European dragons: Why the Welsh love their mythological creature

It's Chinese New Year, a celebration of the coming spring that coincides with a new moon. In regions of Asia historically linked with China, lunar new years are huge family events to remember ancestors and celebrate the arrival of spring.

This year is especially auspicious as 2024 is the Year of the Loong, or Dragon – the longian. It only happens once every 12 years, and a child born within this period is considered particularly lucky. 

Red is the dominant color of every Chinese New Year – and indeed every year in Wales, or Cymru. For around 1,500 years, a red dragon has been the national symbol of the Celtic nation in the west of Europe. Red is the color of the Welsh dragon – Y Ddraig Goch. And red is the color for every sports team that represents Cymru/Wales internationally. 

After the fall of the Roman Empire, Germanic tribes of Jutes, Angles and Saxons began arriving in Britain and pushing the Brythonic people – ancestors of the Welsh – further west.

"There's heroic poetry surviving from that period of time with the word draig, the Welsh word for Dragon, which comes from the Latin draco," says Helen Fulton. A professor at the University of Bristol's Centre for Medieval Studies, she's well-versed in the written and oral traditions surrounding the dragon.

"The word draig is used in Welsh poetry to describe the heroes of those battles between the British and the English," she says. "So I think we can reasonably confidently date it back to at least the sixth century AD."

Dragons everywhere

There aren't just dragon footprints in the literature and language – this mythological animal is on the Welsh national flag. Dragon statues often adorn public buildings, government offices and conference centers. 

Wales has hundreds of castles – it's more densely packed with them than any other country in the world – and above their turrets fly the dragon flag. The Welsh-language TV channel S4C cleverly branded a dragon breathing fire as a TV ident in-between programmes.

The dragon is worn as a tattoo, sold in gift shops across the country and appears as a logo for the national football team. It's also embraced at club level, where Wrexham AFC is the world's third-oldest professional football club. 

The clubs' Hollywood owners have just released an amusing advertising video for one of their sponsors, featuring the Oscar-winning actor Sir Anthony Hopkins. The 86-year old Welshman is seen preparing for one of the finest roles of a long and varied career – as an energetic dragon mascot.

The dragon is soaked deep into Welsh identity. Remembering his school days in Llanelli, writer and broadcaster Jon Gower recalls "We had a motto, Y Ddraig Goch Ddyry Cychwyn –  'a dragon will lead the way.' It's embedded in the culture, in poetry and songs and of course, as a symbol. 

"In that sense, it represents, yes, a country, but also a nation. And I think it represents the spirit of a nation. It's something which actually we can feel inside as well as see outside – on government buildings, on walls, on mottos and on flags." 

As with many of Europe's older cultures, the mythological tales of the Welsh (and fellow Celts in Ireland) were passed down through the centuries by a well-developed oral story-telling tradition. By the ninth century AD, monks were writing down these early tales, and some of the later manuscripts containing the Mabinogion and Arthur King of the Britons are kept in the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth and Jesus College, Oxford.

The dragon emblem, which may have arrived in Britain during Roman times, is rooted in a story most Welsh schoolchildren become familiar with as youngsters.

The story tells how a Brythonic king tries to build a castle on a hill near Dinas Emrys, near Beddgelert in north Wales. Each time walls are constructed, they fall after deep rumblings are heard underground. On advice given by a wizard, the king digs down into the foundations and finds a lake. 

After draining it, he sees two dragons fighting – a red dragon representing the Welsh, and a white dragon of the Saxons representing the ancestors of the English, symbolic of a time when the Celtic people of Britain were threatened by invaders.

Of course, the red dragon wins. It may be a mythological creature, but it's one that remains popular and has a special significance in Wales, says Fulton.

"The dragon as a symbol is common to many countries and it's certainly in English literature," she says. "It's used as a heraldic symbol for English families as well as in Wales. But that particular shape of the Red Dragon that you see on the Welsh flag, and the color, the Red Dragon, is very much belonging to Wales."

And during this Year of the Dragon – whether or not the Welsh version is related to the Chinese Loong – people in Wales retain a warm affinity with the color red and a flag that many believe to be among the most striking in the world.

Reporter: Iolo ap Dafydd

Producer: Ai Yan

Cameraman: Jim Ireland

Video Editor: Steve Ager