The Kwei or Tortoise is not the actual horny reptile known to naturalists and to common experience, but a spirit, an animated creature that ages ago rose up out of the Yellow River, having on its carapace the mystic writing out of which the legendary founder of Chinese civilization deciphered the basis of moral teachings and the secrets of the unseen.  From this divine tortoise which conceived by thought alone, all other tortoises sprang.  In the elaboration of the myths and legends concerning the tortoise we find many varieties of this scaly incarnation.  It lives a thousand years, hence it is emblem of longevity in art and literature.  It is the attendant of the god of the waters.  It has some of the qualities and energies of the dragon, it has the power of transformation.  In pictures and sculptures we are familiar with its figure, often of colossal size, as forming the curb of a well, the base of a monument or tablet.  Yet, whatever its form in literature or art, it is the later elaborated representation of ancient Animism which selected the tortoise as one of the manifold incarnations or media of the myriad spirits that populate the air.

Chief and leader of the four divinely constituted beasts is the Lung, Japanese Ri[=o], or Dragon, which has the power of transformation and of making itself visible or invisible.  At will it reduces itself to the size of a silk-worm, or is swollen until it fills the space of heaven and earth.  This is the creature especially preeminent in art, literature and rhetoric.  There are nine kinds of dragons, all with various features and functions, and artists and authors revel in their representation.  The celestial dragon guards the mansions of the gods and supports them lest they fall; the spiritual dragon causes the winds to blow and rain to descend for the service of mankind; the earth dragon marks out the courses of rivers and streams; the dragon of the hidden treasures watches over the wealth concealed from mortals, etc.  Outwardly, the dragon of superstition resembles the geological monsters brought to resurrection by our paleontologists.  He seems to incarnate all the attributes and forces of animal life—­vigor, rapidity of motion, endurance, power of offence in horn, hoof, claw, tooth, nail, scale and fiery breath.  Being the embodiment of all force the dragon is especially symbolical of the emperor.  Usually associated with malevolence, one sees, besides the conventional art and literature of civilization, the primitive animistic idea of men to whose mind this mysterious universe had no unity, who believed in myriad discordant spirits but knew not of “one Law-giver, who is able both to save and to destroy.”  An enlargement, possibly, of prehistoric man’s reminiscence of now extinct monsters, the dragon is, in its artistic development, a mythical embodiment of all the powers of moisture to bless and to harm.  We shall see how, when Buddhism entered China, the cobra-de-capello, so often figured in the Buddhistic representations of India, is replaced by the dragon.