Zhulong is a colossal dragon of the Shanhaijing with a human face and a red serpent’s body, said to stretch a thousand li. When it opens its eyes it is day and when it closes them it is night; its exhalation brings winter and its inhalation summer.
Zhulong is a figure of cosmic scale, where a single being’s very physiology shapes the order of the world. Its blinking eyelids are read as a myth explaining the northern polar night and the aurora, evoking an immense, indifferent order that dwarfs humankind.