Fitz-James O'Brien's The Dragon Fang Possessed by the Conjuror Piou-Lu: A Detailed Summary and Literary Analysis
- Michael Kellermeyer
- 35 minutes ago
- 7 min read
“The Dragon Fang” – which is much less about its titular artifact and far more about a magical duck that mystifies the fools that would attempt to capture it – is a charming little piece of Oriental fantasy. This being said, there is nothing particularly horrifying about it, and the supernatural mechanics – though they deal injuries to the villains of the tale – are mystical rather than hideous. The story nonetheless deserves attention as an early example of American fantasy literature. Before Poe, Hawthorne, and O’Brien, fantasy was considered the domain of the East: of Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and Middle Eastern folklore, particularly as represented by the 1001 Arabian Nights – one of the most important and underrated tomes in the history of weird fiction and horror.
“The Dragon Fang” is written in the style of one of Scheherazade’s surreal episodes. Ali Baba, Sinbad, Aladdin, Gehrib, and Ali the Cairene are some of the most timeless characters from the Arabian Nights, and their adventures seamlessly interweave horror, fantasy, romance, mystery, intrigue, spy fiction, and ghost stories. H. P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, and others have remarked on the lasting, unquestionable influence of the Arabian Nights on Western speculative fiction (it is, for instance, the first example of a “ghoul” in world literature, and contains several early stories of haunted houses, possession by evil spirits, animated corpses, and ghost towns). While O’Brien doesn’t delve into the malevolence of supernatural beings – as he does so chillingly in “Wondersmith” and “The Lost Room” – he presents a curious example of folkloric speculative fiction set – like Aladdin – in China during the time of the Mongol (or “Tartar”) occupation.
SUMMARY
In the city of Tching-tou, a conjurer named Piou-Lu mounts a public stage and loudly advertises himself as the possessor of the miraculous Dragon Fang, a charm capable of curing illness, solving crimes, and granting success and power. A mixed crowd gathers, including small tradesmen and officials of varying ranks. While the Mandarins look on with skeptical amusement, the common people listen eagerly. When the third-class Mandarin Wei-chang-tze asks Piou-Lu to explain what a Dragon Fang is, the conjurer launches into an elaborate story of how he acquired it.
Piou-Lu claims that years earlier, while working as a barber in the obscure town of Siho, a mysterious and magnificently dressed Mandarin arrived at his shop suffering from a severe toothache. As Piou-Lu prepared to extract the tooth, he discovered with horror that the visitor’s mouth was filled with fire and that his teeth were crystal fangs glowing with flame. Despite his terror, Piou-Lu pulled one of the teeth with the help of the Mandarin’s attendants. The visitor then revealed himself to be Lung, the Dragon of the Sky, and rewarded Piou-Lu with the extracted fang, promising it would grant miraculous powers if Piou-Lu lived rightly. The dragon vanished in fire and smoke, leaving Piou-Lu in possession of the magical relic.
The crowd is impressed, though the Mandarins remain doubtful and demand proof. Piou-Lu offers to perform a miracle and, after some banter with a poor tailor named Hang-pou, produces a small bamboo stool. Standing upon it, he commands the stool to grow, and it lengthens astonishingly, raising him high into the air. As the crowd watches in awe, the stool transforms into a strange tree that produces sweet crimson fruit, which falls among the spectators. When a plum seller named Liho rushes in claiming the fruit is his, Piou-Lu exposes that Liho’s plums have mysteriously collected in his robe. A sudden wind scatters the tree, leaving only the bamboo stool behind. Piou-Lu exchanges a secret signal with Wei-chang-tze, hinting at a deeper connection between them.
That evening, Piou-Lu visits Wei-chang-tze’s home, where the Mandarin complains of being troubled by demons and asks the conjurer to perform a private conjuration. In the garden, Piou-Lu meets Wu, Wei-chang-tze’s daughter, with whom he is secretly in love. Wu urges him to seek an honorable career so they may marry openly, but Piou-Lu hints that his destiny has not yet arrived. After their parting, Piou-Lu gathers flowers and returns to the hall to begin his ritual.
Using the flower petals, Piou-Lu creates a living mandarin duck, then kills it. The duck’s body vanishes, and its shadow comes to life, radiant and untouchable. Piou-Lu then summons a wolf, which attacks the duck’s shadow but cannot harm it. Instead, the shadow torments the wolf until it collapses and dies. Piou-Lu explains that the duck represents the former Ming dynasty and the wolf the Manchu rulers who overthrew it, declaring that the time has come for the shadow to defeat the wolf. He reveals that he is Tien-te, a rebel leader claiming descent from the old dynasty, and urges Wei-chang-tze to join his cause, promising power and honor if he brings Wu with him.
Before Wei-chang-tze can respond, the tailor Hang-pou bursts in with soldiers and Mandarins, accusing Piou-Lu of being the rebel Tien-te and hoping to claim the reward for his capture. Piou-Lu mocks Hang-pou and warns him that the promised reward will never reach him intact. As the soldiers prepare to arrest him, Piou-Lu distracts them by pointing out the beautiful duck. Entranced, Hang-pou, the Mandarins, and the soldiers attempt to seize it, but their hands pass through it, and the duck eludes them no matter how they pursue it.
The chase grows frantic and exhausting. The duck seems to appear everywhere at once, leading the men in a relentless pursuit around the room until they are drenched in sweat and near collapse. While they are consumed by the futile chase, Piou-Lu renews his offer to Wei-chang-tze, warning him that remaining behind will lead to arrest and execution. Wei-chang-tze finally agrees, acknowledging Piou-Lu as emperor and consenting to Wu’s marriage.
At Piou-Lu’s signal, Wu joins them. The conjurer reveals his imperial identity to her, and despite her astonishment, she accepts him. Piou-Lu then uses the Dragon Fang’s power to transport them instantly to his mountain stronghold, leaving the pursuers behind. The men chasing the duck collapse and die from exhaustion, while the shadowy bird vanishes.
The next day, soldiers searching Wei-chang-tze’s house find the bodies of the Mandarins, soldiers, and the tailor Hang-pou lying dead on the floor. The people conclude that Wei-chang-tze poisoned them before fleeing. Wu becomes a favored wife of Tien-te, and Wei-chang-tze rises as one of his leading generals. The story concludes by asserting that Tien-te’s rebellion continues successfully and that he will soon reclaim the ancient throne of his ancestors.
ANALYSIS
“The Dragon Fang” is a richly layered fantasy that fuses spectacle, political allegory, and cultural fascination. At its thematic core is the instability of appearance and authority: Piou-Lu is simultaneously conjurer, impostor, revolutionary, and emperor, and the story delights in collapsing the boundaries between fraud and legitimacy. O’Brien repeatedly stages scenes in which power is revealed to rest not on force but on perception and belief.
The recurring image of the shadow—most memorably in the duck that cannot be seized—functions as a metaphor for ideas, loyalties, and revolutionary movements that elude physical suppression. Mandarins and soldiers alike are undone not by violence but by greed, vanity, and obsessive desire, suggesting that entrenched authority is most vulnerable to its own spiritual emptiness.
The story is equally shaped by its mid-nineteenth-century cultural and historical context, both Chinese and American. Written in 1856, during the Taiping Rebellion and decades before the rhetoric of the “Yellow Peril” hardened American attitudes toward Chinese immigrants, “The Dragon Fang” reflects a moment when the “Orient” was regarded less as a threat than as a source of wonder and imaginative novelty. As European immigrants flooded the eastern seaboard and Chinese laborers arrived on the West Coast, Anglo-American readers oscillated between curiosity and unease, projecting magic, hierarchy, and antiquity onto Asian cultures.
O’Brien exploits this fascination through ornate language, rigid caste distinctions, and theatrical ritual, yet beneath the Orientalist surface lies a pointed political allegory. The Manchu conquest, the humiliation of the queue, and the symbolism of Han Chinese resistance are all explicitly dramatized, transforming the tale into a meditation on foreign rule, cultural violation, and insurgent legitimacy—concerns that resonated quietly with American anxieties about authority, rebellion, and national identity on the eve of the Civil War.
II.
In terms of literary influence, “The Dragon Fang” stands as a significant precursor to later weird and fable-like fantasy traditions. O’Brien’s blending of romance, horror, satire, and political symbolism anticipates the poetic, antiquarian fantasies of Lord Dunsany, whose mythic pastiches similarly draw on Asian and European folklore while favoring dreamlike abstraction over realism. More broadly, O’Brien’s work helped establish an American mode of speculative fiction that used the unreal to interrogate power and belief, influencing writers such as Ambrose Bierce, Robert W. Chambers, and, ultimately, H. P. Lovecraft, whose Dream Cycle echoes O’Brien’s fascination with shadows, unreality, and the instability of the material world. Though shaped by the Orientalist assumptions of his age, O’Brien’s tale endures for its imaginative daring and its seamless fusion of magic, romance, and political insight—marking it as one of the most ambitious and forward-looking fantasies of pre-war American literature.
In a broader sense, “The Dragon Fang” exemplifies a transitional moment in nineteenth-century imaginative literature, standing between the moralized fairy tale and the modern weird story. Unlike earlier fantasy, which tended to restore order through clear allegory or didactic closure, O’Brien allows the supernatural to remain destabilizing rather than consoling. The shadow-duck is not banished, explained away, or neatly moralized; it annihilates its pursuers and vanishes, leaving death, confusion, and political upheaval in its wake. This refusal to domesticate the marvelous anticipates the unsettling metaphysics of later writers such as Ambrose Bierce, whose supernatural tales similarly hinge on cruel irony and the collapse of rational authority, and Robert W. Chambers, whose fiction often presents beauty, obsession, and unreality as mutually reinforcing forces that lure characters toward annihilation.
III.
O’Brien’s interest in illusion as an active, predatory power—rather than mere trickery—foreshadows the peculiar menace of the symbol itself that would become central to fin-de-siècle weird fiction. The story’s legacy is thus less a matter of direct influence than of structural and tonal prefiguration. Its ornate prose, ritualistic pacing, and sense of secret knowledge place it in a lineage that runs through Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood, both of whom would develop the idea that the unseen world presses constantly upon the visible one, revealing itself only to those who trespass too far.
Like Machen, O’Brien suggests that ancient truths survive beneath official histories and sanctioned power; like Blackwood, he invests natural and symbolic forms with a latent, quasi-sentient agency. In this light, “The Dragon Fang” can be read as an early American experiment in the literature of metaphysical unease—a story less concerned with spectacle for its own sake than with the terrifying implication that reality is governed by forces indifferent to human authority. Though long overshadowed by O’Brien’s more famous tales, it deserves recognition as a quietly important ancestor of modern weird fiction, one that helped clear imaginative ground for the dream-logic, cosmic ambiguity, and symbolic dread that would define the genre in the decades to follow.