Dragon of the Lost Sea

Blurb

Dragon of the Lost Sea is a fantasy novel by Chinese-American author Laurence Yep. It was first published in 1982 and is the first book in his Dragon series. Having already written several books, Yep had wanted to adapt Chinese mythology into a fantasy form for some time, and began writing the story in 1980 after undertaking careful research. He had originally intended to adapt a Chinese folktale in which the Monkey King captured a river spirit who had flooded an entire city, which he at first tried to conceive in picture book form.
However, he kept questioning the motivations of the river spirit, who he had renamed Civet. As his outline ballooned exponentially from eight to 800 pages in an attempt to do so, he realized that he would need a series as opposed to just one book to tell her story. Dragon of the Lost Sea, the first book in this series, was originally titled The Green Darkness after Civet's forest home.