What are the mythical creatures of China?

Dragons - These mythical creatures are often thought to be able to control bodies of water and there are many individual dragons for different major bodies/rivers in china.

Phoenix - These mythical birds are not phoenix's in the traditional western sense, they are birds (that live in the sun??) that represent the 4 other chinese elements (apart from water which the dragon represents), the long upright tails represent trees and therefore wood, the shiny claws represent metal, the plume on the head represents fire, the body and feathers sympolise the earth.

Tigers - While not mythical tigers reprresent the opposing yang force to the dragons yin.

Tortoises - Again while not mythical they were considered mythical by the chinese due to their longevity and often represent wisdom etc.

There are many other specific mythical creatures however they were often specific to the region and would change from village to village. where as the 4 above were pretty universal in imperial china.

Please bear in mind I am writing this from memory so some details may be wrong but the basics are correct.

you're loopy, there is no genuine way any mythical creature may have advanced to be as we've see them. And so what? some guy contained in the 1700's said what he thinks turned right into a mermaid? it might want to were a manatee or a dugong or yet another animal of the type. and may I remind you the 1700's wasn't precisely and age with too many smart human beings. the finest answer is dinosaur bones. The ancients who got here across those bones mistook them for animals that purely died some weeks in the past. as an example, what may you imagine in case you got here around the bones of an enormous creature that had a cranium like a crocodiles, claws like a lion and a narrative like a snake? and also you had no former information of dinosaurs what so ever. Your least complicated end can be a...dragon. that is like one among the different solutions reported, a even as in the past the Greeks fond the bones of a dinosaur with a beak, so that they created the griffin. human beings decrease back contained in the day were sort of stupid, they made up a collection of creatures in order that that they could clarify commonplace phenomenon.

The Dragon and the Phoenix.

Chinese Dragons, Nuwa and Fuxi, and many more check it out here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_mythology#Dra...