The big writhing dragon is built, not sewn. Its body is framed in bamboo strips and covered in white silk or cotton paper, then painted along spine, scales and belly; the head carries eyes, horns, gills and whiskers, and the tongue holds a pearl. It usually has 24 sections, standing for the 24 solar terms, and runs more than 50 metres, and it can be lengthened to 50 or even 100 sections when the street allows. The tail is a fish tail split into five. Two of them usually dance together. The type appeared in the 1920s, when the Tongliang artists Liu Lianshan and Li Jiezhi took what was best in the fire dragon, the upright dragon, the second dragon and the small coloured dragon and made one larger body.
From the journal
Bamboo, paper and fire: how the Tongliang dragon is made and danced
The dragon is a constructed object with a calendar inside it, and the craft that makes it is now listed alongside the dance.
In the same city · Tongliang ↗The object first
The calendar of the dance
The dance has a calendar of its own. It sprouted in the Tang, rose in the Ming and reached its height in the Qing, and a Ming-Qing proverb paired the Bodhisattvas of Dazu with the dragons of Tongliang. The Daoguang county gazetteer described the lantern fair as lit from the eighth or ninth of the first month to the fifteenth; from the twelfth the lanterns formed into a procession that called at the temples, and the fifteenth was the peak. The fair stopped in the late 1950s, resumed in the early 1980s, and reappeared at Jiefangbei in Chongqing on New Year's Day 1983. On 20 May 2006 the State Council put the dance on the first national intangible heritage list, as item III-4.
Fire, and the standard prop
The fire dragon is the oldest type and the hardest to photograph. Smiths working in iron fling molten metal into the sky with wooden boards so that it falls as sparks, and the dancers go bare-chested through it. In 1988 the big writhing dragon took the gold cup at the national competition in Beijing; in June 1994 the state sports commission made the Tongliang dragon the standard prop for national dragon dance competition. The national-level inheritors are Liang Zhichun and Huang Tingyan. The craft is taught as well as danced: the vocational education centre formed a team, and in 2023 it opened a dragon dance major with 19 students, and schools give at least one training class a week.