Insects, reptiles and mythical animals

An insect is 虫子 chóngzi in conversation and 昆虫 kūnchóng in a science book. But 虫 chóng long meant far more than insects: just about anything that crawls, swarms or wriggles. That is why the radical 虫 turns up in the snake 蛇, the frog 蛙, the shrimp 虾, and even in the rainbow 虹, in which the Ancients saw a serpent of the sky. In the novel Water Margin, the tiger itself is a 大虫, a “big bug”. After Mammals and farm animals and Birds and aquatic animals, that left what crawls, what stings, and what does not exist.

Many insect names resist being taken apart. 蝴蝶 húdié the butterfly, 蜻蜓 qīngtíng the dragonfly, 蜘蛛 zhīzhū the spider, 蟑螂 zhāngláng the cockroach: these are two-syllable words whose characters are almost never used one without the other. There is no point looking for a meaning character by character. Others, on the other hand, read like pictures. The firefly is 萤火虫 yínghuǒchóng, the “firelight insect”. The ladybird is 瓢虫 piáochóng, the “ladle insect”, because it is shaped like half a gourd. The gecko is a “wall tiger”, 壁虎 bìhǔ, and the chameleon a “colour-changing dragon”, 变色龙 biànsèlóng. As for the dinosaur, 恐龙 kǒnglóng, it is a “terrible dragon”: a calque of the learned word, which came by way of Japanese.

The cicada has two names. The everyday word is 知了 zhīliǎo, an imitation of its song (sentence 11); the written word is 蝉 chán. Watch out for 金蝉脱壳 jīn chán tuō qiào, “the golden cicada sheds its shell”: slipping away while leaving an intact appearance behind. In it 壳 is read qiào, and not ké as in the seashell 贝壳 of the previous page. Usage, again.

The snake has a better reputation than in the West. Its year, out of politeness, is sometimes called that of the “little dragon”. And the most popular love story in China is about a snake: in 白蛇传 Báishé Zhuàn, the Legend of the White Snake, a white snake turned woman marries a young man from Hangzhou, until a monk shuts her up under a pagoda. The reader is on the snake’s side. The expression 画蛇添足 huà shé tiān zú comes from a contest: the first to draw a snake would win a cup of wine. The one who finished first had time to add feet. A snake has no feet, and he lost the cup (sentence 13).

The frog and the toad are mostly used for mockery. The frog at the bottom of its well, 井底之蛙 jǐng dǐ zhī wā, boasts of its domain to a turtle from the Eastern Sea: it is a fable from Zhuangzi, and everyone knows it (sentence 18). The toad, 癞蛤蟆 làiháma, is the one that dreams of eating swan: the suitor who aims too high.

The Chinese dragon, 龙 lóng, is not the one in our fairy tales. It does not breathe fire and nobody thinks of slaying it. It lives in water, rises into the clouds and brings rain. Every sea has its 龙王 Lóngwáng, its Dragon King, and the emperor sat on the dragon throne. You see it dance at New Year and row in the fifth month (see Festivals). In 2024, the Year of the Dragon, some Chinese media even wrote “loong” in English to set it apart from the Western “dragon” (I am not sure the word will catch on). As for the phrase 龙的传人, the “descendants of the dragon” (sentence 15), it sounds very ancient. It was made popular by a song from 1978.

Two dragon stories are worth knowing. Lord Ye loved dragons so much that he had them painted all over his house. A real dragon heard of it and came to put its head through the window: the lord ran away. 叶公好龙 Yè Gōng hào lóng is said of someone who loves a thing as long as it stays a painting. (叶 used to be read Shè in this name; today everyone says Yè.) The other concerns the painter Zhang Sengyou, who had painted four dragons without eyes on the wall of a temple. He was pressed to add the pupils. He gave them to two, which flew off at once. Hence 画龙点睛 huà lóng diǎn jīng: the detail that brings the whole to life.

The dragon does not go alone. The phoenix, 凤凰 fènghuáng, was originally a pair, 凤 the male and 凰 the female; set against the dragon, it became the emblem of the empress. Its coming heralded a happy reign. Confucius, at the end of his life, notes that it is not coming (sentence 25, see Chapter 9 of the Analects of Confucius). The 麒麟 qílín is often translated as “unicorn”, which it hardly resembles: it has scales and hooves, and it brings children. Each of the four cardinal points has its guardian: the Azure Dragon in the east, the White Tiger in the west, the Vermilion Bird in the south, and in the north 玄武 Xuánwǔ, a tortoise entwined with a snake. The 貔貅 píxiū, for its part, sits enthroned beside shopkeepers’ tills: it swallows gold and gives nothing back.

That leaves the zodiac, 生肖 shēngxiào. The verb is 属 shǔ, “to belong to”: 我属龙, “I am a Dragon” (sentence 1). Asking someone their sign is a polite way of asking their age, give or take twelve years. The year of one’s own sign, the 本命年 běnmìngnián, is thought to be dangerous, and people protect themselves with red: belt, socks, underwear (sentence 10). The Year of the Dragon, by contrast, is so sought after that births go up (sentence 2). The order of the twelve animals and their characters are on the page The twelve animals of the Chinese calendar.

Behind the twelve animals there is an older system: ten “heavenly stems”, 天干 tiāngān, and twelve “earthly branches”, 地支 dìzhī, which combine into a cycle of sixty years, the 甲子 jiǎzǐ. History textbooks still use it: the war of 1894 is that of the year 甲午, the revolution of 1911 that of the year 辛亥. It is not easy, and the beginner can leave it aside.

In everyday language, 虫 is used to describe people: 懒虫 lǎnchóng the lazybones, 书虫 shūchóng the “book insect” (English says bookworm: same idea), 跟屁虫 gēnpìchóng the one who follows you everywhere (sentence 14). The cockroach has an almost affectionate nickname, 小强 Xiǎoqiáng, “Little Tough Guy”, which comes from a Stephen Chow film. The young graduates crammed together on the outskirts of the big cities are the “ant tribe”, 蚁族 yǐzú. The computer mouse, 鼠标 shǔbiāo, is a rat as much as a mouse: Chinese has one word for both. And the dragon has found a modern job: a 一条龙 yìtiáolóng service, “in one dragon”, takes care of everything from start to finish, and outside a fashionable shop people 排长龙 pái chánglóng, they “form a long dragon” (sentence 16). It sometimes takes an hour to see its head.

Click on any character on the page: its stroke order appears stroke by stroke, with the arrow showing the direction of the line.