Chinese Year of the Dragon.

Hello and welcome to Story Norie.

You're listening to Jana. May I wish you a very happy Chinese New Year

2024. This year, Chinese and many Asian nations are celebrating the year of the dragon.

All over the world, including London's Chinatown, you can see Chinese processions with banging

drums, clashing symbols and a dragon dance performance.

The dragon is made of paper and cloth and held up a loft on bamboo sticks.

The Chinese word for a dragon is long.

As you can hear, long is a very long and important sounding word.

Being born in the year of the dragon is a good luck omen.

Chinese dragons are usually lucky and good.

Unlike the Western ones, which are poisonous and evil,

instead of breathing fire, they often live at the bottom of the sea,

or oceans, and they often crop up in Chinese stories.

For example, in the Chinese epic, The Journey to the West,

the Hero who is a magical monkey

visits the Dragon King of the East Sea in his underwater palace.

The monkey demands that the dragon should give him a powerful weapon.

Eventually he takes a rod like a long stick. a ear. Then, when he wants to fight, he can extend it into a giant rod of iron, weighing 17,550

pounds. So Chinese dragons are quite wary creatures and they often help make the rains fall, which of course is very lucky for farmers and everyone who likes to eat food.

One wing dragon called Ying Long used his tail to make

channels for water to run through rice fields. This story also explains the rainmaking abilities of dragons.

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