Richard Pratt draws on Britain and China in A Dance to Wake a Dragon – China Underground

A Dance to Wake a Dragon brings Tianya’s mythic dragons to readers

Richard Pratt is a British educator and author based in Beijing. His fantasy novel A Dance to Wake a Dragon was published by Earnshaw Books on 29 April 2025. The story is set in Tianya, where dragons regulate the balance between order and randomness and a ritual dance at Zamai restores equilibrium.

The narrative follows Shengli, a girl from a remote village who undertakes a mission to reach Zamai with friends and a guide named Renzi. Pratt has worked as a teacher for over three decades in Britain and China and is Principal of an international school in Beijing; outside school, his interests include music, poetry, and football (Beijing Guo’an).

What inspired you to write ‘A Dance to Wake a Dragon’?

I’ve been a schoolteacher for over thirty years and at the time that I started ‘Dance’ I was working at a school in Hangzhou. I favour student designed, project-based approaches, in our work in schools and indeed, it is a signature feature of the school I head now in Beijing. At that time, working with a group of students, one elected to embark on writing a fantasy genre novel. I thought that that sounded fun and so I decided to have a go myself. So, the inspiration came from a Year 10 student, really. And I decided to try and pitch the story to readers who would have been those students two or three years younger than I knew them, such that this would be a book that had they had it when they were 12 or 13, they would now speak of fondly at 14 or 15. That gave me an idea of my reader.

What drew you toward this particular setting and theme?

As mentioned above, I was living in Hangzhou at the time, and I have spent half my adult life living and working in China, so the setting is, naturally, deeply influenced by that experience. However, I finished the book over a summer vacation back in my home in York, England, and so that influence is also quite important. It reflects me, and my world, I suppose. The themes emerged in the writing, and I guess had been lying dormant in me. Now that I’ve written the second in the series, I’m more conscious of the themes that I want to explore. But in the first book, I was finding out myself as I went along what it was that was going to be important. Everything is a mix-up of influences and inspirations, and it was interesting to me to see how things played out in the writing.

How did you imagine the world of Tianya?

As part of that project that we were engaged on with students at the time, we spent a few days visiting the town of Anji and the bamboo forest that surrounds it, to the north-west of Hangzhou. I wrote the opening passages set in a bamboo forest while sitting in a bamboo forest. They say that you should write what you know and that is what I was looking at, at the time. Subsequently the world grew as I added in constraints and shaped features such as the geography, which in some ways mimics China with deserts and grasslands to the north, mountains to the west, forests to the south, and sea to the east, but this was mainly to ensure that in future books, I have a variety of landscapes to play with. Growing through that book, and in the next, has been a lot of thought about the history and philosophical traditions of Tianya. It is a lot of fun and of course I find ways to include things that I like and care about.

What sparked your interest in writing about dragons in this way?

It simply began with the idea of a fantasy genre story, and it seemed to me that to fit the genre, it had to have dragons. But then, they quickly began to feel more like Asian dragons, rather than the European style dragons of Tolkein and so on. It wasn’t so much that I was, myself, interested in dragons but they are a familiar device that I hoped would support connection with readers.

How did you collect material and references for the story?

One of the pleasures of writing this was drawing on various strands of odd information or ideas that I had picked up over the years, and mixing things together, and having to check back on what I understood or did not. One can research so much, so easily, these days without leaving one’s desk. But it helps to have had a bit of a magpie mind to start with, and to have scraps and odds and ends of things from reading and teaching for so many years.

Did any cultures or histories influence your ideas?

Of course, the book is very strongly influenced by my experience of living and working in China and studying the language and literature. But it is also clear that a British tradition of writing for children has influenced me, from Kenneth Graham to Phillip Pullman. And what is interesting is how many themes emerge as being of much broader, even universal cultural reference. For example, a dance to reactivate the earth and to bring the spring is familiar to fans of Stravinsky, who was himself drawing on Siberian tribal culture.

Was the concept of ‘fluence’ based on anything specific?

There are quite a range of concepts in different parts of the world that involve the idea of an animating force or spirit. Often depicted as either a breath, or flow, concept. Very obviously, from a China-study perspective, there is influence here from the idea of the Dao (道) as a generative force and the role of Qi (气). However, variations on this ‘anima mundi’ exist in other cultures too and so I would prefer not to be too specific about that single cultural reference. In Welsh tradition, for example, some interpretations of the concept of awen are very similar and Dylan Thomas’s ‘The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower’ was an unashamed reference for me in the passage where Old Tam introduces the concept to Shengli. This is a children’s book, not a scholarly work, so I picked what I liked and mixed it in however it worked for me.

How did you choose the novel’s mix of folklore and everyday life?

This is a great question, but I really don’t know how to answer it. It had to be a sense of feel of how the balance worked, and whether it felt ‘true’ in terms of the experience of the characters and whether it would read as a story. Too much folklore, and it would be hard to identify with the characters; too little, and it would lose the magic. So obviously there is an aim for balance but that had to be a judgment in terms of feel and taste. I hope it worked.

How did you shape Shengli’s character and voice?

I just had to have a clear idea of who she was and then she wrote herself. I think that having read the book you will perhaps agree that there was no way that I would be able to shape her in any way that she was not willing to be shaped!

How did you decide on the different types of dragons?

The original depiction of four different types of dragons came from something I read once about the symbolism of some dragons in a Chinese artwork. I cannot remember where it was or refer back to see if was in any way reliable or correct in any historical context, but it had sat in my brain from somewhere and I just dug it out. Since then, and leading into the second book, I’ve developed the role of the dragons and the forces they represent myself, so that the concept of ‘halteres’ can work through the interplay of the four types of dragons. But I made that up myself. Or I think I did. I never really know what I’ve made up or what I had lodged in my brain from something I once read, or saw, or heard. Influence is a funny thing like that. Fortunately, in children’s fiction you aren’t required to give references or footnotes.

Why did you include the secret script of nüshu in the plot?

Partly to advance the plot. If there are to be spells, they should be esoteric in some way, and the transmission of secret knowledge through women is itself a powerful line to pursue. So, one could just invent something or make it runes or sigils or whatever. But the history of the nüshu of China is so amazing that I decided on this occasion to draw on that, and not to change the name but to keep the pinyin rendering of the term out of respect for that inspiration. There are, of course, other ‘women’s scripts’ from other cultures, such as the Mashket script used in Yiddish, Dedabruli from Georgia, and of course the Hiragana script used in modern Japanese which was originally devised by women who were forbidden from learning to use Kanji. But the original inspiration came from the story of the women of southern Hunan.

What did you enjoy most about writing this novel?

In part, it was trying creating problems for the characters and then solving them, and then introducing themes and elements of esoterica and folklore and making them real in the story in some way. But what I have actually enjoyed the most is talking about the story with people who have read it. We gave it to our grade 7 and grade 8 students to read here at my school in Beijing and some of the conversations that came out of that were really fulfilling. I thought that all I wanted to do was to write a book and that I would be satisfied when I had done that, and had it published. But I find that I am now greedy for readers, and for dialogue with readers.

What are you working on next?

There is a sequel, provisionally entitled ‘A Dance for a Lost Dragon’ that is now with the publisher, and I hope that we will see that before too long. I also have a non-fiction work that is also with Earnshaw Books that looks at traditional Chinese poetry as it is taught in Chinese primary schools and uses that curriculum as the basis for an introduction of the works to an English-speaking audience. I’m currently working on a second book in that series, taking the national Junior High School textbooks as the guide. But if the feedback to the Shengli stories continues to be as pleasing as it has been so far, I would like to get on to a third before too long. She won’t be happy to be ignored for long.

Images courtesy of Richard Pratt

Post Author

Matteo Damiani

CHINA-UNDERGROUND. Matteo Damiani is an Italian sinologist, photographer, author and motion designer. Matteo lived and worked for ten years in China. Founder of CinaOggi.it and China-underground.com.