Head of a camel+body of a snake=?

DRAGON!

Today, textile conservator Yadin Larochette visited us at the Scripps Gallery. =)
She examined a couple pieces of our textile collection, many which had DRAGONS on them.
Don’t we all love dragons!
Patricia taught us that the dragon is a mixture of different animals, and so I decided to check just how many different animals there were. And what better place than…
WIKIPEDIA!
So apparently, the Chinese long dragon has nine anatomical resemblances:
1. Horns of a stag/deer.
2. Head of a camel. (Yeah, we were pretty surprised with that one too. But I can kinda see it.)
3. Eyes of a demon/rabbit. haha.
4. Neck of a snake.
5. Belly of a clam/frog.
6. Scales of a carp.
7. Claws of an eagle/hawk.
8. Soles of a tiger/palms of a tiger.
9. Ears of a cow.
[Also mentioned: a tortoise’s viscera??]
[Also, in Singaporean folktales, the dragon has attributes of the other 11 creatures in the zodiac. I thought that was pretty cool..]
The needlework on the textiles were amazing. I can’t imagine the amount of labor that went into these textiles. No wonder only the wealthy could afford these.
It’s so perfect that it’s crazy!
Mary mentioned the possibility of a couple museums getting together to exhibit the best of their Asian textile collections.
That would be an awesome exhibition!!
I really hope that can happen.
But getting textiles in a good enough condition to be exhibited is probably ridiculously expensive.
I took a peak at some of the estimated costs for conservation work of the textiles and … DANG!
But hopefully it will happen one day =)

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