In July 1934, residents of the port town of Yingkou in Liaoning Province in what was then Japanese-occupied Manchukuo reported the appearance of an enormous, long-bodied animal — described in newspaper accounts of the time as a 'fallen dragon' (坠龙) — in the estuarine reeds of the Liao River delta. The Shengjing Times and the Harbin Gazette published multiple photographs and eyewitness accounts over a six-week period. Local residents organized a voluntary rescue operation, building a wooden channel to convey water to the animal and raising straw sunshades over its body. The creature, described as approximately 10 metres long, dark green in colour, with prominent dorsal scales, four limbs, and a pair of long horn-like protrusions, survived for approximately twenty days before dying during a heavy thunderstorm.
The creature's remains were examined by a team of Imperial Japanese Army veterinarians and a taxonomist from the Mukden Medical College. A preserved skeletal display was exhibited at the Liaoning Provincial Museum in 1934, and a surviving set of photographs was published in the Shengjing Times on August 19, 1934. The remains were reportedly destroyed during the chaos of the Chinese Civil War in the late 1940s, and no skeletal material survives. In the decades since, the Yingkou case has become foundational to modern Chinese cryptozoology. An investigation by the Academy of Sciences of the People's Republic of China conducted between 2004 and 2006 interviewed nine surviving eyewitnesses who had been young people in 1934; all independently confirmed details consistent with the 1934 newspaper accounts.
Proposed identifications include an unusually large Baiji (Yangtze river dolphin, now extinct), a stranded whale, or a hoax constructed from horse and dolphin remains. None adequately accounts for the multiple limb-like appendages, the horn-like protrusions, or the 20-day survival in brackish water. A significant minority view in Chinese academic zoology, including Professor Ma Xiaoxing of Northeast Normal University, holds that the Yingkou creature may represent a genuinely unknown species, potentially a surviving relict. The case remains a subject of active scholarly investigation and is the most famous single incident in twentieth-century Chinese cryptozoology.