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A Dragon Boat Race in Foochow
This copy of an old engraving depicts a huge “dragon boat” passing gracefully up the Min River at Foochow. Twoscore rowers paddle the long craft, which glides swiftly up the river to the weird music of drums and gongs.
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The round disk on the Chinese Dragon Flag, which is often pictured before the mouth of the dragon, is explained by some as a pearl, by others as a huge spider metamorphosed into a ball. We are repeatedly told in fables that dragons have a [[65]]peculiar fondness for teasing spiders. A more satisfactory theory, however, is that the disk represents the sun. According to this explanation, the dragon is not trying to devour that heavenly body, as some would lead us to suppose, but is gazing with a great longing, for it desires to become like the sun in brilliance.
In referring to the Dragon Flag, the fact is worthy of notice that although this design appeared upon Chinese military banners through many centuries, the selection of the dragon emblem as a national insignia was of comparatively recent date. It is probable that the custom of foreign nations of using national emblems had a large part to play with the adoption of a national flag.
There is a feeling among many friends of China, and even among a few Chinese as well, that the effect of the Revolution and the passing of the Dragon Flag will very shortly kill out the dragon idea. This the writer believes is impossible. A belief that has gripped the nation for over forty centuries is not to be shaken even by a great revolution, which, though cataclysmic in itself, yet in relation to the ages which have passed, is little more than a ripple upon the surface of the sea of time. The dragon is neither [[66]]a symbol of the Manchu dynasty nor a type of absolute monarchy, and has nothing in common with either. The idea is distinctly a heritage of the Chinese race itself, and as such it will probably live as long as this people. It will survive at least until a generation after Western science has permeated and dominated every seaside village, every mountain hamlet, and every inland city, to the remotest bounds and limits of this vast Republic.