The WATER DRAGON - is it real?

The "NEAK" - is… it… REAL? (from the epilogue of The Smell of Water)

Now, if I’d been 12-year-old Lang, I would have been looking for a dragon in the deep hole at the head of the fish-trap river. He believed it was a real animal. And the more the 43-year-old Lang told me about the "neak", the more I thought his 12-year-old self had been right...

What started me thinking that the "neak" could be real is the consistency of its depiction, and that it doesn’t have anatomical features that don’t make sense (like wings that wouldn’t support its weight). And it might not be extinct - I’d actually seen a photo of one, in a Lao temple in California. Then there was that U-Tube clip…  So the three of us - Lang, myself, and my son Pyara, a Marine Biology major - decided to do some research.

First, we had to define what constitutes a “neak” – what anatomical parts it has. We looked at the rooves of several temples and came up with 10 definitive features, illustrated below on a shadow puppet we found in the market. Then, we had to determine what it doesn't have.

At this point we came to the same conclusion as Lang’s comrade:  “It’s the fins… So a ‘neak’s not some kind of giant water snake – a reptile. Or something like the Water Monitor – that’s a reptile, too. Or a dinosaur-like creature, like the Loch Ness Monster – they say he swims with flippers. And a separate tail fin? I used to go with my mother to buy eels in the market – I remember very well what an eel looks like. Their tail fins are joined to their dorsal fins. So the ‘neak’ isn’t some kind of giant eel. That leaves… fish."

But it is not a fish. There are never any gills.

So now we didn’t know what it was, but we thought we knew what it wasn’t:

• a bird (no wings, legs, feet or claws)

• a mammal (no fur or hair)

• a plesiosaur (no flippers)

• an eel (the dorsal fin and caudal fin aren’t joined) or other fish (no gills)

• a snake (snakes don’t have fins)

Well, this left us pretty much stuck. So we decided to stop looking at the animal and start looking for linguistic clues.

To do this we went to Wat Bo Buddhist temple in Siem Reap in search of its abbot, Preah Maha Vimaladhamma Pin-Sem Sirisuvanno. He is a living treasure of information about the traditional Khmer arts, and has founded a school at Wat Bo so that masters can pass their skills on. He told us that the modern Khmer word “neak” comes from the Sanskrit word “naga”. I’ve mapped the progression below (I knew there was a reason I saved my college textbooks…). He said the “neak” is a snake.

So now we had a snake with dorsal and caudal fins, a dewlap, and a crest on its head. We were thoroughly confused. But Preah Maha Pin-Sem is the expert, so we continued to listen. 

So just as the Khmer adopted an Indian architectural form and then rendered it in a Khmer style (Angkor Wat the best-known example), they adopted the form of the “naga” and rendered it as one of their own indigenous snakes. This is consistent with what they did with other Indian forms, such as the “apsarā”; in Cambodia this celestial beauty is always carved with a Khmer face, clothing and coiffure.

One of the snakes Preah Maha Pin-Sem spoke of is huge. There’s an old story about hunters who ventured deep into the jungle and sat down to rest on what they thought was a log – until it moved. A man in the room told us another story. A group of men sent by Khmer Rouge cadres into the jungle in Battambang Province to do some task or another stepped over a log on their way. On their return, all that remained of the “log” was an indentation in the grass. The man had heard the story from one of the men who had stepped over the “log”.

Note that neither of these stories associates this snake with water – only with jungle.

Preah Maha Pin-Sem told us that the two stone statues of a gargantuan serpent in front of the South Gate to Jayavarman VII’s royal city of Angkor Thom (pulled by gods on one side of the bridge and demons on the other) depict this huge snake. It has the head of a cobra and no crest, fins or dewlap. The “naga” on the lintel of Preah Einkosei (above) has also been rendered as this snake.

The other snake he told us of is the “Pooah Krai”, a much smaller animal. It has a black body with ivory bands, and both injects venom and sprays venom from its fangs (like the Indo-Chinese Spitting Cobra).

We looked again at the shadow puppet, and realized that it depicts the “neak” with the same short, stout body as the Pooah Krai temple railing above. As you can see, this animal isn’t slithering through water, either – there are three bushes underneath him.

Preah Maha Pin-Sem told us that the Pooah Krai is, in fact, not a water snake – that it lives in the jungle. But it is associated with water because it hibernates in ponds (with other Pooah Krai) to increase the potency of its venom.

And, like most snakes, it can swim.

Another reason the “neak” would be associated with water is that, in both India and Southeast Asia, snakes are associated with water. Illustrative of this is that some statues of the Buddha include a many-headed “naga” spreading its hoods over the Buddha to protect him from the rain. And legends suggest that, at Angkor, snakes were associated with the water used for agriculture. So even terrestrial snakes were associated with water, both in the original Indian form and in the Khmer rendering of it.

And so the elusive “water dragon” is not an aquatic animal at all – it’s a terrestrial one.

OK, we now had two terrestrial Cambodian snakes. But what about the head crest, dewlap and fins? We were still confused.

Preah Maha Pin-Sem explained that the crest, dewlap and fins that are part of the anatomy of the “neak” seen in modern-day Cambodian architecture and popular culture are the result of relatively-recent Chinese influence. It seems today’s Khmer like the fancy Chinese dragon better than the more subdued Indian “naga”. He pointed out that Angkorian “neak” do not have these three anatomical features.

So now we had the answer to the fifty-thousand-dollar question – is the “neak” a real animal? Yes – it can be either of two Cambodian snakes. On to the million-dollar question – are these snakes extinct?

Preah Maha Pin-Sem said that the last sighting of a Pooah Krai was during the French colonial period (1863 – 1953). Both Khmer and French reported seeing them. (There must be a record of this snake in some French scientific journal somewhere – if only a photo of a dead one, or an artist’s rendering. If you know of such a record, please contact us.) The man who described the “log” in Battambang Province believed that that was the last sighting of the huge mahogany-colored snake.

There are several wildlife refuges in Indo-China that afford the habitat these two snakes need to live and hide (vast tracts of dense, wet jungle). We all came to the conclusion that there may be a few left out there. The Pooah Krai should look like the railing at the Lao temple in California, but black with white stripes and possibly a rattle at the end of the tail, and minus the dewlap, crest and caudal fin. (Oh, and the ears – the Lao sculptor got a little carried away…) The other snake should be solid brown in color and as big as a log. It seems the people who told the stories about it didn’t see its head or its tail, but, if you saw a snake as big as a log, would you stick around?

And the photo I’d seen of a “neak” in the Lao temple?

It’s a picture of American seamen holding a dead oarfish found off the California coast. But it was passed off as a photo of American GIs on the Mekong during the Vietnam War holding a “neak”. Wikipedia exposed the hoax (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mekongnaga.jpg).

The oarfish is a deep-water ocean (salt-water) fish. There would be no habitat for it in the Mekong, whether in Cambodia, the Mekong Delta (Vietnam), or the Upper Mekong (China, Laos, Thailand and Myanmar). 

And its head looks nothing like that of the “neak”. The photo of the seamen holding the oarfish was published by the U. S. Navy, so it’s safe to say it wasn’t photo-shopped. But look closely at the fish's head and compare it to the head of the oarfish pictured at right (photo by Katia Cao, courtesy of Fishbase.org). What appears to be a crest on the top of the head in the Navy photo is actually the empty space between the seaman’s arm and his body (clearly visible when the photo is magnified). And the head is partially severed; when the seaman tried to raise it off the cement it moved up and back, altering the fish's profile.

But, as we’ve said, the “neak” can’t be a fish because it’s never depicted with gills.

And what of the U-tube clip of something BIG swimming in the Mekong? You can see it at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZArv10aBP88.

Now, there are plenty of monsters in the Mekong. Like the Asian Water Monitor, which can grow to 3.2 meters (10.5 feet) and 90 kilos (almost 200 pounds). Lang saw one in his village, when he was seven. (Wikipedia photo by Dibyendu Ash)

The Giant Mekong Catfish can reach a length of 3.5 meters (11.5 feet) and a weight of 275 kilos (just over 600 pounds), and the Siamese Giant Carp can get up to 90 kilos (just shy of 200 pounds).

There are Irrawaddy Dolphins, too, and undoubtedly the occasional King Cobra (up to 4 meters - 13 feet).

If you view the U-tube clip in “full screen” mode and look at the footage where the crowd oohs and aahs, you’ll see that the second head that comes up out of the water is attached to a different animal than the first head that came up. And that both animals are very short, and are being followed by animals like them. Fish, probably migratory fish, swimming one after the other in a long, thin line that may have looked like a water dragon from the shoreline. Not a “neak”. Sorry.