Origins and legends

This chapter follows the lion from its arrival in China to the first sign of a distinct southern lion, then sets out the origin legends one at a time. It keeps three kinds of statement apart. Some things are documented: a dated text, a poem, a museum object. Some are official or scholarly readings that fit the evidence but are not proven. Some are legends, meaning stories with no early written source. Southern lion dance is the focus, and the northern lion appears only as contrast. How the southern lion took shape in Guangdong is the subject of Chapter 3, and the regional styles are in Chapter 4. A dated list of events from every chapter is in the timeline.

A foreign animal: how lions reached China

Lions are not native to China. Chinese sources treat the lion as a beast of the Western Regions (西域, Mand. Xīyù), the lands west of China along the Silk Road, and the Han histories say so directly.^{1, 2} The Book of Han (漢書, Mand. Hànshū, begun in the 1st century CE and finished by about 111) says that Wuyishanli (烏弋山離, Mand. Wūyìshānlí, usually identified with an Alexandria in Parthian territory) "has taoba, lions and rhinoceros".³ The Book of Later Han adds that Tiaozhi (條支, Mand. Tiáozhī, in the Mesopotamian region) produced lions, rhinoceros, zebu, peacocks and ostriches.⁴ A commentary to the Book of Later Han, quoting the Dongguan record, describes a lion as tiger-like, plain yellow, with a mane and a tail tuft as big as a 斗 (dou, a grain measure). That is an accurate description of a male lion, so the Han court knew what the animal looked like.⁵

The word for lion changed over time, and its origin is still argued.

For 師子, scholars have proposed Proto-Iranian *carguš (Wolfgang Behr, 2004), Tocharian B *secake* (Douglas Q. Adams, 2013) and Persian šer (Laurence Picken). The popular claim that it comes from Sanskrit simha is weaker. For 狻猊, proposals include an Indian source, Khotanese Saka and a Proto-Indo-Iranian form. None of these is settled.^{1, 6}

Tribute lions, Han to Ming

Real lions reached the court only as gifts, and the records are specific.

Yu Shinan's poem calls the 635 lion a divine beast that came "through many interpreters" to be tamed, with "hooked claws and saw teeth".¹² The pattern holds to the end of the Ming: a live lion was a rare, costly curiosity. For lion dance this matters, because the dancing lion never needed a live model and makers were free to imagine one.

Buddhism and the lion's meaning

The lion entered Chinese imagination mostly through Buddhism, not through the court's animal parks. Buddhist texts call the Buddha's fearless preaching a "lion's roar". The bodhisattva Manjushri (文殊, Mand. Wénshū, Cant. man4 syu4), who stands for wisdom, rides a lion, and his mountain is Wutai in Shanxi. Buddhist halls have lion thrones.^{19, 6} A lecture by Dr. Sun Hui, made for an Ohio State University teachers' workshop, says Eastern Han Buddhist paintings and figurines turned the lion from a ferocious wild animal into an icon of good power. (History of Lion dance taught by Dr. Sun Hui @ 01:36)²⁰ HK01 adds that only the court saw real lions, while ordinary people knew the animal from pictures of Manjushri on his mount.²¹

Lions also became guardians. The gate of the Yongning monastery in Luoyang, around the 520s, had four vajra-warriors and four lions "adorned with gold and silver".²² The Wu family shrine at Jiaxiang in Shandong, whose pillar-gates were begun in 147 CE, has a pair of stone lions that Chinese Wikipedia calls China's earliest exactly dated stone lions.²³ A 6th-century geographical commentary, the Shuijing zhu, records two lions facing each other south of the gate towers at a Han tomb, and a stone beast with 辟邪 (Mand. bìxié, Cant. bik1 ce4, "ward off evil") carved on its shoulder at another.²⁴ The lion is not one of the four classical spirit beasts (qilin, phoenix, tortoise, dragon). Its standing as an auspicious beast is a later, Buddhist-era and imperial addition.²⁵

Berthold Laufer argued in 1923 that the lion became the protector of Buddhism, so the lion dance came to be seen as a demon-expelling ceremony. He also said lion dancers first appeared under the Tang. That start date is contradicted by the Northern Wei text below, and his work is dated scholarship.²⁶ The lion's later meanings are in Chapter 11.

Before the lion: masked beasts, mime people and the Hundred Entertainments

China had masked beast performances before it had lions. The Zhou ritual text Zhouli describes the exorcist Fangxiangshi (方相氏, Mand. Fāngxiàngshì, Cant. fong1 soeng3 si6), who wore a bearskin with four golden eyes, a black tunic and a red skirt, held a dagger-axe and raised a shield, led a hundred men in the seasonal exorcism (儺, Mand. nuó, Cant. no4) and searched houses to drive out pestilence. At funerals he struck the four corners of the tomb.²⁷ That is a native ancestor of the beast-masked, evil-dispelling role. The line from it to the lion is interpretation. Lei guesses that the pom-poms on a southern lion's antennae are two extra eyes inherited from the four-eyed exorcist, and marks this as his own speculation. (Culture of the Lion Dance (David Lei) @ 18:41)¹⁴

The Han court also had the Hundred Entertainments (百戲, Mand. bǎixì, Cant. baak3 hei3): acrobatics, illusion, wrestling, animal training and comic acts, mixing Western Regions shows with Chinese ones. Zhang Heng's Western Capital Rhapsody (2nd century) describes costumed animal acts at the capital: leopards frolic, bears dance, a white tiger plays the zither and a green dragon the flute.²⁸ The Hanshu's treatise on rites and music lists court musicians that include four regular "mime people" (象人, Mand. xiàngrén, Cant. zoeng6 jan4).²⁹ A later gloss says these performers were "like those who nowadays play shrimp, fish and lions". If it means what it seems to, this is the earliest text that may refer to lion impersonation. It dates from the 3rd century, long after the Han acts it explains, and it names lions only in passing.

The People's Republic's national heritage register now states this as the official narrative. The entries for several lion dances, among them Xushui, Tianta, Huangsha and the Guangdong awakened lion, say the "mime people" of the Hanshu were the forerunner of lion dance.³⁰ It is a reasonable inference. It is not proven. Some popular pages go further: Mental Floss says people wore lion costumes at Buddhist festivals in the Three Kingdoms period (220-280), without giving a source, and that claim most likely rests on the same 3rd-century gloss.³¹

Luoyang, about the 520s: the first lion in a procession

The first unambiguous lion scene is in the Record of the Monasteries of Luoyang (洛陽伽藍記, Mand. Luòyáng qiélán jì), written by Yang Xuanzhi (楊衒之) in about 547. The Changqiu monastery owned an image of the Buddha carried in mid-air by a six-tusked white elephant. Each year on the 4th day of the 4th month the image went out in procession.²²

Bixie and lions led the way in front of it. Sword-swallowers and fire-breathers leapt to one side.

Yang Xuanzhi, Luoyang qielan ji, Changqiu monastery, 辟邪師子導引其前，吞刀吐火，騰驤一面

The same passage says performers climbed ropes on painted banners, that the strange acts and costumes were the best in the city, and that crowds stood like walls where the image stopped, trampling one another so that people were often killed. A lion leading and clearing the way for a sacred image is the oldest documented job of the dancing lion. It is the ancestor of the lion that heads a parade or temple procession today. English Wikipedia reads the passage as a lion leading the parade to drive away evil spirits. The text does not say that. It names a 辟邪, literally "ward off evil", a horned protective beast, beside the lion, and gives no purpose.^{32, 22}

The Jingming monastery passage adds the setting. On the 7th day of the 4th month more than a thousand images gathered, and on the 8th they entered the Xuanyang gate to receive flowers scattered by the emperor, while "the hundred entertainments leapt and pranced side by side everywhere".¹⁰ The Book of Wei (魏書) says the same custom went back to Emperor Taiwu (r. 424-452), who watched from the gate tower, but it names no lion.³⁴

The Persian lion, and a lion that died

The same book records a real tribute lion with a sad end. A lion "presented by the Hu king of Persia" (胡, Mand. hú, the usual word for non-Han peoples of Central Asia and the west) was seized by the rebel Moqi Chounu and reached the capital only at the end of the Yong'an era (528-530). Emperor Xiaozhuang, who had heard that a tiger must prostrate itself before a lion, had tigers and a leopard brought to Hualin Park, and they shut their eyes and dared not look up. In 531 the newly enthroned Prince of Guangling freed the caged beasts and ordered the lion sent home to Persia. The escort decided Persia was too far and killed the lion on the road. Officials impeached them.¹⁰

Shall I punish men over a lion?

The Prince of Guangling, Luoyang qielan ji 3, 豈以獅子而罪人也

He pardoned them. This is a documented event, not a lion-dance origin story, and no source read for this chapter links it to the dance. It matters for the legend of the gift lion that died (see below).

The lion as a scare device

Two other documented episodes use lion figures as weapons, not as dances. In the Yuanjia era (445 CE) the general Zong Que (宗愨, Mand. Zōng Què) fought Linyi (林邑, Champa), whose army used war elephants. The Book of Song says he remarked that he had heard the lion overawes all beasts, had lion figures made, and set them against the elephants. The elephants bolted, the ranks broke, and Linyi was taken.³⁵ In 512 the Silla general Isabu (異斯夫) threatened the people of Usan-guk (Ulleungdo) by loading wooden lions on warships and telling them he would release the beasts to trample them. They surrendered. The Korean national encyclopedia calls this the first appearance of the lion in Korean history.^{36, 37, 38} An Indonesian video's description retells the Linyi story and says this is how lion dance became popular in the Southern and Northern Dynasties (420-589), so a documented battlefield trick has already been turned into a dance origin. (SEJARAH ASAL USUL BARONGSAI (video description))³⁹ The Book of Song does not call it a dance. Beside the Luoyang tiger test, one idea repeats: the lion was the beast that other beasts fear. That reading is interpretation, and no text says it.

Tang: the Five-Direction Lion Dance and Taipingyue

The lion became a court spectacle under the Tang. The best-documented form is the Five-Direction Lion Dance (五方師子舞, Mand. Wǔfāng shīzi wǔ, Cant. ng5 fong1 si1 zi2 mou5), which was also called Taipingyue (太平樂, Mand. Tàipíng yuè, Cant. taai3 ping4 ngok6), "Music of Great Peace". Four sources describe it.

The New Tang History also says the An dance and Taipingyue are "music left over from the Zhou and Sui", so the lion piece was older than the Tang.⁴⁵ Cui Lingqin's Jiaofang ji, on the Tang court entertainment office, lists both titles among its tunes.⁴⁶ Chinese Wikipedia says the lion dance became court banquet music in the Zhenguan era (626-649) and spread to frontier armies in the Zhenyuan era (785-805). The second point comes from Bai Juyi's poem, and the first is unsourced on the page.¹⁶

Two interpretations are worth knowing, and neither is in the Tang texts. The directional colours in Chinese cosmology are green or blue for east, red for south, white for west, black for north and yellow for the centre, so a yellow lion could stand for the centre and the emperor, which would fit the Wang Wei story below. And the Kuchean ensemble uses bronze cymbals and many kinds of drum, so the lion piece sat inside percussion-led music like lion music today. The instrument list is in the text. The continuity from Kucha to modern lion bands is a guess.⁴³ In Tang usage Kunlun commonly meant dark-skinned people from the South Seas, which is general background, not part of the entry.

Bai Juyi's lion

The best picture of a Tang lion is a poem. Bai Juyi (白居易, Mand. Bái Jūyì) wrote "Xiliang ji" (西涼伎, Mand. Xīliáng jì, "The Western Liang Entertainment") around 809, as part of a series of New Music Bureau poems.⁴⁸

Masked Hu men and a sham lion: head carved of wood, tail of silk, eyes gilded, teeth faced with silver.

Bai Juyi, Xiliang ji, 刻木為頭絲作尾，金鍍眼睛銀貼齒

The poem goes on: the lion shakes its shaggy coat and flaps both ears as if it had come ten thousand li (a li is a traditional Chinese mile) across the Moving Sands (流沙, the Central Asian deserts), while two Hu men with purple beards and deep-set eyes drum, dance, leap and step forward to speak. The frame is political. Liangzhou (today Wuwei in Gansu) had been lost to the Tibetans for forty years, and Zhenyuan-era frontier generals loved this piece at their drunken feasts. A 70-year-old soldier weeps, the lion turns to look west and gives one mournful roar, and the poem rebukes generals who make the lost province's dance a party game.⁴⁸ Yuan Zhen wrote a poem of the same title that pairs a lion with a Central Asian whirling dance.⁴⁹ Liangzhou was a melting pot of Chinese and Western music, and the historian Chen Yinke said Northern Wei foreign music came in through it and the Hexi corridor.⁵⁰ Tang writers regarded the lion dance as a foreign dance.³²

Treat the table as resemblance, not proof of descent. It shows that several parts of the modern costume have Tang-era counterparts.

Wang Wei and the Yellow Lion

A Tang anecdote gives the earliest evidence found of a colour rule for a lion. The poet Wang Wei (王維, Mand. Wáng Wéi), newly successful in the jinshi examination (the top civil-service degree), was Assistant Director of Imperial Music (太樂丞). The collection Jiyi ji (集異記, by Xue Yongruo, as kept in Taiping guangji 179) says:

His musicians danced the Yellow Lion, so he was sent out of office. It is danced only for the One Man.

Jiyi ji, in Taiping guangji 179, 黃師子者，非一人不舞也

"The One Man" (一人, Mand. yīrén) is the classical self-designation of the emperor. Wang Wei was demoted to granary administrator of Jizhou in Shandong. Chinese Wikipedia dates this to 720 (Kaiyuan 8), and a Beijing Evening News feature dates it to the autumn of 721 (Kaiyuan 9). The scholar Stephen Owen suggests the Yellow Lion charge may have been a pretext, and that the real reason was Wang Wei's closeness to imperial princes.^{52, 53, 54} The point for lion dance is that a lion of one colour could be danced only before the emperor. The later southern colour code (yellow for Liu Bei, red for Guan Yu, black for Zhang Fei) is a separate and much later system, and no source links the two.⁵⁵ That code is covered in Chapter 11.

Japan and Korea: lions that left China

Japan and Korea kept lions from the same period and give independent evidence for what the early Chinese lion looked like.

The gigaku lion opened the programme as a dance that purified the performance ground.⁵⁸ More than 200 gigaku masks survive. The lion masks (7th to 12th century) have movable jaws and ears, flaring nostrils and bulging eyes and need two performers, the same moving parts as Bai Juyi's lion.⁶¹ The thirteenth-century manual Kyokunsho records the gigaku order: a procession led by Chido (治道), a long-nosed mask that clears away evil; then musicians; then five-coloured lions with two lion children (師子児, shishiko) who calm the fierce parent lion; then masked skits.^{58, 57} The parallels with the Tang lion are close.

The parallels are interpretation (medium confidence). The date also matters. Gigaku reached Japan from Wu in 612, before the Tang began in 618, which fits a pre-Tang lion such as the Northern Wei, Northern Zhou and Sui pieces. A Japanese dictionary lists "Five-Direction Lion Dance" among the alternate names of Taiheiraku, a later four-man armoured sword dance, which mixes up two different pieces.⁶² Japanese scholars classify current lion dances as a two-person gigaku lineage, thought to be continental and found mainly west of central Japan, and a one-person furyu lineage, thought native and found mainly in the east. The classification is by Honda Yasuji, and Oishi Yasuo questions its historical assumptions.^{59, 41} In Japan a lion biting a person's head still brings blessings and good luck.⁶³

Choe Chiwon's lion poem echoes Bai Juyi's line about the Moving Sands:

From far across the Moving Sands, ten thousand li it came, its fur coat worn through and caked with dust.

Choe Chiwon, Hyangak japyeong, 遠涉流沙萬里來，毛衣破盡着塵埃

The Korean encyclopedia says the lion dance came from the Western Regions in the Three Kingdoms period, and states as known that it was originally the music and dance of the Lion Kingdom.³⁷

Song to Ming: from court to street

In the Song the lion moved out of court banquets and into street, temple and festival life. Chinese Wikipedia calls this a shift from plot-centred spectacle to technique-centred skill, which is a secondary generalisation.^{16, 21} The primary records are specific.

Kaifeng's village and guild festival troupes (社火, Mand. shèhuǒ) gave similar shows on temple stages, though the list in that passage does not name a lion.⁶⁶ Two scholars place the north and south split in this period. Li Guotao suggests it began with the Song-Liao-Jin division, and Xie Zhongyuan says a lion dance showing martial skill moved south with migrants in Song-Jin times.^{69, 70} Chinese Wikipedia adds that a Buddhist-flavoured green lion was already popular in Fujian in the Song-Yuan period.¹⁶

Local origin claims in the national heritage register

The national register carries many local origin dates.³⁰ They are official claims and local tradition, and none comes with a document of that date.

Treat these as claims about local tradition. Taken together they show how many places link their lion to the Han, Tang or Song layers, without telling us when any one place began.

Where the southern lion first appears

The Ming gives the first southern clues. Prince Zhu Youdun of Zhou (1379-1439) wrote a zaju (a Chinese verse drama) titled "Manjushri Subdues the Lion", but whether it stages a lion dance could not be checked.^{71, 32} The official line is that the awakened lion appeared in Guangdong in the Ming, starting in Nanhai county, and that it descends from the Tang court lion dance and came south with Central Plains migrants after the Five Dynasties. Nanhai then included Foshan.⁷² The register cites no document.

The earliest named Guangdong lion is in the late Ming. Xie Zhongyuan quotes the Suzhou writer Wang Zhideng's Wushe bian (Wanli era, 1573-1620), which describes a "Guangdong lion" with gold eyes and bear skin, two men inside "squatting and leaping to the beat as one body". He also cites the Zhengde-era Qiongtai zhi (Hainan, then part of Guangdong), which records Lantern Festival costumes of monks, Daoists, lions and cranes.⁶⁸ So a form recognised as Guangdong's was already at least 400 years old. Chapter 3 follows it from there: how the southern lion took shape in Guangdong.

These can be read as layers, not contradictions: a Ming "Guangdong lion", a Qing reshaping by martial artists and opera, and a 20th-century name change to "awakened lion". That reconciliation is one way to read the evidence. No source proves it.

The origin legends

Every origin legend below is a story that people tell. None has a written source from the period it claims. A Malaysian documentary on the Sar Ping tradition says the same of the whole subject: the origin of lion dance is obscure, with many legends and myths. (DANCE, THE LION DOCUMENTARY - PART 1 @ 05:37)⁷⁴ The table gives the earliest source found for each legend, which is usually modern.

Nian

The Nian story is the most popular origin tale. A man-eating beast appears at the turn of the year and eats crops, animals and people, especially children. It fears red, fire and loud noise, so villagers hang red cloth, light fireworks, beat drums and gongs, and build a lion because the lion is strong and brave. The beast never comes back. (Sejarah Dan Asal-usul Barongsai | Legenda Nian @ 01:38)⁷⁵ Royal Tan of the Mak Fai association in Seattle tells it with a papier-mache and bamboo costume that scares the beast off. (Lion Dance: The Art of a Culture | KBTC Profiles @ 01:37)⁷⁶ Ken Morin, a Boston lion maker, adds an ending: Nian says he will be back next year, so the lion dances every New Year even though Nian has not returned. (Ken Morin, Lion Dance is the ultimate Asian Art @ 07:05)⁷⁷ The Worcester Youth Nian Dancers, a Massachusetts team, tell a pots-and-pans version in which villagers smash pots and pans to scare an unnamed monster. (Celebrate the Lunar New Year with the Lion Dance @ 01:16)⁷⁸

The details of the beast vary. One video puts it at the bottom of the sea or on a mountain. (Sejarah Dan Asal-usul Barongsai | Legenda Nian @ 01:38)⁷⁵ An Indonesian journal paper gives it a lion's head and a bull's body and dates the story to the founding of the Qing, 1,500 years ago, which contradicts itself because the Qing began in the 17th century.⁷⁹ English Wikipedia's Chinese New Year page describes a horned lion that lives under the sea or in the mountains.⁸⁰ A Japanese-language explainer says a large-headed, large-horned Nian raided a farming village every New Year's Eve, and villagers put two martial artists inside a bamboo-and-paper beast and drove it off with drums, gongs, cymbals and firecrackers. (Foshan and Heshan lions compared (SHOW Chinese Lion Dance channel))⁸¹ An Indonesian federation official dates the tale to the Qin dynasty, around the 3rd century BCE, and calls the date one of the legends. (Barongsai Indonesia (Podcast Nusantara) @ 04:23)⁸² A variant on the Chinese Wikipedia Nian page has an old beggar who tames Nian and rides it, sometimes named as the Daoist patriarch Hongjun.⁸³

Earliest attestation. The Shanghai Library reference librarian Zhu Chunxiang (祝淳翔) traced every Nian story to the novelist-journalist Sun Yusheng (孫玉聲, pen name 海上漱石生), who wrote "Memories of old Shanghai: recollections of seasonal customs" (滬壖話舊錄·歲時風俗之回憶) in the Shanghai tabloid Jingangzuan (金鋼鑽) on 17 January 1933. The piece describes New Year paintings that showed a beast like a dog yet not a dog, chained to a stone pillar. Some said it was the Heavenly Dog star, and some said it was a beast called Nian that wanted to eat people.^{83, 85} It is not a lion and not about lion dance. English Wikipedia also dates the earliest written sources for Nian as a creature to the early 20th century and says it is unclear whether the tale is an old folk myth or a local oral tradition. Chinese Wikipedia says the Nian explanation of the awakened lion appeared in the Republican era.^{85, 55} Oral tradition could be older, but nothing earlier has been found.

The Foshan village monster

This is the local version, and it fits the official Ming dating. The oldest source found is the folklore compilation 廣東民俗 (Guangdong folk customs), as quoted in a 2024 academic paper. In the early Ming a strange beast troubled the Foshan area. People built a lion of bamboo and coloured cloth and scared the beast off with drums and gongs. After that, villagers danced lions from house to house each New Year and hung greens on their doors to be plucked.⁷³ Zhou Jiaxin, a sixth-generation maker at Li's Lion Head in Foshan, tells a shorter form: people believed a one-horned monster lived in Foshan in the Ming, so artists, thinking of the lion as king of the animals, made a lion costume of bamboo and paper. (200-year-old Shop Still Makes the Best Lion Dance Heads in China @ 00:31)⁵¹ The Li family says its workshop is about 200 years old. That dates the workshop, not the story. (200-year-old Shop Still Makes the Best Lion Dance Heads in China @ 00:31)⁵¹

The legend and the official register agree on a Ming Foshan origin, but they are not independent evidence for each other. No Ming text mentions the monster.

Qianlong's dream, and other emperors' dreams

English Wikipedia reports that the Qianlong Emperor dreamt of an auspicious animal on a tour of southern China and ordered its image recreated.³² A student project at the University of Hong Kong gives a generic form: an emperor dreamt that a strange animal saved his life, his ministers said it must be a lion from the West, and it became a symbol of good luck.⁸⁶ A US kung fu school's video makes it a nightmare of demons in which an unknown animal rescued the emperor. A colleague said it was the lion of the West, nobody knew what a lion looked like, and people imagined a mix of lion, phoenix feathers, dragon and unicorn horn. It names no emperor and no date. (Lion Dance History @ 05:02)⁸⁷ A Hung Gar school's short explainer tells a similar tale. (The Origin of Traditional Lion Dancing @ 00:22)⁸⁸ The Hong Kong association's page gives a Tang version with a pun: the emperor Minghuang (Xuanzong) dreamed of a beast dance and had it copied on waking (醒, Cant. sing2, "to wake"), so later people called the lion 醒獅.⁸⁴

There are two checks. Qianlong's six southern tours (1751, 1757, 1762, 1765, 1780, 1784) went no further south than Hangzhou and Shaoxing in Zhejiang, so he never visited Guangdong.⁸⁹ The Foshan head-making register does say the craft rose locally in the Qianlong reign, but no source links that to the dream.⁷² The earliest sources found for the dream are modern encyclopedias and explainers.

The Buddha, Guanyin and the lion's keeper

Several stories give the lion a holy keeper. They overlap, which is why they are grouped here.

All of these tellings found are from the 21st century, and none cites an older text. The Guanyin version was found in a Cleveland family's telling and one newspaper summary, and not in any other source checked. Treat it as a family tradition, not a general rule. A common thread is that the ribbon, belt or fan marks a holy being who controls, forgives or leads the lion. That is a pattern across the tellings, not something any one source states. A Hong Kong school's notes add that the lion loves lingzhi (靈芝, a fungus) but tests it, and that lettuce replaced lingzhi once it became rare. For the red ribbon and the eye-dotting that uses it see Chapter 9 and Chapter 11, and for choi cheng see Chapter 10.

The gift lion that died

One version of this legend is on record, from Koheryanto Salim, secretary general of the Indonesian Barongsai Sports Federation. Persians brought a lion as tribute to the Chinese court. The emperor loved it, and it died. He was angry and sad and told his subordinates to find another. There were no lions in China, so a lion-dance costume was made on a deadline, the emperor accepted it, and that, he says, is why lion dance exists. Koheryanto presents it as one of many versions. (Barongsai Indonesia (Podcast Nusantara) @ 04:23)⁸² A popular retelling puts it under Han Emperor Zhang: a Yuezhi lion died or was killed by a eunuch, who then dressed as the lion to fool the envoy. That version could not be found in any text checked for this chapter, and the documented Han lions in 87, 101 and 133 CE carry no such story.^{9, 4, 5}

The nearest documented event is the Northern Wei Persian lion killed on the road home in 531. The Persian detail in the legend matches it, but no source links the two, and none says a costume stood in for the lion.¹⁰ The Ming records add a practical point: a lion ate two live sheep a day, so a lion that did not survive is easy to imagine.¹³

Other stories

Telling it to a class