In people's impressions, the Dragon King of the Four Seas looks the same: the horns are like deer, the belly is like a snake, the scales are like fish, the feet are like phoenixes, and the whiskers are like people. We can't tell the difference between one Dragon King and another, just as we don't know how today's sun differs from tomorrow's sun.
Remove the crown, who among us can distinguish these four brothers?
But if the Dragon Kings had different skin tones—not the difference in yellowish and whitening in their yellow skin, but the differences in similar races—it would be easy to distinguish.
One
First of all, the previous image:
The picture is from the 79th edition of the animated film version of "Nezha Noisy Sea", the first large-scale color widescreen animated feature film in mainland China
This is the most revealing image of the Difference in Skin Color of the Dragon King that can be found so far.
At one point, I thought that the main creator was accommodating children: the Dragon King's real body and no clothes were to be brighter to distinguish clearly; and I suspected that they showed off their skills, after all, in that era, it was more difficult to show the different looks, movements and colors of the four dragons.
Two
It is also after trying to contact the Five Elements Theory in recent years that I understand the ingenuity of the main creative staff.
The Five Elements Theory is a classical philosophy of the mainland. The "five elements" are the five basic elements in the universe, gold, wood, water, fire, and earth, which can represent the direction, season, color, five viscera, emotion, heaven and dry earth branch, and so on. Philosophy is the foundation and source of all disciplines, and the use of the five elements to explain the principles and phenomena of events can be justified by the ancients.
Wood is eastern and has a cyan color; fire is southern, with red color; metallic west, with a white color; and water is northern, with a black color. Corresponding to the Four Seas Dragon King, the color is like this: East Sea Dragon King blue; South Sea Dragon King red; West Sea Dragon King white; North Sea Dragon King black. What about the medium and yellow corresponding to the earth element? There is a yellow dragon, which has gradually blurred its figure in the long river of history, as will be discussed below.
So, it's not so much a physical problem as it is a philosophical one.
Indeed, if purely from a biological point of view, it is impossible to explain some phenomena: the third son of the White West Sea Dragon King, the later white dragon horse is no problem ("Journey to the West"), but why is Ao Bing, the third son of the Blue East Sea Dragon King, also a tail little white dragon (79 version of the animated film version of "Nezha Noisy Sea"), and how is his other son black (Heilongjiang folklore)?
In the same cartoon, the green-skinned Dragon King's father has a white-skinned dragon son
Three
Dragons are divided into five colors and have a long history.
The Book of Heavenly Officials says: "Xuanyuan, Yellow Dragon Body." The ancestor of Xuanyuan, the Yellow Emperor.
The story of the Red Emperor Liu Bang beheading the White Emperor and a white snake after being called emperor can also be seen that the dragon has different colors.
The "History of Liao" records that "longzhou Huanglongfu ben Bohai Buyeo province, Taizuping Bohai Sea also collapsed here, there is a Yellow Dragon see, renamed." Yue Fei said with great emotion that "go straight to the Huanglong Mansion and drink with the kings", which is the place where the Liao people saw the Huanglong.
In the second year (1108) of Emperor Huizong of Song's reign, emperor Huizong of Song made the qinglong god the King of Guangren, the Red Dragon God the King of Jiaze, the Yellow Dragon God the King of Fuying, the White Dragon God the King of Yiji, and the Black Dragon God the King of Lingze. People at that time obviously sincerely believed that the Dragon King was multicolored.
Friends who like to listen to blind talk may know the story of the black dragon bald-tailed old Li, who defeated the evil white dragon, and the white dragon river was renamed Heilongjiang - it can be seen from this that the folk do not think that the dragon king is only white. Statues scattered throughout the Dragon King Temple illustrate this problem.
The statue of the Dragon King in the Temple of the Dragon King in Shanxi Province. From right to left, the Dragon King is the Dragon King of the Four Seas, Southeast, northwest, and southeast, corresponding to the four colors of blue, red, white and black
Four
After knowing the skin color of the Dragon King of the Four Seas, he also deliberately looked for the Yellow Skin Dragon, but it had little effect. There are only three places mentioned above: the ancestor of Xuanyuan is the "Yellow Dragon Body"; the origin of the name of the Yellow Dragon House; and the Yellow Dragon God is crowned as the King of Fuying.
The dragon and the dragon king are not the same (the public account previously pushed the "Many and Inexpensive Dragon Kings and Clan Kings"), influenced by Buddhist culture, after the Han Dynasty, the word Dragon King appeared, and the status of the Dragon King is far from being comparable to the dragon in our totem. Judging from the history books, by the time of the Song Dynasty, the Yellow Dragon God was sealed along with other four-colored dragons, and his status was not superior--he was really just a yellow-skinned Dragon King, who was far less revered than the "Yellow Dragon Body" Yellow Emperor. It is also true: the Song Dynasty, in order to attack the Tang system, sacrificed the Dragon King with the ritual of a rain master--only regarded them as gods calling the wind and rain, which is consistent with the views of later generations.
After the Song Dynasty, the yellow-skinned Dragon King slowly disappeared from the legend. To this day, folk still only talk about the Dragon King of the Four Seas - of course, this is undoubtedly influenced by the Ming Dynasty's "Journey to the West" and "Fengshen Yanyi".
The occurrence of this phenomenon is not known for the following reasons: feudal centralization is becoming more and more intense, people are more sensitive and more evasive of the color of yellow than in the Tang and Song dynasties, and there is no longer the appearance of the yellow-skinned dragon king; the East Sea, the South China Sea, the West Sea (Bosten Lake, located at the foot of the Tianshan Mountains, commonly known as the West Sea; there are also friends who like "Journey to the West" who say that it is Qinghai Lake), the North Sea has a real meaning, and the Middle Sea does not exist, and there is no yellow skin in the Sea Dragon King. Of course, it is also possible that the relevant god genealogy was more complete in the Ming Dynasty, and it has long been listed only as the Dragon King of the Four Seas, and the Journey to the West and the "Fengshen Yanyi" are just direct records.