The Dragon in China and Japan

Marinus Willem de Visser's The Dragon in China and Japan is an early twentieth century scholarly study systematically comparing dragon mythology and religious symbolism across Chinese and Japanese sources, written by a Dutch orientalist working directly from primary textual material in both traditions. Its enduring value is exactly that comparative textual breadth, still cited by folklorists and religious studies scholars for its documentary compilation of dragon lore across centuries of East Asian religious and literary sources. As an early twentieth century work, it predates later methodological developments in comparative religion and folklore studies, and its interpretive framing occasionally reflects period assumptions about Chinese and Japanese religion that later specialists in each tradition have refined, while the underlying primary-source compilation itself remains a genuinely useful reference.