Rồng

In the seventh month of 1010 a flotilla came up the Red River carrying a new king and his court. Lý Công Uẩn, remembered as Lý Thái Tổ, was moving his capital from the cramped limestone valley of Hoa Lư to the old citadel of Đại La. According to the court chronicle, the Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư, as the boats reached the walls a golden dragon rose beside the royal barge and climbed into the sky. The king renamed the city on the spot. Thăng Long, the Rising Dragon, is the name Hanoi carried for most of the next eight centuries.

That is the rồng doing what it exists to do: appearing at the right moment, over water, to say that heaven approves. It never needed to say anything else.

Its older claim on the Vietnamese is not royal but parental. The founding story, first written down in the medieval collection Lĩnh Nam chích quái and repeated in the chronicles, begins with Lạc Long Quân, a lord of the water born to Kinh Dương Vương and a dragon woman. He cleared the coast of monsters, killing a giant sea fish by feeding it a red-hot iron figure and hunting down a nine-tailed fox spirit, and then he married Âu Cơ, a woman of the immortal mountain race. She gave birth to a sac, and the sac held a hundred eggs, and the eggs hatched a hundred sons. The marriage did not hold. “I am descended from dragons, you from immortals,” Lạc Long Quân told her. “We are as incompatible as water is with fire.” Fifty sons went down to the sea with their father. Fifty climbed into the hills with their mother, and at Phong Châu the eldest of them was raised up as the first Hùng king.

From that parting comes the phrase every Vietnamese schoolchild learns: con Rồng cháu Tiên, children of the dragon, grandchildren of the fairy. It is worth knowing how old the written version actually is. The historian Keith Taylor, in The Birth of Vietnam (1983), treated the tale as a window on early ethnic identity, while Liam Kelley argued in the Journal of Vietnamese Studies (2012) that the “Biography of the Hồng Bàng Clan” was a medieval invented tradition, composed by literati after Vietnam won its independence from China. Vietnamese historians, Tạ Chí Đại Trường among them, answered him in the same journal. The argument is about the date of the writing. Nobody disputes that the dragon father has sat at the head of the family tree ever since.

Before the dragon had a story it had a shape, and the shape changed with the dynasties. The Lý kings, who built Thăng Long and filled it with pagodas, fixed the classic form. Their dragon is round-bodied and long, rippling in twelve even curves that Vietnamese art historians read as the twelve months of the year. It has no horns. The eyes bulge, the fangs hook upward from an open jaw, a wavy crest runs along the snout, a long mane streams back, and the mouth always closes gently around a pearl. The legs are thin and small, often three-toed, almost an afterthought. Carved in stone and fired in terracotta, it has the soft, cool look of something that belongs in cloud rather than on a battlefield.

The Trần, who followed in 1225, fattened it. Their dragons grew plumper and stronger, with larger claws, stiff whiskers, and a shorter crest of fire. One of them survives as a national treasure: a big terracotta dragon head, dug from the Thăng Long citadel, its mane and crest swept back as if in flight, the long curved fangs framing a jewel that the small tongue curls around. It once sat on a palace roof and weighed on the rafters like a sack of river clay.

Under the early Lê the head grew heavy and fierce. The stone dragons that flank the steps of the Kính Thiên palace, carved in green stone in 1467, lift large heads with round, staring eyes, long horns, and manes swept backward, and the old fire crest has given way to a broad snout. Five sharp claws curl at the end of each leg. On the northern steps, cut two or three centuries later, a dragon more than three meters long bends through seven curves on five-clawed feet. By the Nguyễn, the last dynasty, the dragon wore deer-like horns curving back, a lion’s nose, and bared canines, and it had come down into ordinary life, painted in pairs, with its young, or chasing prey across porcelain.

The claws were not decoration. They were paperwork. Under the Later Lê and Nguyễn courts the number of claws followed the rank of the owner, and only the emperor and his government could use the five-clawed dragon. Subjects made do with four or three. The dragon was the throne, and the throne did not share.

Among the four sacred creatures, the tứ linh of dragon, unicorn-like lân, turtle, and phoenix, the rồng comes first. It is the one bound to water, and in a country that lives on wet rice that makes it the one bound to survival. Farmers associated it with the rain that fills the paddies and with the prayers for a good season, and the smell of wet earth after the first monsoon storm is, in this reckoning, the dragon’s work. Unlike the dragons of Europe it hoards nothing and is killed by no one. It gives rain, it rises over the river to bless a king, and it passes between the sea and the sky without wings.

Its powers are exactly those of its element. It governs water, moves through cloud, and carries the approval of heaven, which is why every court that meant to be taken seriously put it on roof ridges, stairways, robes, and bowls. Its limits are written into the founding story. Water cannot live with fire, so the first dragon could not keep his mountain wife, and half of his sons grew up out of his reach in the hills. And once the courts claimed its fullest form, the ordinary household could honor the dragon but never own a five-clawed one.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Rồng in Vietnamese mythology?

The Rồng is the Vietnamese dragon, a long, wingless serpent tied to water, rain and royal authority. It is benevolent rather than destructive, and the Vietnamese trace their own ancestry to the dragon lord Lạc Long Quân. It ranks first among the four sacred creatures of Vietnamese tradition.

Why do Vietnamese people call themselves children of the dragon?

The phrase con Rồng cháu Tiên, “children of the dragon, grandchildren of the fairy,” comes from the founding story in the medieval collection Lĩnh Nam chích quái. The dragon lord Lạc Long Quân and the mountain immortal Âu Cơ had a hundred sons from a sac of a hundred eggs, and the eldest became the first Hùng king. Historian Liam Kelley has argued that this written version is a medieval invented tradition, a view other Vietnamese historians have disputed.

Why is Hanoi called the city of the Rising Dragon?

According to the Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư, when Lý Thái Tổ moved his capital to Đại La in 1010, a golden dragon rose beside his boat. He renamed the city Thăng Long, meaning “Rising Dragon.” Thăng Long was the name of the city that is now Hanoi for most of the following eight centuries.

How many claws does a Vietnamese dragon have?

It depends on the period and the owner’s rank. Lý dynasty dragons usually have small three-toed feet, while early Lê dragons, such as those carved at the Kính Thiên palace in 1467, have five claws. Under the Later Lê and Nguyễn courts only the emperor and his government could use five-clawed dragons, and subjects used four or three.

How did the Vietnamese dragon change from dynasty to dynasty?

Lý dragons are slender and hornless, with twelve curves, a wavy crest on the snout and a pearl in the mouth. Trần dragons became plumper and stronger with a shorter fire crest, early Lê dragons gained large heads, long horns and five claws, and Nguyễn dragons took deer-like horns and a lion’s nose.

Related Entries

Lạc Long Quân, Âu Cơ, Thủy Tinh, Sơn Tinh, Lóng, Jiaolong, Qilin, Fenghuang, Dragon turtle, Yong, Ryū, Imugi, Naga, Dragon