At the autumnal equinox, according to one source, the majority of dragons descend into the sea where they hibernate for six months. In fact, the home of dragons is on the floor of the ocean where they dwell in beautiful palaces. At the vernal equinox dragons leave the sea and ascend again into the clouds. Destructive typhoons and equinoctial hurricanes along the coast, in the spring and autumn, are caused by the disturbance of the waters when the great animals thus enter or leave their maritime home. CHAPTER EIGHT HOW DRAGONS CONTROL THE FORTUNES OF MEN The surface of the earth is believed to be covered with a network of invisible paths of the dragon known as Lung Mei. People who build their houses or find graves for their dead upon one of these courses are extremely fortunate. The ruling emperors, however, made efforts to prevent their subjects from occupying the positions upon such auspicious sites. When Chao Ming, the founder of the Sung dynasty, while still an unknown young man in reduced financial straits, was forced to move his father’s bones, he carried them in a reed bag and buried them by accident upon one of these dragon paths. As a result of this fact, we are told, heaven smiled upon him and he himself not long afterward became an emperor. Within the past few years, a young Chinese, who had been studying in Japan, committed suicide for political reasons while on his way across the ocean. Because he was so well beloved he was buried by his friends in a beautiful mountain valley on a dragon path. The Board of Rites in Peking, on hearing of this, ordered the grave removed, sending telegram after telegram to the local magistrates to have the coffin disinterred at once and taken to another spot. Since the Revolution, it is said that the student’s body has been taken back to its first resting place. When Chinese observe the natural phenomenon which in the West is commonly described as “the sun drawing up water,” they say that what is seen is the dragon sucking up water to form the clouds. When rain falls upon one man’s field and not upon his neighbor’s, or upon one half of a man’s farm and not upon the other, one explanation which is advanced for this fact is that the line which marks the division of dry and wet land is directly beneath the boundary line of the territory governed by two different dragons. One sees fit to order rain when the other does not. The territories controlled by the different dragons are redistributed once each year, on the seventeenth of the third month, which is known as “Li Hsia,” “The Festival of the Beginning of Summer.”