The Carp at Dragon Gate

On an old ceramic plate there is a creature that looks like no animal in real life.

Its head is a dragon's head, with horns, whiskers and an open mouth. But its body and tail still belong to a fish. Fish scales. Fish fins. The tail fans out like the ribs of a hand fan, and the painter has carefully set that tail inside a ring.

Plates like this were raised from a shipwreck off Cù Lao Chàm. They date from the 15th century, and the large ones measure about 40 centimeters across, nearly the size of a round meal tray. On some of them, the half-fish, half-dragon is painted in blue under the glaze. On others it is painted in many colors over the glaze, and some even carry gold leaf. Craftsmen of old carved it in stone and in wood as well. On the outer face of the stair walls at the Nam Giao altar in Hanoi, a stone carving from the 15th century shows a fish becoming a dragon as it swims on the waves. Then there is Lỗ Hạnh communal house, in the Hiệp Hòa area. It stands in Bắc Ninh province, and it keeps a 16th-century wood carving from the Mạc period: two fish becoming dragons, both turned to face the sun.

Here is the strange part. No one carves an unfinished creature by accident. A whole fish would be easier to carve. A whole dragon would be easier too. Yet generation after generation, potters, stone carvers and woodcarvers all chose the very instant when the fish is no longer wholly a fish, and not yet wholly a dragon.

To see why, you have to go back to a very old story.

People in old China told of a mountain called Longmen, on a stretch of the Yellow River. The name means Dragon Gate. In legend, Yu the Great was a ruler of ancient China who tamed great floods. The story says that long ago, he split that mountain apart, and the break left a gap just like a gate, more than one li wide. A li was an old way of measuring distance. The whole Yellow River crowded into that gate of stone and poured down through it. Along both banks, neither cart nor horse could pass.

The tale was first written down in a very old book called the Records of the Three Qin. Tradition says a man surnamed Xin compiled it under the Han dynasty. That book is now lost entirely, and not a single copy survives. We still know what it said because later books copied its words. One of them is a huge collection called the Taiping Guangji, put together more than a thousand years ago.

The book records that the water at Longmen shoots up like an arrow in flight. Its fury runs on for seven li downstream before it calms. It is a great river forced through a narrow gate of stone, and it roars.

And every year, in the last month of spring, something happens at the foot of that stone gate.

Golden carp arrive.

They come from the sea. They come from the rivers. From waters so far away that no one knows how they ever heard the news, golden carp swim upstream, racing one another to get there. They crowd together at the foot of Longmen until the water below teems with glinting golden backs. Seen from high above, a whole stretch of river looks as if someone had sprinkled it with gold.

Then they begin to climb.

Every one of them points its nose at the whitest water, beats its tail hard and hurls itself upward with all its strength. The water pushes down, and the fish push up. When a fish does not make it, the current gathers it up and carries it back to the calm water below. It rests there a while, catching its breath. Then it turns its head around and climbs again. All through the last month of spring, the foot of Longmen holds nothing but the thunder of water and golden tails slapping the river without rest.

The old book records a number. In a whole year, no more than 72 fish make it up through Longmen.

Just 72, out of a whole river full of fish.

The one who wrote it down does not call the others failures, and does not praise those 72 as better than anyone. The book only counts, and then goes on with the story. What the book tells again and again, year after year, is that they keep coming. Spring after spring, from the sea and from the rivers, golden carp still find their way to the hardest stone gate they know, and still they try.

Then there is the fish that makes it through.

The story goes that the moment it clears the stone gate, before it can go anywhere, clouds come rolling across the sky. The clouds follow it. The rain follows it. Then, from behind, a fire from heaven touches the fish's tail.

That fire is not there to hurt. It is the last stroke of the change. The tail glows and then is gone, and where a carp has just slipped through the stone gate, there is no carp anymore. A dragon comes out, carrying clouds and rain of its own.

So now it is clear why the craftsmen chose that unfinished shape.

In the whole story, the most beautiful moment is not the fish still down below, and not the dragon already flying. It is one instant right in the middle of the stone gate, when the head is already a dragon's head and the tail is still a fish's tail. The potter kept exactly that instant. The ring around the tail on those plates from Cù Lao Chàm is that very gate, made small with a single stroke of the brush. Vietnamese people call it vũ môn.

Vietnamese people have a carp of their own as well, and that carp also goes up to the sky.

Every year on the 23rd day of the last lunar month, in countless Vietnamese kitchens, a carp is placed in a basin of water. Then it is carried out to a river or a pond and set free, so that Ông Táo, the Kitchen God, can ride it up to Heaven. The two images sit side by side like two old friends on the same porch. One is a fish fighting the current below a stone gate in an old book. The other is a fish carrying the Kitchen God up into the clouds from a family kitchen. Neither story is told as the first, and neither as the one that followed. What they share is the same belief, that an ordinary fish can still travel very far.

The half-fish, half-dragon turns up again and again. It waits on an old plate in a grandmother's cabinet, on the gate of a communal house, on the glaze of an incense bowl set out for Tết, the Lunar New Year festival in Vietnam. Wherever it appears, the place to look first is not the head.

It is the tail.

The tail is still a fish's tail. That means the craftsman chose to stop time right here, at the very moment the fish is still trying. And ever since, that unfinished shape has stayed on in clay, in wood and in stone. It waits patiently for someone to look closely enough, and long enough, to see that it is still swimming.