Magical Creatures Week 10 Report

• Lauren B
• 0
• on Nov 10, 2022

This week we started out reading a chapter from the textbook titled “Dragons.” It talked about how there were three theories of their origin: dinosaurs, snakes, and crocodiles. But it’s important to realize that a dragon can look like anything you want it to look like. The Chinese used dragons as a way to explain something that they didn’t understand. Dragons were also closely associated with yin energy though they still have some type of fire capability. The next thing we read was “The Monkey and the Inkpot: Natural History and Its Transformations In Early Modern China” a pdf about different types of medicine and how they were meant to be used as well as their historical origin. In medicine, only a dragon’s bone, horn, teeth, and saliva could be used. One of their uses was in repairing or healing your kidney, they can also help if you get possessed by a goblin or a demon as well as with general wound healing. Finally, we listened to the podcast “Li Shizhen”. In Our Time” about Li Shizhen and his life. What stood out to me was that when they were talking about his book they mentioned that not only did it contain ingredients and different mediums but mentions of the ingredients in other books and their own unique history. In that way his book was similar to a glossary with some medicine sprinkled in.

There’s nothing on my to-do aside from working on the textbook. 

A question I had was that if dragons were mythical and didn’t truly exist how did Chinese people obtain anything from a dragon? Was it from a creature they believed to be dragon-like or were they lied to by a doctor?

So far my group has made a bit over halfway through the existing textbook. I’m still compiling a list of notes for the textbook that I need to give to the other groups so I’ll probably do that once I’ve gotten through more chapters.