Hello, my name is Wang Yan and I’m a reporter with NewsChina. With our podcast, we aim to provide insight into the current trends of modern China allowing you to clearly see what’s happening today through a historical lens.

Today we introduce China’s First Jade Dragon, one of the most representative artifacts of Hongshan culture and the earliest prototype of the Chinese dragon.

At the cultural relic exhibition entitled “The Making of Zhongguo – Origins, Developments and Achievements of Chinese Civilization” held recently at China’s Palace Museum, also known as the Forbidden City, three top national treasures: the He Zun, the Liangzhu Jade Cong, and the Hongshan Jade Dragon secured the most prominent places.

Visitors could easily relate to the important cultural messages conveyed by these three relics – He Zun is the oldest known bronzeware item with an inscription including the word “Zhongguo”, or China, the Liangzhu Jade Cong represents China’s earliest jade culture and civilization, and the Hongshan Jade Dragon is among the earliest examples of Chinese dragon culture. Both jade culture and dragon culture are the unique representations of Chinese civilization, and the Hongshan Jade Dragon combines them both. It is a rare cultural icon, showcasing Chinese prehistoric civilization.

Three similar Hongshan Jade Dragon objects have been unearthed. In addition to the jade dragon displayed at the exhibition, which is part of the Palace Museum’s collection of cultural relics, the other two are part of the collections of the National Museum of China and the Ongniud Banner Museum (翁牛特旗) in the city of Chifeng, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. The three C-shaped jade dragons are of a similar size, but the color of each one is slightly different. While experts have argued that they are jades of the same period with the same function, they were unearthed separately without other cultural relics, and to this day still remain “mysterious”. 

The pale green piece housed at the National Museum of China is known as the “First Dragon of China” because it proved to be the earliest example of a dragon-shaped artifact to be unearthed in the country. In January 2002, it was listed by the National Cultural Heritage Administration as one of the 64 designated historical artifacts that can never leave Chinese soil. What’s more, it is also unlikely to ever be put on display outside of the National Museum of China.

In 1971, Zhang Fengxiang, a farmer in the Ongniud Banner happened to dig out an “iron hook” while planting trees near his home. He immediately gave it to his four-year-old brother to play with. The child tied a rope to the artifact and dragged it along the ground for fun. Eventually, the “rust” on its surface chipped off to reveal the shiny and translucent jade underneath. Zhang realized that this was an important item and handed it over to the cultural center of Ongniud Banner. Staff at the cultural center confirmed that it was indeed a piece of precious jadeware, and bought it from Zhang for 30 yuan, about US$4.4 – equal to the price paid for another national treasure, He Zun, when it was acquired by a museum in western China’s Shaanxi Province. Back then, most Chinese people earned a monthly salary of around 36 yuan. 

Although the relic was acquired by the cultural center, it was placed in a drawer for more than 10 years and forgotten.

In 1983, the staff of the cultural center read a story in the newspaper about the discovery of several jade pig dragons with a similar shape at a Hongshan site – an area that once belonged to a Neolithic culture in the West Liao river basin in northeast China which dates back to around 4700 BC to 2900 BC. The staff quickly realized that the jade item they had hidden away in a drawer might be part of a bigger story. They went to Beijing to seek help from experts to identify the artifact.

The fine, smooth jade artifact was finally in the hands of Su Bingqi, a leading archaeologist and one of the 14 founders of the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He was excited to announce that it was, indeed, a marvelous piece, that it was clear that the artifact is a representative object belonging to Hongshan culture and that it may be a little older than the jade pig dragons. It was later identified as the “First Dragon of China”.

Hongshan culture was first identified by Japanese and French archaeologists more than 100 years ago, with the discovery of some stone artifacts and pottery fragments. It was not until the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 that it was officially named Hongshan culture. After a massive excavation in 1983, it was proved that Hongshan culture existed during the same time period as Yangshao culture, another Neolithic culture that existed extensively along the middle reaches of the Yellow River in China from around 5000 BC to 3000 BC. In terms of jade production, the work of the  Honghsan culture is considered superior to that of its Yangshao counterpart.

Over the years, Chinese civilizations were centered around Henan and Shanxi provinces in central China, nobody had ever imagined that the earliest dragon-shaped artifacts would appear north of the Great Wall, where nomadic lifestyles flourished. 

How could Chinese civilization have started from there? For thousands of years, there has been a misunderstanding among Chinese people. The Great Wall, continuously built from the 3rd century BC to the 17th century AD, and with a total length of more than 20,000 kilometers, was regarded as the boundary between the heartland of China, the region known as Zhongyuan in the lower and middle reaches of the Yellow River, and the grasslands beyond the Great Wall, as well as the boundary between civilization and “barbarism”. 

Zhongyuan has long been regarded as the birthplace of Chinese civilization. The emergence of “China’s First Dragon”, however, drew the eyes of historians and archaeologists north of the Great Wall for the first time, and provided a breakthrough in understanding the concept of China’s cultural geography. 

The precious artifact is a C-shaped piece of jade with the head of a beast carved at one end and the body of a snake. Speculation about the head abounded. Some believed it to be a pig, while others said it was a bear. There are also those that thought it was a deer, and claimed that behind the head is a curled-up “mane” like that of a horse. The mane gives the impression of a creature in flight, which is divided into two forks and became known as the “jade pig-dragon”. It wasn’t until 2003 that archaeologists found an even earlier dragon-shaped product with a boar’s skull at the Xinglongwa Culture Relic Site (兴隆洼文化遗址), a Neolithic culture based around the border of Liaoning and the Inner Mongolia autonomous region at the Liao River basin in northeast China. 

It further helped to conclude that the dragon head was probably that of a pig. The pig not only represents bravery, but also indicates that it was the first domesticated animal, providing meat for people of that period. Within the area of Hongshan culture, bones of oxen, lambs, pigs and deer have been unearthed, though in small numbers. The emergence of animal husbandry is an important embodiment of the progress of civilization.

In the 1940s, famed Chinese poet Wen Yiduo proposed a question: why is the totem of Chinese people the  dragon, a creature that does not exist in real life? And why is it sometimes a combination of nine animals, and other times a dozen creatures? He provided a possible answer that through the course of Chinese history, it was one tribe that annexed another, and the totems of the two tribes merged into one, becoming the earliest prototype of the dragon, before a third tribe was then annexed, and then a fourth, and so on. As more tribes combined, the Chinese nation became richer and clearer in the image of the dragon. 

The dragon artifact, 26 centimeters in height, is perforated in the middle. After attaching a rope, the dragon’s head and tail are on the same level, indicating that this artifact is used for hanging. But it is too big to be an ornament, so it is thought to be nothing more than a ritual item, a sacrificial object to worship god, representing the highest standard of sacrificial objects.

Only nobles would use the best jade to offer sacrifices. Jade was regarded as the most precious stone in ancient China, symbolizing purity and moral integrity. The emergence of jade ritual items not only represents the formation process of the Chinese nation, but also demonstrates the emergence of a class division.

Famed archeologist Su Bingqi argued that the Hongshan culture beyond the Great Wall, the Liangzhu Culture in the coastal areas in provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and the Sanxingdui culture in central China’s Sichuan Province developed and influenced each other over a long period of time, forming a more powerful and influential civilization in central China and passed down knowledge from generation to generation, despite these cultures flourishing in areas separated by geographical distance. These jade dragons contain the “master password” of ancient Chinese civilization and provide a unique perspective from which to view the grand picture of Chinese prehistoric civilization.

That is end of our podcast. Thank you to our writer Song Yimin, translator Du Guodong, and copy editor James McCarthy. We hope you enjoyed it and thank you for listening. See you next week.