Nine Sons of the Dragon: Names, Meanings and Where They Sit

Some time in the reign of the Hongzhi emperor, who ruled from 1488 to 1505, a palace eunuch arrived at the office of one of the most senior officials in China with a question from the emperor. What, the emperor wanted to know, were the names of the dragon's nine sons? The official was Li Dongyang, Grand Secretary and the leading poet of his day. He did not know.

What happened next is the whole story of the nine sons, and Li wrote it down himself. But first, the sons, because you have almost certainly met them.

The nine sons, one by one

The saying goes that the dragon had nine sons and none of them turned out a dragon. Each loved one thing, and each was given the job that suited it. Here is the list Li Dongyang finally sent to the emperor, in his own order, with the place he says you could see each one in his day:

1. Qiuniu 囚牛 loves music. He is the little beast carved on the head of the huqin, the two-string fiddle. 2. Yazi 睚眦 loves killing. He is the dragon mouth that swallows the blade where a sword meets its handle. 3. Chaofeng 嘲风 loves danger. He is the beast running along the corner of a hall's roof. 4. Pulao 蒲牢 loves to cry out. He is the looped knob on top of a bell. 5. Suanni 狻猊 loves to sit. He is the lion under the Buddha's throne. 6. Baxia 霸下 loves to bear weight. He is the tortoise under a stone stele. 7. Bi'an 狴犴 loves lawsuits. He is the lion's head over the gate of a prison. 8. Bixi 赑屃 loves literature. He is the dragons that coil around the face of a stele. 9. Chiwen 螭吻 loves to swallow. He is the gaping head at each end of a hall's main ridge.

If that list does not match the one you saw somewhere else, you are in good company. The version most often printed today comes from a younger scholar, Yang Shen, and it brings in three sons Li never mentions: the taotie, who loves food and drink and sits on the lids of cauldrons; a water-loving creature called gongfu who stands on the pillars of bridges; and jiaotu, who looks like a river snail, loves to keep shut, and holds the ring of a door in his teeth. Yang's list also moves the name bixi onto the stele tortoise, which is where most people now put it. We will come to why the lists disagree. It is the best part.

Where you will meet them

Nobody needs to visit a museum for this. The nine sons are a field guide to a Chinese building, and once you know them you cannot stop seeing them.

On the roof

Look up at the main ridge of any palace hall or large temple and you will find a pair of enormous open mouths, one at each end, swallowing the ridge. That is chiwen. The usual explanation is that he is a water creature, and that a water creature at the top of a timber building is a standing order against fire. Lower down, along the sloping corners, runs a little procession of beasts in glazed tile, and at the head of it, according to Li Dongyang, is chaofeng, the son who loves danger. Of course he does. He lives on the edge of a roof.

Under the stone

The tortoise straining under a memorial stele is the most monumental of the sons, and the most common. You find him at the Ming Tombs outside Beijing, in the courtyards of Confucian temples, at the roadsides of old provincial towns, carrying a slab twice his height and looking, frankly, put upon. His name is older than the list. In a rhapsody on the Western Capital written by the astronomer Zhang Heng early in the second century CE, the word bixi describes a giant god straining with all his might to heave two mountains apart so the Yellow River could flow between them. Bixi first meant the effort itself. It became the tortoise who makes it.

On the bell and the gate

Every big temple bell hangs from a loop on its crown, and the loop is a dragon: pulao, the son who loves to cry out. This one has the oldest pedigree of the lot. A third-century commentator named Xue Zong, explaining a line about bells in an old rhapsody, wrote that the pulao lives by the sea and is terrified of whales, and that when a whale strikes it, it bellows. So, he says, a bell that is meant to be loud gets a pulao on top, and the beam that strikes it is carved as a whale. Big temple bells in China are still rung by a swinging log rather than a clapper.

At ground level the sons keep guard. Bi'an, who loves lawsuits, glared from the gates of prisons and magistrates' courts. Jiaotu, in Yang Shen's list, is the bronze mask clamping the ring on a big red door, the son who likes everything closed. Next to the jiaotu at a palace gate you will usually find a pair of stone lions, who are not sons at all, though Li Dongyang's suanni is their cousin: the lion the Buddha sits on.

In the hand

The smaller sons live on things you hold. Yazi, who loves killing, is the dragon at the hilt of a sword, and his name is a borrowed phrase. In the Records of the Grand Historian, the statesman Fan Ju is said to have repaid every meal anyone ever gave him and avenged every angry glare, and the word for that glare is yazi. A son named after a grudge is a sensible thing to put on a weapon. Qiuniu, the music-lover, sits on the pegbox of the huqin, and jinni, the smoke-loving lion of Yang Shen's list, crouches on the lid of an incense burner.

"Nine sons, and not one a dragon"

The saying outlived the list. In Chinese, the dragon had nine sons and none became a dragon is something a parent says about children who turned out nothing like each other, or like the parents. It is affectionate, mostly. It is the Chinese way of saying that a family can share every gene and still produce a bookworm, a brawler and one who sits on the roof all day.

The emperor's question

Back to Li Dongyang, unable to answer. He left a note about it in his collected works, and it is one of the most candid things a Chinese official ever wrote.

When the emperor's question arrived, Li says, he remembered seeing the names "in miscellaneous books" as a boy but could not produce them in a hurry, and did not know where they came from in any case. So he asked around. A Hanlin compiler named Luo Qi managed five or six, which he had from his own teacher, and that was all. Then Li asked Liu Ji, a mid-ranking official at the Ministry of Personnel, and Liu Ji came back with an old booklet that had the whole list copied onto its cover. Where had the booklet got it? Liu Ji "did not know where it came from either." Li sent it up to the emperor anyway, and then, slightly shaken, wrote the list down for posterity, "fearing it would be lost again."

Notice what this means. The canonical list of the dragon's nine sons, the one carved on souvenirs and printed on posters, entered the written record because the Grand Secretary of the Ming empire was set a pop quiz, failed it, and copied the answer off the cover of somebody's notebook. Nobody in the chain, by his own account, knew its source.

The second list is the first list, remembered

Now for the rival list. Yang Shen, born in 1488, was a generation younger than Li and knew him well. In his own collected works he tells the same story: the Hongzhi emperor wrote a little note in his own hand, Li answered it, relying on Luo Qi and Liu Ji. And then he adds the sentence that explains everything. Li, he says, once told him the list in person, and "I record it here now as best I remember it."

As best he remembered it. Yang Shen's nine are: bixi the stele tortoise, chiwen on the roof (now a son who loves to gaze into the distance), pulao on the bell, bi'an at the prison gate, the taotie on the cauldron lid, gongfu on the bridge, yazi on the sword, jinni (a smoke-loving lion) on the incense burner, and jiaotu on the door. Then, unable to stop at nine, he adds a tenth, the jinwu, a winged creature with the head of a beautiful woman and a fish's tail, who never sleeps and is therefore used for the night watch.

So the two lists that have been "politely disagreeing" for five centuries are not two traditions. They are one conversation, written down once by the man who had it and once by the man he told, years later.

Before they were sons

Except that there is an even older list, and it does not have sons in it at all.

Lu Rong, a Ming official who died in 1494, kept a notebook of things that interested him. In it he copied a passage he had found in the commonplace book of a villager at a place called Nicun, under the heading "old alternative names of objects." It gives fourteen names, each with a shape, a temperament and a place on an object. It is unmistakably the same menagerie, and nobody in it is anybody's son.

Lay the three side by side and you can watch the beasts change jobs.

The taotie is the giveaway. In Lu Rong's list it loves water and stands at the heads of bridges. In Yang Shen's, the taotie has become the glutton everyone knows it as, and a new creature has been hired for the bridges. Our reading, and it is only a reading, is that Yang's half-remembered nine came out as Li's story crossed with a roster very like Lu Rong's: jiaotu, jinni, jinwu and the taotie appear in Lu and Yang but nowhere in Li.

Lu Rong did one more thing, and it is the most Ming-scholar thing in this whole story. The villager's notebook claimed the names came from the Classic of Mountains and Seas and the Treatise on Curiosities, the two great catalogs of strange creatures. Lu went and looked. "None of it is there," he reports, and then, being fair-minded, wonders whether the notebook's author had seen complete editions that he hadn't. He also notes that people of his day called the door creature a "drum nail," which he says is wrong. Even the corrections had corrections.

Older than the family

None of this means the individual sons were invented in the 1490s. Several are much older than the family they were later adopted into.

The pulao and his whale go back to Xue Zong in the third century, quoted in the seventh by Li Shan, whose commentary on the great anthology of early Chinese literature is how most of these lines survive. The bixi was a word for heroic strain in Zhang Heng's rhapsody nearly fourteen hundred years before it was a son. The yazi is a glare from the Records of the Grand Historian, around 90 BCE. The suanni is the lion, already entered under that name in the ancient dictionary Erya, a story our page on the guardian lions traces. And the taotie is the mask on Shang bronzes, some nine hundred years older than its name, as our taotie page explains. What the Ming did was gather a loose crowd of ornament-creatures, some ancient, some anonymous, and give them a single father.

The family idea caught on fast. Journey to the West, printed in 1592, a century after Li's pop quiz, gives a Dragon King's household exactly nine sons with exactly these sorts of jobs. They are the children of the Jing River Dragon King, the one the novel has beheaded for fudging the rain (the full story is on our Dragon King page), whose youngest was raised by their uncle, the Dragon King of the Western Sea. Eight are model civil servants: the fifth keeps the Buddha's bell, the sixth holds down the roof-ridges of the gods, the seventh guards the Jade Emperor's pillar. The ninth, an alligator-dragon too young for a post, has gone into business as a river monster, and Monkey has to deal with him. It is the nine-sons idea turned into a staff list, with one bad hire.

Nobody knows, and that is the point

A century after Li Dongyang, the essayist Xie Zhaozhe copied out the nine yet again, in about 1616, and added a verdict: "This saying has been handed around in recent times, and no one has traced where it comes from." He then offered his own explanation for why the dragon had so many odd children, which is that the dragon is lustful by nature and will couple with anything. It is not a scholarly position. It is, however, more honest than most.

So here is what can be said with confidence. The nine sons are not in any classic. Their roster was written down in the reign of the Hongzhi emperor, around 1500, by a Grand Secretary who could not answer the emperor's question and copied the answer from an old booklet of unknown origin, and the second famous version is that same story, retold from memory by a younger friend. What cannot be said is where the booklet got it. Nobody knows.

And it hardly matters. The sons have done their jobs regardless, carrying the steles, swallowing the ridges, bellowing from the bells, holding the doors shut, for five hundred years, on a list that started as an emperor's idle question and a scholar's slightly embarrassed note. Each of them is a dragon's son, and not one of them is a dragon. They are much more useful than that.