The blueprint every other dragon came from. The East Asian dragon is nothing like its fire-breathing Western cousin. It's a benevolent power — lord of water and rain, summoner of storms and good harvests, emblem of the emperor and of wisdom itself. A composite creature assembled from nine animals (a camel's head, a deer's antlers, a serpent's body, an eagle's claws, a carp's scales), it moves through cloud and river rather than menacing villages, and to cross paths with one is fortune, not doom.

What makes this particular dragon interesting is what it was for. It isn't a standalone artwork but a teaching image — a two-page spread from an 18th-century painting manual, one of the model-books that taught Edo artists how to paint. The volume it comes from, "Kan ryū no bu," is the Chinese-style section, so this is the "correct" Chinese-manner dragon, laid out for students to study and copy. In a real sense, images like this are the DNA of everything that followed — including the dragons that would later coil across the tattooed backs of Kuniyoshi's Suikoden heroes a century on.

The man behind it, Ōoka Shunboku, was an Osaka painter of the Kanō school who became something more useful than famous: a great populariser. Through book after book of careful reproductions he put the masterworks of China and Japan into the hands of ordinary artists, helping ignite the era's fascination with Ming-dynasty Chinese painting. He's no household name, but a great deal of what came after was drawn by people who first learned their craft from his pages.

Ryu (竜, Dragon), from the book Kan ryū no bu (漢流之部, Han-style volume) from the series of six illustrated books Wakan Meigaen (和漢名画苑, A Garden of Celebrated Japanese and Chinese Paintings) 1750.

Ōoka Shunboku (大岡春卜, 1680–1763)