Dragon or Loong?

China’s 龙(龍) and the West’s dragon are not the same creature. They were pressed into a single word by an act of Bible translation.Robert Morrison, the first Protestant missionary to China, spent years on a complete Chinese Bible, finished in 1823. When he reached the Book of Revelation, he faced a small choice with a long shadow. Revelation 12:9 describes a great red dragon thrown down from heaven, “that ancient serpent, called the Devil and Satan.” In the literary Chinese that would carry the scriptures across the next century, the verse reads: 巨龍與其使者、皆逐於地、昔有蛇、亦稱魔鬼撒但、素惑天下億兆、即此龍也. Morrison needed a Chinese word for that beast, and he chose 龙(龍): the emperor’s emblem, the bringer of rain, the creature coiled on the imperial throne and stitched into the robes of the Son of Heaven.He knew what the word carried. Two centuries earlier the Jesuit Matteo Ricci had faced the same problem and deliberately picked a different character: 蛟, a kind of water-serpent, precisely to keep China’s…