Hong (rainbow-dragon)

Note that all these Chinese characters share a graphic element of hui 虫 "insect; worm; reptile; etc."

The regular script Chinese character 虹 for hong or jiang "rainbow" combines the "wug radical" with a gong 工 "work" phonetic.

However, the oldest characters for "rainbow" in Shang dynasty oracle bone script were pictographs of an arched dragon or serpent with open-mouthed heads at both ends.

For the design of the character is, in the main, naturalistic, in so far as it is clearly modeled on the semi-circular Bow in the sky, but symbolistic through the addition of two heads, for where the Rainbow ends, there the Dragon begins!

It is the belief of the Chinese that the appearance of the Rainbow is at once the herald and the cause of the cessation of rain and the return of clear skies.

… Now, if by his own volition, when mounting to the upper air, the Dragon could beget the rolling thunder and the drenching rain-storm, how should he not be able also, in descending, the cause the rain to cease, and the face of the blue sky to clear?

And that is why I conjecture and suggest that the early Chinese must have seen in the Rainbow one avatar of the wonder-working Dragon as conceived by their animistic mentality.

[5] Jiang is an uncommon pronunciation of 虹, limited to colloquial or dialectal usage, and unlike hong not normally found in compounds.

Didong 蝃蝀 or 螮蝀 is a Classical Chinese word for "rainbow", now usually restricted to literary or historical usage.

One poem[6] uses 虹, which is interpreted as a loan character for hong 訌 (with the "speech radical" 言) "disorder; conflict; quarrel": "That kid with horns was truly a portent of disaster, my son!"

Arthur Waley explains translating zhuo 蝃 "spider" as a loan for di 螮 "girdle".

[8] "Although many ancient cultures believed rainbows were good omens,"Carr explains, "the Chinese saw them as meteorological disasters.

Several classic texts (e.g., Liu Xiang's Shuoyuan and Xinxu) use the phrase baihong guan ri 白虹貫日 "bright rainbow threads the sun".

The commentary of Guo Pu notes rainbows were called yu in Jiangdong (present day Jiangsu and Zhejiang), and gives additional names of meiren 美人 "beautiful woman" and xiyi 析翳 "split cover/screen".

The Yueling 月令 "Monthly Ordinances" section of the Liji Legge[15] claims hong 虹 rainbows only appear during half the year.

Rainbows thus symbolized a sexual union of Yin-Yang (Shijing 51 above) and a competition between male and female river gods or dragons.

In common belief as in literature, the dark, wet side of nature showed itself alternately in women and in dragons.

200 CE Shiming dictionary (1, Shitian 釋天 "Explaining Heaven"), which defines words through phono-semantic glosses, gave the oldest Chinese "etymologies" for rainbows.

([26][27] For jiang 虹 "rainbow", Schuessler reconstructs *krôŋh and notes the survival in Gan Wuning dialect kɔŋC1.

This points to the fact that the myth must be intimately connected with the occurrence and geographic distribution of a particular family of snakes, the Boidae, which includes the largest specimens in existence, namely the Pythons and the Boas.