Legend about Dragon Claw Rock and Small Dragon

The Dragon Claw Rock lies amidst the pool of rocks at the edge of the southwest coastline of Hac Sa Beach. This coastal area of the Southern Sea, which used to be a rocky shore extending several hundreds of meters, is nowadays known as “Dragon Claw Cape” in Chinese (“Morro de Hác-Sá” in Portuguese) because of the presence of the Dragon Claw Rock.

According to the folklore of Coloane, once a small heavenly dragon ate the peaches of immortality (the peach tree flowered every 3000 years and bears fruit of immortality) without the permission of the Heavenly Jade Emperor. It aroused the wrath of the Emperor for the peaches were reserved for celestial beings that are closely related to him. The Jade Emperor ordered his courtiers to use their magical power to banish the rash little dragon to the world of the mortals and confined it in a rock.

The old inhabitants of Hac Sa Village said their forefather had once seen a small dragon, surrounded by a white stripe of light, crossing the sky over the Coloane Height one night. The meteor-like blaze fell to the stretch of rocks along the southwestern shore of Hac Sa Beach.

The rock that the small dragon dashed into is the Dragon Claw Rock. It is about 4 metres tall and divided into two parts, with its upper part resembling the shape of a lid. There is a screen-shaped rock located 3 metres away southwest of the Dragon Claw Rock, with indistinctive lines constituting a peach tree seen on its flattened surface. Legendarily, the peach tree was grown from the peach-pit spit out by the dragon (by scientific explanation, the brownish dented lines on the rock’s surface are caused by the corrosive salt in seawater). Nowadays, this piece of rock is known as the “Rock of the Heavenly Peach”.

Since a long time ago, the inhabitants have been saying that the small dragon would burst out from the rock in between 2000 and 2222. Then, it would leap into the air by using the Dragon Claw Terrace facing the rock as a jumping platform. Once high up in the sky, it begins to pursue its belief of equality: all celestial beings should be treated fairly in the sense that every celestial can taste the peach of immortality regardless of their importance or status and that no unreasonable or covered-up distribution of interest should be allowed in the Celestial Palace.