The dragon was simply the name of a kind of snake. It used to be the totem of one tribe. When this snake tribe conquered other tribes, it assimilated their totems, thus the snake came to have a horse’s head, a stag’s horns etc. and became what we know as the dragon today… For thousands of years, we have called ourselves the Huaxia; this Huaxia culture is the culture of the dragon tribe. In the past, emperors have described themselves as the embodiment of the dragon and the dragon was therefore the symbol of the state… Now that democracy has replaced the monarchy, the dragon has come to symbolise every citizen of the Chinese nation.

Despite obvious logical flaws in Wen Yiduo’s argument, and lack of proof for his dragon totem theory, the feeling of ethno-nationalistic pride he invested in the dragon at the time of a national crisis galvanised a generation of young readers. In the words of Shi Aidong 施愛東, a renowned scholar on Chinese folklore, ‘In the short span of 150 characters, Wen laid out the four transitions of the dragon, from “tribal totem” to “imperial symbol” to “national emblem” and to “every Chinese citizen”. One cannot help but marvel at the immense power of his poetic language.’

Yet, just two years later, Wen Yiduo launched a surprise attack on the dragon, demoting it to ‘an extremely devious snake’. This change of attitude was prompted by the publication of China’s Destiny 中國之命運 by Chiang Kai-shek 蔣介石, president of the Republic and leader of China’s Nationalist Party (KMT). This book, most likely authored by Chiang’s party theorist, T’ao Hsi-sheng 陶希聖, lamented the erosive effects of Western ideologies, particularly communism and liberalism, on the spirit and mind of China’s citizens, especially the youth, and called for moral regeneration through embracing traditional Confucian ethics.[10] For Wen Yiduo, an intellectual heavily influenced by the May Fourth Movement that denounced Confucianism and advocated for democracy and individual liberty, the book was an assault on the achievements of May Fourth. Concerned that the dragon could never be freed from despot traditions of China’s past, Wen sought to bring down this national totem he had so passionately helped to raise up.

On the morning of 15 July 1946, in the midst of a civil war between Chiang’s Nationalist Party and Mao’s Communist Party, Wen Yiduo delivered a fiery speech criticising the Nationalist Party’s reign of terror at the funeral of his friend Li Gongpu 李公朴, who had been assassinated by KMT secret agents three days earlier. That same afternoon, Wen himself became the victim of a KMT assassination. He was 48 years old.

Wen’s conflicted attitude towards the dragon foreshadowed some of the battles and debates that would play out in the latter half of the twentieth century. During the Cultural Revolution, the dragon was seen as a remnant of country’s feudal past and Red Guards attacked buildings and artefacts carrying dragon motifs; among the monuments they destroyed was a well-preserved Ming dynasty ‘Nine Dragon Wall’ in Anyang, Henan. With Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms, the rise of the dragon became synonymous with the rise of China in both domestic and international headlines. The ‘Heirs of the Dragon’ 龍的傳人, a popular song written by Hou Dejian 侯德健, then a university student in Taiwan, became the soundtrack of the 1980s, sung by those of Chinese descent around the world with a proud feeling that all belonged to the same ‘dragon tribe’.

As Linda Jaivin wrote at length in The Monkey and the Dragon, Hou Dejian, self-confessed ‘third-rate uni student, womaniser and bullshit artist’ had very different intentions when he originally wrote the song in 1979 after the US government severed diplomatic ties with Taipei to establish them with Beijing.[11] Likewise, Geremie Barmé has noted how Hou’s lyrics ‘describe a sense that many people have had of growing up…constricted by this snake-like totem and oppressed by its mighty claws’. Indeed, on Tiananmen Square in 1989, Hou would lead pro-democracy protesters to sing this song as a lament for the state of China and its inability to break away from autocratic traditions of its past.

Hou was not alone in his fight. Su Xiaokang 蘇曉康, one of the chief writers of River Elegy, described the 1980s as an era of ‘slaying the dragon’ 屠龍年代. For Su Xiaokang and his generation of intellectuals who grew up under Mao’s dictatorship, the dragon they were attacking was none other than Mao, who died in 1976, a year of the dragon. They believed that if the leadership under Deng would not thoroughly repudiate Mao’s legacy, there could be no real political reform, let alone democracy. Their fears proved right. Following the June 1989 crackdown on the pro-democracy movement, River Elegy was banned and blamed for helping to instigate the movement in the first place. Its creators, including Su Xiaokang, were either hunted down and detained, or forced into exile.

The ancient Chinese believed that in winter, the dragon sleeps curled up at the bottom of the sea. At the beginning of spring, it soars into the sky amidst whirling clouds and brings rainfall. The dragon’s cycles of ascent and descent find resonance in modern intellectuals’ affirmation and rejection as they attempt to create a better China. As we welcome the year of the dragon in 2024, we can expect that the dragon will be officially extoled — narcissistically and chauvinistically — as the unifying symbol of the Chinese state where all those of Chinese descent worldwide as well as all ethnic minorities within China fall under the same common identity of the ‘dragon tribe’. But already, Chinese netizens have begun picking apart this year’s theme for the annual Spring Gala: ‘Dragons take flight and the nation prospers’ 龙行龘龘, 欣欣家国. The character meaning ‘dragon taking flight’, da 龘, features a stack of three dragons 龍. Some thought it was a coded message about the need for everyone to have three children, i.e. little heirs of the dragon, while others saw a China where one dragon stands atop the others.

Notes

[1] John Thorbjarnarson and Xiaoming Wang, The Chinese Alligator: Ecology, Behavior, Conservation, and Culture, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, pp.25-30.

[2] Li Liu, ‘Urbanization in China: Erlitou and its hinterland’, in Glenn R. Storey ed., Urbanism in the Preindustrial World, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006, p.183.

[3] Thorbjarnarson and Wang, The Chinese Alligator, p.64.

[4] David W. Pankenier, Astrology and Cosmology in Early China: Conforming Earth to Heaven, Cambridge University Press, 2015, p.337.

[5] Richard E. Strassberg, A Chinese Bestiary: Strange Creatures from the Guideways through Mountains and Seas, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, p.3

[6] Translation modified based on Strassberg, A Chinese Bestiary, p.210

[7] In The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion, James George Frazer also noted the widespread connection across different cultures between frogs or toads and rainfall.

[8] Translation modified based on Marinus Willem de Visser, The Dragon in China and Japan, Amsterdam: Muller, 1913, pp. 66;70.

[9] Translation slightly modified based on Michael Loewe, ‘The Cult of the Dragon and the Invocation for Rain’ in Charles Le Blanc and Susan Blader eds., Chinese Ideas about Nature and Society: Studies in Honour of Derk Bodde, Hong Kong University Press, 1987, p.196.

[10] As Geremie Barmé observed in his introduction to The China Story Yearbook 2014: ‘the countervailing elements of Confucianism that supported dissent, criticism of excessive power and humanity are quietly passed over’. Online at: https://www.thechinastory.org/yearbooks/yearbook-2014/

[11] Linda Jaivin, The Monkey and the Dragon, Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2001, p.54.

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The male hare wildly kicks its feet,

The female hare has shifty eyes,

But when a pair of hares run side by side,

Who can tell a buck from doe? [1]

The difficulty of distinguishing the gender of rabbits (and hares, for distinction between the two species was not clearly made in the Chinese language) has led some ancient Chinese to believe that rabbits are androgynous. They become pregnant, some thought, by sucking on their fur and gazing at the moon. The Chinese name for rabbit, tu 兔, is said to derive from the idea that rabbits spit out (tu 吐) their young.

For the best iteration of beliefs related to the rabbit, one need look no further than the Biography of Mao Ying, written by the Tang dynasty statesman Han Yu 韩愈 (768-824), a well-known Confucian pedant and poet, but a forgotten humourist. Written in the style of a conventional historical biography, his piece turns out to be a fictitious account of a rabbit-fur writing brush: Mao 毛, can be a common surname but also stands for fur; Ying 颖 means intelligence as well as the tip of a brush. Crammed with clever double entendre, Han Yu’s parody resembles a literary riddle, and is written for the amusement of the educated reader. [2] Thus, its meaning must be carefully decoded to shine light on the author’s erudition and wit:

Mao Ying was a native of Central Mountain.

Translation: The rabbit-fur brush came from a region in Hebei famous for producing the best rabbit-fur brush.

His ancestor Ming Shi helped Yu the Great govern the East. For rendering service in the nourishment of living things, he was consequently enfeoffed with the lands of Mao.

Explanation: Ming Shi 明视 (‘bright eyes’) is another name for the rabbit, relating to the belief that they have keen vision. Yu the Great is one of the three mythical rulers of ancient China. Mao 卯 is a homophone of mao 毛 (fur), as well as the fourth of the twelve ‘earthly branches’ 地支 in the Chinese calendrical system, corresponding to the direction east and the animal rabbit.

Translation: The rabbit-fur brush descended from a lineage of ‘bright-eyes’ that had flourished in the land of fur since antiquity.

On his death, Ming Shi became one of the Twelve Spirits. He once said, ‘My descendants will be the posterity of a spirit-illuminate and cannot be the same as other creatures. They shall be born by spitting.’ [3]

Translation: Rabbit is one of the twelve zodiac signs, which also correspond to the twelve ‘earthly branches’. They are special because people believe that they give birth to their young by spitting them out!

By Han Yu’s time, the rabbit had been firmly woven into the myth of Chang’e 嫦娥, a female mortal who, after consuming her husband’s elixir of longevity, flew to the moon and became its guardian spirit. In some accounts of the story, a ‘jade rabbit’ 玉兔 — named for its pure white fur — was the original inhabitant of the moon; in other versions, it joined the goddess’ company out of sympathy for her loneliness. [4]

The pictured Tang dynasty bronze mirror depicts the moon goddess on one side and the jade rabbit, pounding the elixir of longevity, on the other. There is also a toad at the bottom, which according to Han Yu, gave the rabbit a ride on its back as they travelled to the moon together. In 2013, China’s third moon lander, named after the goddess Chang’e, took the toad’s role and delivered a robotic rover called ‘Jade Rabbit’ to the lunar surface.

Sometime in the seventeenth century, the rabbit managed to cast aside its role as the moon goddess’ sidekick and transformed itself into a local deity — Lord Rabbit 兔儿爷 — beloved by those living in northern China, especially in areas surrounding the capital Beijing. Before the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, colourful figurines of Lord Rabbit, made from clay or stitched fabric would begin piling up like mountains at the marketplaces of Beijing in the months leading up to the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival. These figurines ranged from one to three feet tall, some were dressed in an official’s gown and cap, others in full armour with a military flag sticking up from the back. Parents would let their children choose one to take home. [5]

Although these figures of Lord Rabbit were anthropomorphically male in appearance; the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival — where offerings were made to the moon (associated with the feminine yin in Chinese cosmology), traditionally excluded adult men from participating in its rituals. As women made offerings to the moon, asking for its blessing and for the birth of (more) sons, their children knelt next to them, praying to the figurine of Lord Rabbit for protection from disease and plague. Then, the day after the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival, the rabbit figurine was respectfully removed from the altar and given to kids to play with.

In the spoken dialect of Qing dynasty (1644-1911) Beijing, ‘rabbit’ became a slur for catamites, male actors (particularly those impersonating women on stage) and more generally, male prostitutes. (Interestingly, the same association between rabbits and homosexuals existed in ancient Rome. [6]) According to one elaborate theory, the association between rabbits and homosexuals came from the fact that, as previously mentioned, rabbit correspond to mao 卯, the fourth of the twelve ‘earthly branches’. The mortise and tenon joints commonly used in traditional Chinese architecture, meanwhile, are called sun mao 榫卯. Apparently, the practice of inserting one a piece of wood into a hole in another piece of wood became euphemism for anal sex. [7] A simpler explanation could be that the rabbit was still widely perceived as androgynous, and therefore a suitable metaphor for men who were in some way ‘feminine’. In modern-day speech, some still use the phrase ‘son of a rabbit’ 兔崽子 as an insult.

In 2006, a Daoist priest named Lu Wei-ming 卢威明 founded a shrine dedicated to the Rabbit God 兔儿神, patron saint of homosexuals, in Yonghe City, Taiwan. According to Lu, the Rabbit God is based on a historical person in the Qing dynasty, a man from Fujian province called Hu Tianbao 胡天保, who fell in love with a young, handsome imperial inspector. One day, the story goes, the inspector caught Hu peeping at his naked buttocks through a hole in the privy wall and had Hu beaten to death.

In eighteenth-century Fujian, which is just across the strait from Taiwan, there was indeed an organised cult centred on Hu Tianbao, believed to have the power in the afterlife to grant the wishes of men wanting have sex with younger men. However, according to Harvard professor Michael Szonyi, the association of Hu Tianbao with the Rabbit God was entirely invented by the poet, painter, and gourmet Yuan Mei 袁枚 (1716-1797). [8] In Yuan’s famous anthology of tall tales — What the Master Did Not Talk of  子不语, a reference to a passage in the Analects of Confucius: ‘The Master never talked of wonders, feats of strength, disorders of nature or spirits’ — we find the following account:

A month after Hu’s death, he appeared in a local man’s dream and said: ‘I certainly deserved to die for my feelings have violated propriety and my actions have offended an honourable man. But it was truly a feeling of love, a momentary obsession. This is not the same as causing harm to someone. Officials in the Netherworld all mocked and made fun of me; but none were angry with me. Now they have made me the Rabbit God, charged specifically with supervising the affairs in the world of men who appreciate other men. You may erect a temple for me, and call on the people to burn incense.’ [9]

We do not know whether Yuan Mei wrote this tale for his own amusement, or to express his sympathy for Hu, as hinted by the attitude held by ‘officials in the Netherworld’. Having spent nearly a decade in the capital as a student and official, and formed friendships with male actors, he may have been subverting dominant culture by fusing the popular Beijing deity Lord Rabbit, and the slur for homosexual, with the cult of Hu Tianbao, which he most likely heard from his friend, Zhu Gui 朱珪 (1731–1807), an official tasked with eliminating the cult in Fujian. [10] Regardless, Yuan Mei’s idea eventually found an audience in Taiwan through Lu Wei-ming, who elevated role of the Rabbit God to the protector of the LGBTQ community, as part of his greater fight for recognition and inclusion of LGBTQ into the Daoist faith, as well as Taiwanese society at large.

Just as the rabbit became a symbol for LGBTQ pride on Taiwan, it has also taken on an additional set of associations in mainland China. Around 2010, in a handful of online forums dedicated to military affairs and foreign relations, the word ‘rabbit’ became synonymous with the PRC. One explanation stipulates that this usage was originally employed by patriotic netizens to describe China’s international image as a cuddly bunny, ‘harmless to humans and animals alike’人畜无害. Another theory traces its origin to a viral video of a hare kicking an eagle as it tries to dodge an attack, which has since been interpreted to mean: China, minds its own business but will fight back if provoked by America, the predatory eagle.

In 2011, the year of the rabbit, a webcomic entitled Year Hare Affair 那年那兔那些事儿 became a sensation on the Chinese internet, attracting a total of one billion views. Drawing on historical events of the twentieth-century, It tells the story of the Rabbit family (representing the Communist Party of China and its supporters) working hard to defend their ‘flower-planting household’ (zhong hua jia 种花家: a homophone for 中华家, the family of the Chinese nation) against attacks and oppression from Chickens (Japan, vilified from the nation of the crane to that of the chicken), Bald Eagles (the United States) and Bears (the Soviet Union bear has the hammer and sickle of Communism on its stomach, while the Russia bear, featured later, has the number ‘1’ on its stomach, signifying that it is the eldest son of the Soviet Union. Ukraine is also represented by a bear with the number ‘2’ on its stomach, meaning that it is the ‘second son’.)

The creator of Year Hare Affair, Lin Chao 林超 told an interviewer that he was a huge fan of military aircraft as a child. When he became older, he loved chatting on military forums, and his comics was inspired by discussions in these forums. When asked why he chose to use the rabbit to represent China as opposed to the more obvious national symbol of the dragon, Lin replied, ‘There’s an old saying, “we must go through the year of the rabbit to get to the year of the dragon that follows”. This may be true for our country: only after going through a phase of being “rabbits” can we fully emerge as “dragons”.’

In 2015, Lin’s comic was adapted into an animation series by the same name, and was promoted by the official accounts such as Xinhua News Agency and the Communist Youth League on Weibo. As of 2020, the animation series has attracted more than 800 million views on video streaming sites in China. Lin won an award in 2018 for being a model of online ‘positive energy’, a term central to media and ideological control in the Xi Jinping era.

Sandwiched between the fearsome tiger, whose place it is taking in 2023, and the magnificent dragon, which is due to take over in 2024, the rabbit may seem rather common or garden. Nonetheless, ideas and beliefs relating to its image help bring to the fore some of the unorthodox and even queer aspects of the Chinese tradition. The inherent ambiguity of the rabbit, which traces back to its difficult-to-discern gender, suggests that symbols and meaning ascribed to it will constantly mutate and change. The rabbit thus stands for heterogeneity in a country that has always strived for the opposite. Whatever new meaning it takes on, we welcome the year of the rabbit, hoping that it is a year where ambiguities and multiple voices will flourish.

Notes

[1] Translation modified based on Wilt L. Idema in Shiamin Kwa and Wilt L. Idema trans., Mulan: Five Versions of a Classic Chinese Legend, with Related Texts, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2010, p.3.

[2] Von Herbert Franke, ‘A note on parody in Chinese traditional literature’, Oriens Extremus 18, no. 2 (1971): 247.

[3] Translation of Han Yu’s text and related notes modified based on two educated readers, sinologist William H. Nienhauser Jr. and James R. Hightower: see William H. Nienhauser Jr., ‘An Allegorical Reading of Han Yü’s “Mao-Ying Chuan” (Biography of Fur Point).’ Oriens Extremus 23, no. 2 (1976): 155-156; James R. Hightower, ‘Han Yü as Humorist’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, (1984): 10-11.

[4] Yang Lihui and An Deming, Handbook of Chinese Mythology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 88-89.

[5] There are ample records of Lord Rabbit in the ‘jottings’ 筆記 of the Ming and Qing. Here we base our descriptions from those mentioned in 侧帽餘譚 (1878) and 燕京歲時記 (circa 1900).

[6] John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, p.306.

[7] Zhang Jie 张杰, Investigation into Depictions of Homosexuality in Pre-modern China 中国古代同性恋图考, Yunan: Yunan renmin chubanshe, 2008, p.228.

[8] Arthur Waley, Yuan Mei: Eighteenth Century Chinese Poet, London: Allen and Unwin, 1956, p. 120.

[9] Translation modified based on Michael Szonyi, ‘The Cult of Hu Tianbao and the Eighteenth-Century Discourse of Homosexuality, Late Imperial China 19, no. 1 (1998): 6. doi:10.1353/late.1998.0004.

[10] Ibid.

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