Dragon

The dragon is the central emblem of Chinese symbolic tradition — authority, transformation and the power of what is not fully seen. The Chinese dragon (long) is not the Western fire-breather: it is a water-and-sky creature associated with rain, with imperial authority, and with change. It is the only one of the twelve zodiac animals that is not a real animal, which is precisely the point.

Its use is documented across several registers at once. The dragon is the central emblem of Chinese symbolic tradition — authority, transformation and the power of what is not fully seen. The dragon's most distinctive traditional feature is that it is usually shown partly hidden — clouds covering part of the body — so that incompleteness is itself part of the symbol rather than a failure of depiction.

Traditional sources treat the dragon as yang at its most active and as the emblem of the emperor. The classic description lists nine resemblances — deer horns, camel head, snake neck, carp scales — which is why it reads as composite rather than as a single creature. It is grouped under Wood (木) in the five-element system.