"Red Dragon" or "Center"
From reader "Jonah P.":
"Greetings, I've always wondered what the symbol means on the Tshirts that Swollen Members wear. A buddy and me that play mah-jhong have seen the symbol before. He says that it means 'middle' and it doesnt mean anything else. But I've learned that in terms of strictly Mah-jhong (or mahjong, ma jiang) that it means 'Red Dragon' which is the name of the company that produces the shirt. So if anything I figured that someone just took the "middle" character out of context."
Usually the character 中 means "central; center, middle; in the midst of; hit (target); attain". Only in the game of 麻將 (Ma Jiang or mahjong), 中 would represent "red dragon".
I do understand the association the skateboard/clothing company Red Dragon Supplies (RDS) trying to connect between their products and "red dragon", but unless the people know about Mahjong or play the game, the connection is bit of a stretch. Plus, the character 中 has to be in red color in order to represent "red dragon", unfortunately many of RDS' products do not have.
posted by tian at
1:01 PM
8 Comments:
In Thomas Harris' book Red Dragon (where Hannibal Lecter makes his first appearance) the villain carves 中 into a tree and FBI specialists later identify it as "the red dragon."
Also, the character appeared in a James Bond movie. I can't remember which one, but I believe it was one with Sean Connery. He looked at a dead man's wrist, saw the character tattooed there and drew the conclusion that the man was a member of the Red Dragon triad (or something like that, it's been a while since i've seen it).
just because hollywood says that is so doesn't mean it's true :)
In Mahjong 中 does not mean red dragon either but is related to it by virtue that the 中 tile often has a redragon drawn on it (thus you end up calling it the 中 tile or the red dragon). Perhaps the tile makers could not come up with a symbol for "middle" except the middle kingdom is a country of the dragon. Was there ever a Red Dragon Gang in reality? If so this might have been where they took the exotic connection from. IF not the fiction writers made a silly mistake that in turn has spread.
It's true that the dudes who started Red Dragon didn't have a clue about Chinese/Japanese characters. At the time there were always alarmist stories in the Vancouver newspapers about "Asian Youth Gangs," so they started calling themselves the Red Dragons as a joke about Asian Youth gangs run amok in Vancouver (none of the RDs dudes are Asian.) This whole thing was only ever a joke to them and you should know better than to take punk-ass skaters seriously.
Hey, one of the james bond that has the "red dragon" on his wrist was thunderball. this site actually helped thanks man
I didn't know Red Dragons was a skater apparel company. I still believe that the symbol means both 'middle' and 'red dragon' though. Maybe just the way it could be used. Do you really think that movies from two different backgrounds and producers would say the same thing about a symbol? It is different in every culture: Yes, 'middle' in mandarin but in biblical terms it means satan, though the symbol itself hasn't been traced to the bible. It is merely a trail of follow-ups. In Red Dragon, the symbol stands for the Red Dragon, which you can plainly see in the movie that it follows to satan. The movie is like a lighter version of the same subject of The Exorcist.
What you think doesn't matter, what matters is what the character means in languages using it; and in both Chinese and Japanese 中 means only "middle, center" (and also "China", as an abbreviation of 中国 - "the country of the middle")
Nobody able to read chinese characters will ever think about a dragon (whatever the color) when seeing "中".
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