The dragon is weather. In China he is not a hoarder of the rain to be slain, as he is farther west, but the very engine of it — "spirits of the waters", a "beneficent being producing rain" who carries prosperity in his gift. "He controls the rain, and so" holds in his power, the record says, both plenty and peace; among his kinds is "the divine dragon, who causes the winds" to blow and who "produces rain for the benefit of mankind". To watch the sky, in this telling, is to watch him at work: every cloud with a serpentine tail is the dragon abroad, and when the peasants point upward they say simply, "We see him". The scattering of that cloud is his going. This is the motif Thompson filed as the dragon as rain-spirit.

The witness is the seventh chapter of Myths & Legends of China (a compilation of Chinese myth published in 1922), which opens its whole account of the waters by making the dragon the male, generative principle of nature — the essence of the yang, the fecundating force — rather than a monster to be fought. The rain he brings is not plunder released by his death but bounty released by his pleasure. His body is drawn to match his office: a creature of horse's head and snake's tail and clouded scales, at home in river and lake, ascending to the heavens in spring and burying himself in the deep water in autumn, so that the year's turn is his breathing in and out.

Thompson's authorities set beside this Chinese material a study of the dragon by Smith, cited at several places; only the Chinese witness is wired to served text here, its Vedic neighbor — where the storm-god instead strikes down a dragon to loose the waters — standing off the motif and unquoted. The contrast is the whole point: in one country the rain is won by killing the serpent, in the other it is the serpent's own free gift. If a people meets the same dry sky and the same longed-for rain, what decides whether their dragon becomes the enemy who withholds it or the god who pours it down?