Name: Chinese Dragons vs Western Dragons
Uploaded: 2025-07-14T21:38:39.000Z
Duration: 7 min 29 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Basic passive voice

I was born in the year of the dragon, but I didn't know that until I was 22.

Transition words & phrases

When I was growing up, I used to pretend to kill dragons because dragons were bad.

The image of the dragon is not the same everywhere.

I think it's a great example of how culture shapes the way we think, and how learning about other cultures can open new windows to other ways of seeing things.

So let's talk about the Chinese dragon and the, let's call it the Western dragon.

There are a few similarities between them, but I think more differences, and both of these can give us some really interesting insights.

What do the Western dragon and the Chinese dragon have in common?

They both seem to have a connection to wealth and fortune, but not in the same way.

Actually, cultures around the world have legends about dragons, but as I said, we'll focus on the West and China.

In Chinese culture, dragons symbolize power and good fortune, so it makes sense that dragons were the symbol of the emperor in Chinese dynasties.

Being born in the year of the dragon is, I'm told, something to be proud of.

Most dragons in Chinese culture can fly, but generally not with wings.

In my opinion, Chinese dragons look super duper cool.

The Western dragon, by contrast, is the embodiment of evil.

You can use that one for people you don't like.

They guard gold selfishly, as well as beautiful women.

They're huge and horrifying creatures that will burn your village just because they want to.

This is the traditional image of the Western dragon.

The most brave and heroic thing any hero can do is kill the dragon, get the gold, and save the village.

In one of the earliest English stories, Beowulf, the hero, fights a dragon to save his people.

This is the image I grew up with, and there really aren't many exceptions.

So what can these similarities and differences teach us about culture and the stories we tell?

Well, in both cases, I think dragons are tools to shape culture, but tools used in different ways.

I find it interesting that in both cases, they symbolize power.

The power symbolized by dragons is supernatural, not something ordinary humans can ever have or even completely understand.

In the West, the dragon's power is terrifying.

It symbolizes the scary unknown, the things that frighten us most, which we can't really understand.

It's really the perfect thing to hang all our fears on.

When terrible things happen, it's nice to be able to say, dragon, bad.

I think also Western dragons represent the worst things about ourselves.

Dragons are what happens when power meets total selfishness.

If you had unlimited power, wouldn't you swim around on a mountain of gold?

Dragons have no real use for the gold or the girls.

The Western dragon shows us the extremes of our worst characteristics, the worst things about ourselves.

So we need to kill the dragon to teach our children that these things can be defeated, but only the bravest and strongest person can do it.

We have to be strong in order to defeat these things, these bad things.

In ourselves, we have to protect the village from what we might become if we didn't try our best to become more like the dragon-killing hero.

On the other side, there's the Chinese dragon.

The other side of power is the good side, the side that stands for order and law.

Without great power, how can any leader keep the nation from falling?

The power of the dragon symbolizes the power to rule an entire kingdom with a firm but fair hand.

With a strong ruler, the nation can be strong.

When the nation is strong, good fortune will follow.

The symbol of the dragon in China is like a power-up in a video game.

It's something you need to do the job of emperoring well.

I think Game of Thrones brings these two ideas together in a way.

Daenerys' dragons are pretty scary, but they also give her the power to be a leader.

The dragons in Game of Thrones are as close as I've seen to dragons that blend the Western and Chinese conceptions.

Well, the ones in How to Train Your Dragon are also friends with humans, but those aren't really dragons.

They're more like flying cats with scales.