Dragon Mountain Inspiration by Katie and Kevin Tsang

Discover the inspiration for the Dragon Mountain series by Katie and Kevin Tsang.  They found nature and its beauty a brilliant place to imagine leaping tigers and dragons flying.  Thank you for writing such a wonderful blog!

DRAGON MOUNTAIN INSPIRATION – TIGER LEAPING GORGE IN YUNAAN PROVINCE

By Katie and Kevin Tsang

The mountain setting for the summer camp in Dragon Mountain was very much inspired by our time spent in Yunnan Province, specifically hiking Tiger Leaping Gorge

When we were living in Hong Kong, we had the opportunity to travel all over China. One of our favourite trips was to a place Katie had visited as a student, Tiger Leaping Gorge in Yunnan Province. Tiger Leaping Gorge is one of the deepest gorges (or canyons) in the world – and the scenery there is dramatic, varied, and absolutely gorgeous (pun intended!). Legend has it that a tiger once leapt across the gorge, giving it its name.

We spent two days hiking the gorge, starting at the top and going all the way down to the Yangtze River. It felt like stepping back in time, or into a fantasy novel. We trekked through bamboo forests, past fields of wildflowers, and down steep limestone ravines. We traversed cliffside waterfalls, marvelled at snowcapped mountains, and put our feet in the rushing Yangtze River. We spent the night at a small guesthouse nestled between rice terraces, and spent hours watching shooting stars. To this day, we’ve never seen more stars anywhere else. It was a hard hike, but a stunning one, and we loved every minute of it — even the truly terrifying climb down to the lowest point of the gorge! Best of all, it felt like somewhere that you really could discover hidden dragons.

Years later, when we first had the idea for Dragon Mountain, and imagined a camp hidden deep in the mountains of China, where the campers discover secret dragons who need their help, we knew exactly where we wanted it to be set. Our Camp Dragon is imaginary, but we very much envision it in the Yunnan mountains. When our main character Billy describes the harrowing bus journey up to the mountains, and seeing peaks that look like they could puncture the sky, those descriptions are directly inspired by our own experiences in Tiger Leaping Gorge (after we finished the hike, we book a bus back to the nearest city, and we really did feel like the bus was going to go careening off into the ravine!) We also took inspiration from the beautiful and varied landscape. When Billy and his friends are lost in the bamboo forest, that was inspired by one of the bamboo forests we saw on our hike (as well as a bamboo forest in Hawaii that we once really did get lost in, but that is a story for another time!).  And of course the titular Dragon Mountain itself is inspired by the very mountains we hiked across. We imagined Dragon Mountain, where Billy and his friends first discover four trapped dragons, a massive limestone mountain, and we could perfectly picture it– because we felt like we’d really seen it in real life! The only thing better than hiking Tiger Leaping Gorge would have been finding a hidden entrance to one of the mountains and then discovering dragons there!

We also wanted to put a tiger in the story, and if you’ve read Dragon Mountain you’ll know what tiger we are talking about, and that tiger was partly inspired by the fabled tiger that leapt across the gorge.

Tiger Leaping Gorge is located between two real mountains— Haba Snow Mountain and the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, which is also a wonderful coincidence. We would love to go back one day, and bring our children, and see what other stories this magical place will inspire.

The Dragon Mountain series is published by Simon & Schuster Children’s and is available now, including a special World Book Day edition.

 

Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Federation.