Man needs monsters. From the cave at Lascaux to your television screen tonight, Man has always needed something inhuman to measure his humanity against. The latest monster has swum into sight. This is a black aquatic creature, at least ten metres long. It swims very fast, in coils, occasionally raising its head out of the water. It was filmed and photographed by tourists during the holiday season. And, as it happens, it is not our own dear Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster.

For these are Chinese creatures, recorded on Kanasi Lake, near Xinjiang’s short border with Russia, and are being screened in grainy videos on Chinese television. And they have the traditional qualities of all good (ie, bad) monsters. They are unlike any other creature known to biology. They are huge, and presumably dangerous, so making humans shiver with vicarious pleasure in the comfort of their cave, or, in this case, armchair. They are the unknown Other.

The chimera was a fire-breathing monster, with the head of a lion, body of a she-goat and tail of a snake. In these incredulous modern times, the poor beast has become a metaphor for an unrealistic dream, or an organism consisting of at least two genetically different kinds of tissue: eg, a mouse lumbered with a human ear. The unicorn is loaded with romantic symbolism. The tapestries of the Lady and the Unicorn in the Cluny Museum in Paris are masterpieces of medieval monsterology. Centaurs and Lapiths, Daleks and Gollum, Gryphon and the Jedi: the Chinese monsters join a never-ending tail, stretching human imagination and credulity. And they flatter the most remarkable creature of the all: Man. For monsters need Man to make them.