#ZUN is dragonphobic he would never put an actual dragon in touhou

[roaringwish]

wait i thought yachie was a dragon? just a turtle one

So this ask sent me digging and here's what I found:

She's a Chinese cryptid called jidiao (吉弔) that's described as a tortoise with the head and tail of a dragon, which is what the wiki says.

Recently I found this ask where Clarste, a translator said that it's easiest for us to view her as a type of dragon, but a jidiao IS its own species.

On archive.org I found the text transcript of the book A Chinese Bestiary by Richard E. Strassberg where they mentioned jidiao:

"He cited a [dragon turtle] related species mentioned in medical texts, the Jidiao, which has a turtle’s body and a snake’s head."

So, from the point of view of non-touhou mythology she’s even less of a dragon fhgfjgh

The other source I found is this website, that gives a pretty detailed description of them, and it says (from what my translator understood) that when a dragon lays two eggs one of them will become a dragon, and the other a jidiao, which Would make Yachie a dragon technically...? But like a lesser dragon I suppose, the rest of the article wasn’t kind to jidiao.

This one also describes them a beings with a snake head and a turtle body.

It also has this image of them, which I think is cool and I also think there’s a 70% chance that ZUN used it as a reference for Yachie.

In conclusion, I don't see her as a Dragon dragon, she's more of a separate species to me (even if her parents were dragons) that has both dragon and tortoise qualities, but I think the myths leave it up to interpretation...? Sort of...?