Patterns of Sun, Moon, Dragon and Phoenix
2 min readDragon is a mighty and mysterious animal conceived by ancient Chinese people which generally bears the following form: head like a creature with two horns and tentacles, body like a snake with four clawed feet, while the squamae and fins on the body indicate its close connection with water. Phoenix on the other hand, is the legendary king of birds which only perches on phoenix trees. It was considered to be the most beautiful bird on earth.
Due to such unique characters of dragon and phoenix, they respectively became the particular embodiment of emperor and empress. Only authorized workshops were permitted to produce such patterns, and dragon appeared on imperial silk robes in various forms, such as front viewed dragon, rising dragon soaring over the cloud, descending dragon coming down from the sky, flying dragon and dragon in roundel.
Among all its different forms, the intertwining dragon was the most dignified one, which fully presented the stateliness of emperor, as demonstrated on the dragon robes of Emperor Mingzong and Emperor Wenzong of Yuan now collected in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
It was also in the Yuan dynasty that patterns of the sun and the moon were applied together with dragon patterns on robes. As a Yuan robe collected in theChina National Silk Museum displays,a roundel is weaved on both shoulder of th robe. Inside the left roundel is the pattern of the tri-feet bird, which is the symbol of the sun, while inside the right roundel is a rabbit, implying the jade rabbit living on the moon according to Chinese folk tales. The patterns of the sun and the moon on the shoulder indicate that the owner must be someone with greatresponsibility to bear, and such decoration was inherited by dragon robes of theMing and Qing dynasties. And by the Ming and Qing dynasties, the five-claw dragon was officially designated to be an imperial pattern.
