"Kong Jia YangLong" was first mentioned in the "Zuo Chuan", and later mentioned in the "History" along the "Zuo Chuan" saying.
The original text is as follows:
Heaven descended on the dragon two, there are males and females, Kong Jia can not eat, did not get the dragon clan. Tao Tang declined, followed by Liu Lei, who learned to disturb the dragon from the Dragon Clan and to do things to Kong Jia. Kong Jia's surname was Yulong (御龙氏), after Feng Wei. The dragon dies one female to eat after the summer. After the summer, the angels begged, fearful and moved away.
Kong Jia was the fourteenth monarch of the Xia Dynasty (also known as the Sixteenth). During kong jia's reign, the Heavenly Emperor gave the dragon to drive, two each of the Yellow River and the Han River, and each male and female. Kong Jia could not be raised, and it was difficult to find the dragon family, the Dragon Clan. At that time, Liu Lei, a descendant of the Tao Tang clan, had learned the art of domestication from the Feng Long clan, so he raised dragons for Kong Jia. Liu Lei was credited with raising the Dragon Royal Dragon, and Kong Jia named him the Royal Dragon Clan. After all, Liu Lei was not skilled in learning, and later a female dragon died, and Liu Lei processed the dragon meat into a delicacy and gave it to Kong Jia to eat. Kong Jia felt that the taste was very delicious, and he wanted to eat it again. Liu Lei was afraid of the crime, so he moved to Lu County.
From this account, we know that dragons were aquatic or near-water animals that humans could domesticate. However, it is a pity that although Kong Jia Yanglong appeared in the "Zuo Zhuan" and "History", many people still classified it as a myth and legend. After all, modern people generally believe that the dragon is a fictional artifact, made of a variety of animal fits.
However, it is not scientific to list the story of raising dragons as legends. From following the literature to inquire, we can find that the "dragon" that appeared in ancient times is not illusory.
In China's pre-Qin classics, the "dragon" mainly appears in the "Zuo Zhuan", "Chinese", and "Zhou Yi", of which the "Zuo Zhuan" is the majority. We list them below:
"Zuo Chuan Zhao Nineteenth Year": "Zheng Dashui, dragon bucket outside the Gate of Time" Dragons are the wild animals of ZhengGuo, and as the amount of water increases, the activities of dragons are disturbing.
"Zuo Chuan Xianggong Twenty-one Years": "Deep mountains and dazes, real life dragon snake." "Dragons here are ominous and are often mentioned alongside snakes.
In the pre-Qin literature, it is also recorded that Emperor Shun once raised dragons, and at that time, a dragon keeper named Dong Father caught more than a dozen dragons from the wild mudflats to raise.
Taken together, the dragon in the literature is not a symbol, but a real animal. This animal has at least the following characteristics: one is that it is near water or near-aquatic; the second is that dragons are active in the wild mudflats and are very similar to the living environment of snakes; and third, people are less respectful of dragons, and even regard them as ominous.
Under this logic, some scholars believe that the dragons that appeared in the Central Plains or the Yellow River Basin in ancient times were actually crocodiles. The earliest description of crocodiles in China appeared in the Western Jin Dynasty's "Anthology of Wu Dufu", "Squid holding a sword, mackerel crocodile." It's in it. "From the pre-Qin to the Western Jin Dynasty, the time span is at least 2,000 years. It is speculated that crocodiles have always lived in the jungle swamps and shallow waters of the Yellow River Basin, which is the "dragon" in the pre-Qin literature.
On the one hand, after the Western Zhou Dynasty, the weather in the north became colder, the swampy beaches became less, and the crocodiles gradually disappeared in the north, while the crocodiles in the Yangtze River Basin continued to live, such as the Yangtze Crocodile, which still lives in the Yangtze River Basin. On the other hand, crocodiles are quite similar to the image of dragons today, such as crocodiles with four legs and scales; and for example, crocodiles will also have wind and rain and lightning when they appear.
It is conceivable that in ancient times, the crocodile was used as a dragon in the Central Plains, and after the crocodile disappeared, it was gradually combined with other images to be deified; while the crocodile in the south has been preserved, the crocodile has survived, and due to the local pronunciation, the crocodile has formed today's crocodile.