The sage Confucius once sought the counsel of another wise man, Laozi (Lao Tzu), the founder of Taoism, 20 years his senior. "Beyond appearances and behavior that are less than sharp, there often lies a noble soul," Laozi told Confucius, who was probably in his 20s or 30s when this encounter happened, in the first half of the sixth century BC.

"Rid yourself of arrogance and desire, and rein in your vanity and self-delusion, none of which will serve you well. That's all I have to say."

A bronze mirror with dragon design from the eighth to ninth centuries. CHINA DAILY

Laozi is reputed to have composed Tao Te Ching (Dao De Jing, the foundational work of Taoism) in just one session, and this one meeting with Confucius was apparently all that was needed to awe this equally brilliant mind.

"I know that birds can fly, fish can swim, and beasts can run," Confucius would later tell his disciples. "To capture them you need arrows, angling lines and nets. But I had no idea of a dragon, riding on winds and clouds, and soaring to heaven — until I met Laozi."

In short, a dragon could be neither defined nor confined.

Four centuries after that meeting, Confucianism was enshrined by a powerful Chinese emperor as the guiding ideology for his society. Yet Taoism continued to exert its influence culturally and artistically. In due time both incorporated the image of a dragon in their visual expressions.

Confucius died in 479 BC, and his humble residence in what is today the city of Qufu, Shandong province, was turned into a memorial the following year. In the ensuing centuries, the small compound was continuously expanded and added to, until it became the ultimate shrine for the wise man — the temple of all Confucius temples in China. One of its most remarkable architectural features was 10 carved stone columns in front of the temple's main hall, underneath its eaves.

The columns are wrapped in the scaled, sinuous bodies of majestic dragons, half-hidden in clouds. Manes billowing and eyes glistening with intensity, they are there to watch over the sacred place and to ensure the social order as envisioned by the master philosopher.

The columns were erected around 1500, during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), with major renovations done during the ensuing Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). In court portraits both the Ming and Qing rulers routinely wear voluminous dragon robes whose resplendent patterns, woven or embroidered into shimmering silk, constitute for many the most iconic images of a Chinese dragon.

Equally well-known, at least to aficionados of ancient Chinese art, is a mid-13th-century ink painting titled Nine Dragons, held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Within a space of 9 meters — the entire work stretches about 15 meters, including many postscripts — the artist Chen Rong captured the elusive nature of his mythical protagonists by letting them in and out of a seemingly endless continuum of clouds, mist and whirlpools. The hand scroll, painted during the rule of Zhao Yun, a devout Taoist and fifth emperor of the Southern Song Dynasty (1127–1279), is believed to have referred directly to the dynamic force of nature that Taoism has long celebrated.

Elsewhere, the dragon, painted in gold, lends itself to a 15th-century red lacquer box containing Buddhist sutras before making another appearance alongside a tiger in two hanging scrolls flanking a wooden statue of Guanyin, a Buddhist icon known as the goddess of mercy.

All evidence points to Chinese dragons moving freely between the worlds of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. With their powerful claws gripping the imagination of generations of Chinese, they propelled their way across the country's cultural and artistic history, becoming an enduring phenomenon with a profound impact on the nation's consciousness.

The answer to the obvious question of where the Chinese dragon came from is as elusive as the creature itself.

Based on the dragon's scaled, serpentine body, many researchers have suggested a connection with either snake or crocodile or both. While the former seems to have the capacity to arouse awe and fear, and has served throughout human history as a totem for many ancient cultures, the latter is believed to have once existed in relatively large numbers in the Yellow River Basin, one of the cradles of Chinese civilization.

Other experts have gone a few steps further. Some, after having studied the oracle bone script carved by ancient Chinese somewhere between the 17th and 11th centuries BC, posit that the image of a dragon may have been born out of that of a seahorse. Others point to the colossal column of a tornado reaching down from a turbulent sky, saying that is what I Ching (Book of Changes), an ancient Chinese divination text, meant in its description of a dragon that "battled in the wilderness, its blood the color of a reddish dark (heaven) and yellow (earth)".

Others propose, if tentatively, that a dragon took its jagged form from lightning, and its sound — the Chinese word for dragon is pronounced loong — from the thunderous roar that follows.

All those natural phenomena are linked, directly or indirectly, to one element: water.

On one hand, depictions abound in ancient Chinese literature of tempestuous dragons that would announce their arrival by a loud rumble, before dumping their fury in a torrential downpour that would render the world blurry. On the other hand, a large part of the dragon worship that was to evolve later was centered on its power over the weather, either showering rain on cracked earth or making it stop once the land was flooded. Across the country, numerous dragon king temples were built, all by those praying for a good harvest, many still in existence today.

It is just as interesting to know that Dong Zhongshu (179-104 BC), a prominent thinker and influential politician during the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 24), once wrote about invoking dragons during drought, by making clay figurines and having young boys pace and dance among them. Dong, who acted as a trusted counselor to the powerful Western Han Emperor Wudi, was responsible for putting Confucianism on the pedestal, once and for all, by making it the official ideology for all the Chinese imperial states that followed.

Sending out envoys on a westward journey that was to give rise to the ancient Silk Road, Emperor Wudi also redrew the map for China, partly by driving back invading forces from the northern steppes, military campaigns deemed to have taken his armies, at one point, to Lake Baikal in southern Siberia. Some scholars believe that was the place referred to as "the North Sea" by ancient Chinese texts, which talked about "the Four Seas" being guarded by mighty dragons. (The other three correspond with what is today called the South China Sea, East China Sea and Qinghai Lake in Qinghai province, western China.)

Mythology, after all, may not be as removed from history as most people tend to think.

When it comes to habits and traits, the Chinese dragon, dwelling either in the clouds or at the bottom of lakes, seems to have little in common with its Western counterpart, which occupies lairs or caves. While fire-breathing Western dragons are often portrayed in classic literature as a destructive force, the water-spraying Chinese dragons are mostly venerated for being a savior and enabler capable of bringing an abundant yield of crops or simply good fortune.

Thus comes their well-earned place in the Chinese zodiac, which assigns an animal and its reputed attributes to each year in a repeating 12-year cycle. The dragon is there with the tiger, the ox, the horse, and eight others, the only one absent from real life.

Yet the dragon seems to have worked that absence to its own advantage, engaging the creative imagination of Chinese artists and artisans from time immemorial.

Take for example the world-renowned bronze wares made throughout the Shang and Zhou dynasties between the 17th century and third century BC. It was on the surfaces of these wares that dragon images effectively went into a visual explosion, their bodies undulating and intertwining with remarkable grace and precision.

The complexity of the patterns points to the sophisticated thinking behind the painstaking effort the making of such extravagant wares must have entailed. These were sacrificial bronzes used during rituals by the same people who had engraved the word dragon on oracle bones for augury purposes.

The Shang people, in their endeavor to communicate with heaven and earth and those who preceded them, seemed to have once again turned to the dragon that, by traversing the space between the terrestrial and the celestial, also helped to bridge the worlds of the human and the divine, the mortal and the eternal.

Inseparable from that sense of divinity was a permanency that people had always longed for themselves. For members of the ruling elite who lived during the Western Han Dynasty, one way to achieve it was to be laid to rest with a casket laden with jade, a material that, as with the dragon, Chinese culture has treated with reverence.

From the burial ground of a vassal king in today's Xuzhou city, Jiangsu province, archaeologists unearthed what is believed to be some of the most majestic jade dragons yielded by any Han Dynasty tomb, or for that matter any ancient Chinese tomb.

Horned and bearded, with flowing mane on the back and upwardly curled tufts of hair sprouting from the ankles, these S-shaped dragons are an amalgam of fantastical details, all contained within the graceful curves which in turn were realized with powerful simplicity. Their task was to carry the soul of the deceased to heaven while keeping the body intact, until the two were reunited.

Nobleness, the very quality the ancient Chinese associated with jade, was exactly what they expected from the dragon. Since the concept of "rule by virtue" was deeply embedded in Confucianism, it seems only natural that the dragon, a symbol of moral strength, would gradually evolve into an emblem of royal power.

No one knows exactly when the idea that a Chinese emperor was a "real dragon" — a man mandated by Heaven to rule — started to take hold. However, Zhao Feng, a former director of the China National Silk Museum in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, says dragon robes as we know them today have probably existed since the time of the powerful Tang empire (618-907), whose territories extended all the way westward to present-day Afghanistan.

"No contemporaneous images have been found of a dragon robedonning Tang emperor," Zhao says. "However, we do have a mural from the Mogao Caves showing a Uygur ruler who lived in the late 10th century, in the decades after Tang's demise, wearing a dress decorated with the iconic dragon roundel pattern."

Sitting on the ancient Silk Road in what is now the city of Dunhuang, Gansu province, the world-renowned caves Zhao refers to stood witness to the frequent cultural exchanges along the route.

The oldest archaeological artifact of the dragon robe, Zhao says, belonged to a ruler of the Liao Dynasty (916-1125) of North China, founded by a clan of the ethnic minority Khitan people. The Khitan rulers, while pushing their borders against their neighbor, the ethnic majority Han people-dominated Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127), were more than eager to take a few pages from their rival's cultural books.

This was before the Mongol rulers of the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) codified, for the first time, the use of dragon robes as the official court dress. The same people also put carved jade dragons on the top of their headdresses.

"Such was the symbolic significance of the dragon that it cut through various cultural divides to be embraced by all who considered themselves legitimate rulers on the Chinese land," Zhao says.

In the meantime, the creature never stopped reinventing itself. The gilt bronze dragons of the Tang Dynasty are infused with a fierce dynamism reflective of the verve and vigor of Tang society. Their counterparts in the ensuing Song Dynasty (960-1279), during which a literati culture flourished, are equally imposing, but in a more dignified, stately way.

Further on in history, the Mongol people of the Yuan Dynasty channeled their love of the colors blue and white into porcelain making, creating fine china with patterns depicting blue dragons surging through rolling clouds or frothy waves. While the theme stayed popular for the next 600 years, a palette of vibrant hues was added during the Ming and Qing dynasties. The dragon, which may come in red or green, bursts through a multicolored background to assert its presence.

A dragon is always attuned to its day, culturally and aesthetically.

Perhaps the ultimate place for one to be overpowered, at least visually, by Chinese dragons is in the Forbidden City in Beijing, built in the early 15th century to serve as the royal palaces until the end of the Qing Dynasty in 1911. Its largest hall, in which enthronement took place, is adorned with more than 12,600 dragons. These include carved ones on the marble stone platform leading to the hall's entrance, painted ones wrapped around the giant wooden pillars sustaining the weight of the hall's immense roof, as well as molded and enameled ones standing on both ends of the roof's central ridge.

When a Ming or Qing emperor sat on his "dragon chair", a gilded wooden seat with 13 glistening dragons curling around every part of it, he would be doing so in front of a magnificent wooden screen seething with dragons, directly underneath an equally resplendent caisson ceiling from which the dragons cast down their deep gaze.

During heavy rain, water would gush from the mouths of the stone dragon heads protruding from the stone balustrades outside the hall. They still function today.

Tai He Dian, or the Hall of Supreme Harmony, was the name bestowed upon this place by the first Qing emperor who entered it. Given his background as a member of the ethnic minority Manchu from Northeast China, the man, only 7 at the time, and his court seemed to be fully aware of the thing that had held China together.

All that said, it would be wrong to associate a Chinese dragon solely with royalty. In fact, it is its celebration by folk culture that has guaranteed its place in the hearts of hundreds of millions. Newlyweds routinely decorate their windows and doors with paper-cuttings of a dragon and a phoenix. Dragon dances are performed in anticipation of fortune and fortuity during each Chinese Lunar New Year, on village squares, in shopping malls and along streets. On the fifth day of the fifth month of the Chinese lunar calendar, dragon boats are raced across the country's lakes and rivers in memory of one man: Qu Yuan (340-278 BC), a brilliant poet who was patriotic to the hilt, and who drowned himself in the land of his exile.

So what is a Chinese dragon after all? Throughout history, many have attempted to answer that question. Cao Cao, a warlord and poet who lived between the second and third centuries, compared a dragon to a man who adapts and acts on his chance — a hero, to use his term.

"A dragon can be both big and small; it can also go both high and low," he said. "When it is big, it announces its presence; when it is small, it conceals its existence. When it soars, it roams the cosmos; when it falls, it hides in colossal waves."

In a sense, he was echoing Confucius, who nearly seven centuries earlier had talked with a disciple about the transformative nature of a dragon: "A piece of cloud, snake, fish, bird, worm — a dragon can morph into anything it intends without becoming anything other than itself ... a manifestation of power and dignity, of honor and integrity, of strength and perseverance.

"Yet this profound changeability has often prevented it from being fully described, depicted or understood."

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