In early February, Chinese people worldwide celebrate the Spring Festival — the New Year in China’s traditional lunar calendar.

In 2024, this new year marked the beginning of the Year of the Dragon. For centuries, China used a cycle of 12 animals to mark each year, popularly known as the Chinese Zodiac in English (though variations are used in Thailand, Vietnam, Japan, Korea and other parts of East and Southeast Asia). Of these animals — rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat/sheep, monkey, rooster, dog, pig — the dragon (long 龙 in Chinese) is the only mythical one, and is regarded as the most majestic legendary creature in Chinese culture. With Salem’s history of global maritime trade, PEM has a large collection of East Asian artworks, offering many examples of how dragons in Chinese art have traveled and influenced artists across the world.

It is hard to give a clear explanation of what a dragon looks like. Dragon myths originated independently in Asia, Europe and the Americas, and different cultures hold different ideas of dragon anatomy. Many scholars of Chinese art have concluded that almost all “stripe-like” animals that could not be identified were called “dragons” in historical texts. Some of these texts also tried to define a dragons’ appearance. Wang Fu (78-163), an intellectual living during the Eastern Han dynasty, concluded that a dragon had the features of nine animals: a rabbit’s eyes, a deer’s antlers, an ox’s mouth, a camel’s head, the belly of a shen (a sea-serpent-like creature), a tiger’s paws, an eagle’s claws, fish scales, and a snake’s body. But even this detailed definition couldn’t keep artists throughout history from imagining their own dragons.

There is more consensus on the symbolic meaning of Chinese dragons: divinity. They were creatures that bridged the mortal world and the realm of the immortals, serving as the messengers or mounts for deities. Dragons were also associated with water, dwelling in rivers and seas and bringing rains. With the spread of Buddhism in China, the Buddhist dragon kings of Sanskrit sutras merged with local Chinese traditions about dragons’ divine connections with water, making dragons the deities of choice to be worshiped in temples for a good harvest or ocean voyage.

Dragons’ divine nature increasingly inspired connections to the Chinese imperial family. Emperors in China gradually restricted the use of images of dragons, declaring in 1314 (during the reign of Emperor Renzong of Yuan) that only the emperor could use depictions of dragons with five claws on each foot and two antlers on their heads. This exclusive use of five-clawed dragons in the imperial household continued in subsequent dynasties, but some wares depicting these dragons managed to circulate out of sight of the government. In the Qing dynasty, Emperor Qianlong (1711-1799) allowed the sale of defective wares produced by imperial kilns, including ceramics depicting five-clawed dragons.