Enter the Dragon

This story was published in Nikkei Asia here in July 2025.

“Here Be Dragons” was a poetic turn of phrase used by cartographers in the past to indicate terra incognita. But on one sixteenth century map of what is now Indonesia, it was also unwittingly. Though the area in question was unexplored by Europeans at the time, it was already well travelled by local people, who had long known it as Nusa Nipa, or Dragon Island.

When Europeans did arrive at its coastal villages to trade, they heard tales of fearsome beasts lurking inland, but dismissed them as fairytales and folklore. It was only centuries later, when a curious Dutch colonial officer mounted an expedition to the interior and eventually returned carrying the dead body of a Komodo dragon, that the outsiders realised the locals had been telling the truth all along.

On a recent visit there, I was following my guide through the brush in the searing afternoon heat when he suddenly froze and then slowly raised his forked stick to point at a nearby tree. Under it, lounging in the shade, I had my first sighting of this most extraordinary creature.

Though strictly speaking giant lizards, Komodos’ enormous size well justifies the dragon moniker - they can reach up to three metres in length and weigh in at nearly ninety kilogrammes. And while they may not breathe fire, their mouths contain something just as deadly: toxic venom glands that allow them to take down pretty much anything they set their eyes on. That includes deer, buffalos, and even humans, given they can comfortably outrun us.

But though there have been a handful of tragic fatalities in past years, on the whole the local community lives in harmony with the dragons. This gives a glimmer of hope for what is now an endangered species, with just a couple of thousand individuals left in the wild across this and the neighbouring islands in the Lesser Sunda group.

It is a glimmer that is further brightened by another remarkable biological feature, an ability that the people living with them always talked about but that outsiders scoffed at until its observation in a British zoo: the female dragons have the rare talent for pathogenesis, the ability to produce fertilised eggs without having first mated with a partner.

Those past dismissals of dragon stories by foreigners are part of an enduring wider trend. For example, outsiders also long mocked tales of the gorilla and the giraffe in Africa and of the panda in China.

Here in Indonesia, travellers had similarly rejected stories of the ebu gogo, a bipedal creature that was said to be half-ape and half-human, standing a metre or so tall, covered in hair, with long gangly arms. Local people had told tales of it for centuries, but visitors always derided it as a myth, or maybe just a misrepresentation of a monkey. That was until, in a familiar turn of events, a body showed up.

I had to drive for several hours along narrow, twisting roads through the mountains and jungle to reach the site where they’d found it, a remote cave deep in the interior of the Indonesian island of Flores. It was here in 2003 that a joint Indonesian-Australian archaeological team had come to look for evidence of early humans.

During one of their excavations, they unearthed what they thought was the top of a child’s skull, but as they carefully burrowed down further to excavate it, they found that it in fact had the teeth of an adult. What they had actually stumbled upon was the find of their lives - the skeleton of a whole new species. They then went on to dig up another fourteen of them in the same cave. 

Experts confirmed that the bodies these skeletons had once supported would have looked like a cross between a human and an ape. They named the new species Homo floresiensis after the island where they had been discovered, but the morphology was also a striking match with those stories of the ebu gogo that had been told by local people for centuries.

So much so that the editor of the prestigious scientific journal Nature described it as a wake-up call for scientists, urging them to take indigenous people’s stories of allegedly mythical creatures much more seriously. He said that the discovery showed such stories  could well be founded on elements of truth, such as ancestral memories of what were once very real creatures.

It is also a refreshing reminder for the rest of us that humanity has not yet catalogued everything in books or on the internet, and that centuries of accumulated, lived experience of nature can still offer astounding new knowledge and insights.

In other words, there’s thankfuly still plenty of terra incognita out there.