Zhulong

North of everything, past the country whose people have no calves to their legs, there is a mountain the sun has never touched. Something enormous lies coiled at the foot of it, scarlet as a coal, a thousand leagues from face to tail. When it opens its eyes, the world turns to morning.

The Classic of Mountains and Seas gives this creature twice and cannot quite agree with itself about where he lives or what to call him. In the eighth book he is Zhuyin, Torch Shade, the deity of Mount Zhong, and he keeps to the lower slopes. In the seventeenth he is Zhulong, Torch Dragon, and he is out beyond the northwestern seas on Mount Zhangwei, north of the Red River. The descriptions match so closely that Guo Pu, annotating the text in the early fourth century, treated the two as one god under two names, and the identification has held ever since.

What both passages agree on is the body. Human face, serpent’s trunk, scarlet from end to end. The seventeenth book adds a detail that has kept translators arguing for a century: his eyes are vertical, set in a straight seam, an anatomy nobody has satisfactorily pictured. The Huainanzi, compiled in the second century BCE, describes him instead as human-faced with a dragon’s body and no feet at all, which for a creature a thousand leagues long is less of an inconvenience than it sounds. Whatever he is, he is built on the scale of geography rather than zoology. His length is measured against the distance between cities.

The eyes do the work. When they open there is daylight; when they close, night falls, and it falls everywhere. The rhythm is not a metaphor for the sun, it is the mechanism itself, and the text states it flatly, without wonder. The mouth handles the rest of the calendar. When he blows out, it is winter. When he calls out, it is summer. Somewhere behind that arrangement is the plain observation that the north wind is cold and the south wind is warm, worked back to a single throat large enough to produce both.

He neither drinks, nor eats, nor sleeps, nor breathes. It is an economy of appetite so total that it removes every ordinary handle a story might grip. He cannot be starved, tempted, poisoned, or caught napping. On the rare occasions he does draw breath, the result is not weather so much as damage: gales come off him, and the eighth book notes that wind and rain wait on his convenience.

Then there is the torch, which the second name insists on and the descriptions never fully explain. Guo Pu quotes a commentary on the Classic of Poetry, since lost, that supplies the cosmology behind it. The sky, that text said, was not large enough to cover the northwest corner of the world, so in that quarter the ordinary alternation of yin and yang failed and light simply stopped arriving. A dragon therefore carries a torch in its jaws to light up the sky. The Great Wilderness text puts the same idea in four characters: he shines his torch over the ninefold darkness, the nine dark points of the compass on the underside of a flat earth.

The poets of Chu knew him and found him worth a question. The Heavenly Questions, that long list of unanswerable things flung at the ceiling of the world, asks what land the sun does not shine on and how the Torch Dragon lights it. The Great Summons places him in a landscape of pure cold: in the north are the Frozen Mountain, and the Torch Dragon, glaring red. The Huainanzi fixes an address for him, north of Wild Goose Gate, hidden inside Abandoned Wings Mountain, where he never sees the sun. Gao You, commenting around 200 CE, explains that the mountain sits in the shadow of the northern limit and the sun cannot be seen from it. He is the light, and he never gets any.

Nobody says where he came from. He has no birth, no parents, no making, no moment at which the world acquired him, which is unusual even by the standards of a text as compressed as the Guideways. He is simply there at the edge, already ancient, already burning.

There is one family story, and it is grim. The second book of the Guideways says the son of the god of Mount Zhong was named Gu, human-faced with a dragon’s body, and that Gu and another spirit, Qinpi, murdered the god Baojiang on the slopes of Kunlun. The Yellow Emperor had both of them executed on the eastern cliff of Mount Zhong. Qinpi came back as a great osprey with a red beak and tiger’s claws, and its appearance over a city means war is coming. Gu came back as a bird with red feet, a straight beak and a white head, and its appearance means drought. Commentators identify the god of Mount Zhong with Zhuyin, which makes this the closest thing the record offers to a Torch Dragon myth: a son put to death within sight of his father’s slope, and the father’s reaction nowhere recorded.

His powers follow from his position rather than from any deed. Because he holds the corner where the sun does not go, he holds light, and because he holds light he holds the day, the night, the seasons and the wind, all of them consequences of a body doing very little. His limits follow from the same place. He is fixed to the far north and never leaves it. He has no feet. He wants nothing, so he can be offered nothing, and no ritual in the surviving record is addressed to him. His fire illuminates only the quarter the sun abandoned, which is another way of saying that his entire dominion is the part of the world nobody wanted.

Modern readers have tried to catch him at being something else. John S. Major, translating the Huainanzi, thought him most likely a mythological reading of the aurora borealis, which does hang red and serpentine over the northern sky and does appear where the winter sun does not. Others take him for sunlight itself, personified and pushed to the map’s edge. Kwang-chih Chang read him through a broader Eastern Zhou pattern in which the features of the natural world are transformations of mythical bodies. The texts themselves make no such claim. They report a red thing in the dark with its eyes shut, and leave the reader to decide what has gone out.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Zhulong, the Torch Dragon?

Zhulong is a colossal deity of Chinese mythology with a human face and a scarlet serpent’s body, said to be a thousand leagues long. He controls daylight by opening and closing his eyes and the seasons by breathing, and he carries a torch that lights the far northwest, where the sun was believed never to reach. He appears in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, the Chu Ci and the Huainanzi.

How does Zhulong create day and night?

Zhulong creates day and night with his eyelids. The Classic of Mountains and Seas states that when his eyes look out there is daylight, and when he shuts them there is night. The same passage gives his mouth the seasons: when he blows out it is winter, and when he calls out it is summer.

What is the difference between Zhulong and Zhuyin?

They are two names for the same god, recorded in different chapters of the Classic of Mountains and Seas. Zhuyin, “Torch Shade,” appears in book eight as the deity of Mount Zhong, while Zhulong, “Torch Dragon,” appears in book seventeen on Mount Zhangwei beyond the northwestern seas. The fourth-century commentator Guo Pu treated the two descriptions as one being, and later tradition followed him.

Where does Zhulong live?

Zhulong lives at the far northern and northwestern edge of the world, in country the sun does not reach. The Classic of Mountains and Seas places him at Mount Zhong and at Mount Zhangwei north of the Red River, while the Huainanzi puts him north of Wild Goose Gate, hidden inside Abandoned Wings Mountain, where he never sees the sun.

Is Zhulong a sun god?

The classical texts never call Zhulong a sun god, though he does supply light where the sun fails. Modern interpretations differ: John S. Major suggested he is a mythological reading of the aurora borealis, while others treat him as a personification of sunlight itself. The sources describe what he does and leave his nature unexplained.

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