“The Dragon Fang” – which is way much less about its titular artifact and much more a few magical duck that mystifies the fools that might try to seize it – is a captivating little piece of Oriental fantasy. This being mentioned, there’s nothing notably horrifying about it, and the supernatural mechanics – although they deal accidents to the villains of the story – are mystical moderately than hideous. The story nonetheless deserves consideration as an early instance of American fantasy literature. Earlier than Poe, Hawthorne, and O’Brien, fantasy was thought-about the area of the East: of Indian, Chinese language, Japanese, and Center Japanese folklore, notably as represented by the 1001 Arabian Nights – one of the vital vital and underrated tomes within the historical past of bizarre fiction and horror.
“The Dragon Fang” is written within the fashion of one in every of Scheherazade’s surreal episodes. Ali Baba, Sinbad, Aladdin, Gehrib, and Ali the Cairene are a few of the most timeless characters from the Arabian Nights, and their adventures seamlessly interweave horror, fantasy, romance, thriller, intrigue, spy fiction, and ghost tales. H. P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, and others have remarked on the lasting, unquestionable affect of the Arabian Nights on Western speculative fiction (it’s, as an example, the primary instance of a “ghoul” in world literature, and accommodates a number of early tales of haunted homes, possession by evil spirits, animated corpses, and ghost cities). Whereas O’Brien doesn’t delve into the malevolence of supernatural beings – as he does so chillingly in “Wondersmith” and “The Misplaced Room” – he presents a curious instance of folkloric speculative fiction set – like Aladdin – in China throughout the time of the Mongol (or “Tartar”) occupation.
Within the metropolis of Tching-tou, a conjurer named Piou-Lu mounts a public stage and loudly advertises himself because the possessor of the miraculous Dragon Fang, a appeal able to curing sickness, fixing crimes, and granting success and energy. A combined crowd gathers, together with small tradesmen and officers of various ranks. Whereas the Mandarins look on with skeptical amusement, the widespread individuals hear eagerly. When the third-class Mandarin Wei-chang-tze asks Piou-Lu to elucidate what a Dragon Fang is, the conjurer launches into an elaborate story of how he acquired it.
Piou-Lu claims that years earlier, whereas working as a barber within the obscure city of Siho, a mysterious and magnificently dressed Mandarin arrived at his store affected by a extreme toothache. As Piou-Lu ready to extract the tooth, he found with horror that the customer’s mouth was full of fireplace and that his enamel had been crystal fangs glowing with flame. Regardless of his terror, Piou-Lu pulled one of many enamel with the assistance of the Mandarin’s attendants. The customer then revealed himself to be Lung, the Dragon of the Sky, and rewarded Piou-Lu with the extracted fang, promising it will grant miraculous powers if Piou-Lu lived rightly. The dragon vanished in fireplace and smoke, leaving Piou-Lu in possession of the magical relic.
The gang is impressed, although the Mandarins stay uncertain and demand proof. Piou-Lu gives to carry out a miracle and, after some banter with a poor tailor named Cling-pou, produces a small bamboo stool. Standing upon it, he instructions the stool to develop, and it lengthens astonishingly, elevating him excessive into the air. As the gang watches in awe, the stool transforms into a wierd tree that produces candy crimson fruit, which falls among the many spectators. When a plum vendor named Liho rushes in claiming the fruit is his, Piou-Lu exposes that Liho’s plums have mysteriously collected in his gown. A sudden wind scatters the tree, leaving solely the bamboo stool behind. Piou-Lu exchanges a secret sign with Wei-chang-tze, hinting at a deeper connection between them.
That night, Piou-Lu visits Wei-chang-tze’s residence, the place the Mandarin complains of being troubled by demons and asks the conjurer to carry out a non-public conjuration. Within the backyard, Piou-Lu meets Wu, Wei-chang-tze’s daughter, with whom he’s secretly in love. Wu urges him to hunt an honorable profession so they could marry overtly, however Piou-Lu hints that his future has not but arrived. After their parting, Piou-Lu gathers flowers and returns to the corridor to start his ritual.
Utilizing the flower petals, Piou-Lu creates a residing mandarin duck, then kills it. The duck’s physique vanishes, and its shadow involves life, radiant and untouchable. Piou-Lu then summons a wolf, which assaults the duck’s shadow however can’t hurt it. As an alternative, the shadow torments the wolf till it collapses and dies. Piou-Lu explains that the duck represents the previous Ming dynasty and the wolf the Manchu rulers who overthrew it, declaring that the time has come for the shadow to defeat the wolf. He reveals that he’s Tien-te, a insurgent chief claiming descent from the previous dynasty, and urges Wei-chang-tze to hitch his trigger, promising energy and honor if he brings Wu with him.
Earlier than Wei-chang-tze can reply, the tailor Cling-pou bursts in with troopers and Mandarins, accusing Piou-Lu of being the insurgent Tien-te and hoping to say the reward for his seize. Piou-Lu mocks Cling-pou and warns him that the promised reward won’t ever attain him intact. Because the troopers put together to arrest him, Piou-Lu distracts them by mentioning the attractive duck. Entranced, Cling-pou, the Mandarins, and the troopers try to seize it, however their fingers go by way of it, and the duck eludes them regardless of how they pursue it.
The chase grows frantic and exhausting. The duck appears to seem all over the place without delay, main the lads in a relentless pursuit across the room till they’re drenched in sweat and close to collapse. Whereas they’re consumed by the futile chase, Piou-Lu renews his supply to Wei-chang-tze, warning him that remaining behind will result in arrest and execution. Wei-chang-tze lastly agrees, acknowledging Piou-Lu as emperor and consenting to Wu’s marriage.
At Piou-Lu’s sign, Wu joins them. The conjurer reveals his imperial id to her, and regardless of her astonishment, she accepts him. Piou-Lu then makes use of the Dragon Fang’s energy to move them immediately to his mountain stronghold, leaving the pursuers behind. The lads chasing the duck collapse and die from exhaustion, whereas the shadowy hen vanishes.
The subsequent day, troopers looking out Wei-chang-tze’s home discover the our bodies of the Mandarins, troopers, and the tailor Cling-pou mendacity lifeless on the ground. The individuals conclude that Wei-chang-tze poisoned them earlier than fleeing. Wu turns into a well-liked spouse of Tien-te, and Wei-chang-tze rises as one in every of his main generals. The story concludes by asserting that Tien-te’s rebel continues efficiently and that he’ll quickly reclaim the traditional throne of his ancestors.
“The Dragon Fang” is a richly layered fantasy that fuses spectacle, political allegory, and cultural fascination. At its thematic core is the instability of look and authority: Piou-Lu is concurrently conjurer, impostor, revolutionary, and emperor, and the story delights in collapsing the boundaries between fraud and legitimacy. O’Brien repeatedly phases scenes by which energy is revealed to relaxation not on power however on notion and perception.
The recurring picture of the shadow—most memorably within the duck that can not be seized—capabilities as a metaphor for concepts, loyalties, and revolutionary actions that elude bodily suppression. Mandarins and troopers alike are undone not by violence however by greed, vainness, and obsessive need, suggesting that entrenched authority is most weak to its personal non secular vacancy.
The story is equally formed by its mid-nineteenth-century cultural and historic context, each Chinese language and American. Written in 1856, throughout the Taiping Insurrection and a long time earlier than the rhetoric of the “Yellow Peril” hardened American attitudes towards Chinese language immigrants, “The Dragon Fang” displays a second when the “Orient” was regarded much less as a menace than as a supply of marvel and imaginative novelty. As European immigrants flooded the japanese seaboard and Chinese language laborers arrived on the West Coast, Anglo-American readers oscillated between curiosity and unease, projecting magic, hierarchy, and antiquity onto Asian cultures.
O’Brien exploits this fascination by way of ornate language, inflexible caste distinctions, and theatrical ritual, but beneath the Orientalist floor lies a pointed political allegory. The Manchu conquest, the humiliation of the queue, and the symbolism of Han Chinese language resistance are all explicitly dramatized, reworking the story right into a meditation on overseas rule, cultural violation, and rebel legitimacy—issues that resonated quietly with American anxieties about authority, rebel, and nationwide id on the eve of the Civil Battle.
By way of literary affect, “The Dragon Fang” stands as a major precursor to later bizarre and fable-like fantasy traditions. O’Brien’s mixing of romance, horror, satire, and political symbolism anticipates the poetic, antiquarian fantasies of Lord Dunsany, whose mythic pastiches equally draw on Asian and European folklore whereas favoring dreamlike abstraction over realism. Extra broadly, O’Brien’s work helped set up an American mode of speculative fiction that used the unreal to interrogate energy and perception, influencing writers corresponding to Ambrose Bierce, Robert W. Chambers, and, finally, H. P. Lovecraft, whose Dream Cycle echoes O’Brien’s fascination with shadows, unreality, and the instability of the fabric world. Although formed by the Orientalist assumptions of his age, O’Brien’s story endures for its imaginative daring and its seamless fusion of magic, romance, and political perception—marking it as one of the vital formidable and forward-looking fantasies of pre-war American literature.
In a broader sense, “The Dragon Fang” exemplifies a transitional second in nineteenth-century imaginative literature, standing between the moralized fairy story and the fashionable bizarre story. In contrast to earlier fantasy, which tended to revive order by way of clear allegory or didactic closure, O’Brien permits the supernatural to stay destabilizing moderately than consoling. The shadow-duck isn’t banished, defined away, or neatly moralized; it annihilates its pursuers and vanishes, leaving dying, confusion, and political upheaval in its wake. This refusal to cultivate the marvelous anticipates the unsettling metaphysics of later writers corresponding to Ambrose Bierce, whose supernatural tales equally hinge on merciless irony and the collapse of rational authority, and Robert W. Chambers, whose fiction usually presents magnificence, obsession, and unreality as mutually reinforcing forces that lure characters towards annihilation.
O’Brien’s curiosity in phantasm as an energetic, predatory energy—moderately than mere trickery—foreshadows the peculiar menace of the image itself that might turn into central to fin-de-siècle bizarre fiction. The story’s legacy is thus much less a matter of direct affect than of structural and tonal prefiguration. Its ornate prose, ritualistic pacing, and sense of secret information place it in a lineage that runs by way of Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood, each of whom would develop the concept the unseen world presses always upon the seen one, revealing itself solely to those that trespass too far.
Like Machen, O’Brien means that historical truths survive beneath official histories and sanctioned energy; like Blackwood, he invests pure and symbolic types with a latent, quasi-sentient company. On this gentle, “The Dragon Fang” will be learn as an early American experiment within the literature of metaphysical unease—a narrative much less involved with spectacle for its personal sake than with the terrifying implication that actuality is ruled by forces detached to human authority. Although lengthy overshadowed by O’Brien’s extra well-known tales, it deserves recognition as a quietly vital ancestor of contemporary bizarre fiction, one which helped clear imaginative floor for the dream-logic, cosmic ambiguity, and symbolic dread that might outline the style within the a long time to observe.
