188 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. 



age of the Han. This agrees with the fact that these objects were 

 adopted into the cult at that time. The dragon when invoked for 

 rain as the embodiment of the fertilizing power of water thus became 

 a veritable deity. For full details on these prayer ceremonies for 

 rain see G. Schlegel " Uranographie chinoise," pp. 453-459 and 

 De Groot, "Les fetes annuelles," p. 361. If we look upon the dragon 



Fig. 93- 

 Jade Carving of Dragon. 



as a deity, we shall at once arrive at a better undei standing of the 

 various conceptions of the dragon in religion and art: the manifold 

 types and variations of dragons met with in ancient Chinese art are 

 representatives of different forces of nature, or are, in other words, 

 different deities. At this point, the investigation must set in; we 

 cannot expect to understand Chinese art properly, without being 

 cognizant of all the religious conceptions leading up to its creations. 



In the Chinese Journal Shen chou kuo kuang tsi (published in Shang- 

 hai by the Shen chou kuo kuang she), No. 4, there is the reproduction 

 of an inscribed tablet of jade offered in 928 a. d. to the dragon of the 

 Great Lake (T'ai hu) by Ts'ien Liu, king of Wu; this tablet had been 

 found by a fisherman in the K'ien-lung period (1 736-1 795). Other 

 known tablets of this kind are one of bronze dated 738 a. d., one of 



