Читать книгу Giraffe Reflections - Dale Peterson - Страница 11

UNICORNS

IN THE HISTORICAL ANNALS of the Chinese, the earliest known reference to Africa appears in the Yu-yang-tsa-tsu, written by the scholar Tuan Ch’eng-shih, who died in AD 863.

Relaying stories and information that had been provided by travelers from the West, Tuan described a land called Po-pa-li, which probably corresponds to a coastal portion of today’s northern Somalia. This hostile, faraway land was home to some strange animals, the scholar wrote, including “the camel-crane” (ostrich), the “mule with red, black, and white stripes wound as girdles around the body” (zebra), and “the so-called tsu-la, striped like a camel and in size like an ox. It is yellow in colour. Its front legs are five feet high and its hind legs are only three feet. Its head is high up and is turned upwards. Its skin is an inch thick.” Both these odd quadrupeds—the striped mule and the tsu-la—are “variations of the camel,” which “the inhabitants are fond of hunting and from time to time they catch them with poisoned arrows.”¹

The tsu-la, then, was probably a giraffe.

At various times following that earliest reference, the Chinese traded with African countries through intermediaries, particularly as, during the tenth and eleventh centuries, their trading ships sailed as far as southeastern India to exchange their own valuables for such luxury goods as elephant ivory, rhinoceros horn, pearls, and precious aromatics. But the Chinese would not see or touch an actual giraffe until AD 1414.

That gorgeous creature arrived during China’s Age of Exploration, a great if brief period that lasted from AD 1405 to 1433 and was inspired—or commanded—by the Ming emperor Yongle, who opened China to an assertive form of maritime trade with countries to the south and west. This new orientation may have been a natural consequence of the disintegration of the Mongolian Empire, which ended the Silk Road and an extensive overland trade between China and countries to the west. Under Yongle, the Chinese turned to the seas in seven enormous expeditions that eventually reached halfway across the world, through the Indonesian archipelago to India, the Arabian Middle East as far as Mecca, and on to the eastern shores of Africa as far south as the coast of today’s Kenya.

Guided by magnetic compasses and complex star charts, the expeditions carried huge quantities of Chinese-made goods—copper and iron products, furniture and porcelain, cloth and silk and paper, sugar and salt—and returned to China with foreign envoys who oversaw the presentation of gaudy treasures to the emperor and his court while also profiting through commerce outside the court.

Nearly sixty years after the last of these fleets returned to port in Nanjing, Christopher Columbus sailed from Spain, leading a brave expedition that, in a disoriented search for the oriental Old World, would accidentally stumble onto an occidental New World. Columbus’s three-ship expedition included a crew of about 120 men; his flagship, the four-masted Santa Maria, was approximately 80 feet long. By contrast, Emperor Yongle’s first maritime expedition (commanded by Zheng He, a thirty-four-year-old Muslim eunuch who had previously served as Grand Director of the Imperial Harem) carried a crew and army of around 28,000 men aboard 62 nine-masted ships and an additional 255 five-masted vessels. The larger ships, known as “treasure ships,” were nearly 450 feet long and 190 feet wide.

Tribute Giraffe with Attendant. Chinese, Ming Dynasty, Yongle Period (1403–1424). Philadelphia Museum of Art.

So the full imperial fleet would have been a stirring or an alarming sight when it appeared on the horizon before the ports of various settlements and kingdoms in the Indonesian archipelago during the year 1405 and, from there, west as far as the southwestern coast of India. That first expedition returned in 1407 carrying several foreign emissaries along with their goods and treasures.

The fourth expedition left China in the fall of 1413 and sailed farther west than ever before, eventually reaching Hormuz, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, and Aden, on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula at the mouth of the Red Sea. A subsidiary fleet from this expedition also sailed along the eastern coast of India to Bengal, where the sailors were greeted by a newly ascended Islamic king. It happened that envoys from the Islamic coastal settlement of Malindi, East Africa (in an area claimed by today’s Kenya), were in the Bengal court at the time, having traveled there to offer their own tribute—some live giraffes—to the new king.

The Chinese visitors were clearly fascinated by those tribute giraffes. They encouraged the Bengali king to give them one, and they persuaded an envoy from Malindi to accompany that particular animal on one of their treasure ships that was returning to China before the rest of the fleet. China’s first giraffe thus weakly wobbled onto stable land on September 20, 1414. Within the year, at least one more giraffe was brought by sea from Milandi to Bengal and, from there, to the imperial capital at Nanjing, where it was presented to Emperor Yongle at some time before the full fleet returned home in August of 1415.²

The giraffes were introduced to the emperor and his imperial court as unicorns.

Ch’i-lin—the name given to the unicorn described in ancient Confucian texts—was what the mariners called the tall animals they brought back home, possibly because, one author speculates, they originally heard them described in the Somali language as girin, which may have sounded like ch’i-lin.³

It is also possible that Zheng He, the eunuch admiral of the fleet, firmly believed that the extraordinary animals he delivered to the emperor were actual ch’i-lin, actual unicorns as traditionally understood.

According to Confucian tradition, a ch’i-lin male, aside from his many other wondrous qualities, would be marked by a flesh-covered horn rising from the forehead. Giraffes have skin-covered horns, and some giraffe males develop a skin-covered median horn, a decisive knob or bump that appears at mid-forehead. Ch’i-lin could alternatively have two or three horns, as can giraffes. Confucian tradition also held that ch’i-lin had a deer’s body and cloven hooves, as well as the tail of an ox and, sometimes, the scales of a fish. A giraffe would probably pass that test as well, aside from the fish scales—or might a giraffe’s markings actually resemble scales from a distance? Ch’i-lin were usually imagined to be white; but they could be gaily colored in red, yellow, blue, white, and black—not entirely unlike a giraffe. Ch’i-lin were associated with gentleness and goodness, qualities that would be at least superficially apparent in a giraffe; finally, ch’i-lin were revered as portents of good fortune brought about by a wise and benevolent ruler.⁴

The last imagined quality of a ch’i-lin suggests a third possible reason the giraffes brought back to China were presented as the miraculous unicorns of Confucian tradition: They could be used as propaganda bolstering the Yongle emperor’s precarious claims to legitimacy.

Yongle was the Ming dynasty’s third emperor. Or was he the second?

Yongle succeeded to the imperial throne in 1403 by raiding Nanjing at the head of an army of a few hundred thousand men, massing outside the city until one of his many brothers opened a city gate at night, whereupon his troops entered and overwhelmed the imperial defenses, setting fire to the palace and government buildings. The second Ming emperor, Jianwen, was (according to the claims circulated by Yongle) unfortunately and accidentally consumed in the flames.

Yongle moved to consolidate his own position as the new emperor, and his early acts included the usual—sorting friends from enemies, elevating the former, executing the latter—as well as arranging for an important recalibration of Ming history. This proved to be a major enterprise requiring that a select group of dedicated historians destroy all earlier records and accounts of the dynasty and then create a full replacement set of new records and accounts. Ultimately, Jianwen was expunged from the list of emperors altogether, which left the first and founding Ming emperor reigning for about four years past his own death. Yongle was then able to claim his honorable position as the second Ming emperor.

Jianwen had been the oldest surviving son of the founding emperor’s first son. The founding emperor chose him based on the principle of primogeniture as described in the official Ancestral Injunctions. Yongle was merely a fourth son—and not even the child of his father’s first consort, the empress Ma. Nevertheless, once he became emperor, Yongle made sure the official genealogy was rewritten, making him the son of Ma to fix the mother problem. And although he had not been the first of the founder’s twenty-six sons, Yongle would argue that the Confucian principle of filial piety, along with the full legal code prescribed in the Ancestral Injunctions, allowed for a prince to intercede when an emperor was corrupted or overwhelmed by nefarious advisors. Yongle had been a prince. Yongle had interceded. Once he became emperor, his scholars would write the history that justified that intercession.⁵

In such a manner, Yongle became the most powerful man on earth: the civil, military, political, and spiritual head of an empire covering a stretch of real estate the size of Western Europe and containing a growing population of perhaps 90 million people.⁶ Yongle was among the most dynamic and influential rulers in Ming history, an era covering nearly three centuries. He was also a pretender to the imperial throne, an illegitimate usurper who would be concerned about the security of his position. Indeed, as the unhappy fate of his immediate predecessor starkly demonstrated, great power required great control. As the compelling example of his father more happily added, though, great control could sometimes be achieved through stimulating the emotions of hope, fear, and reverence.

Hope included the promise of advancement in the vast civil service bureaucracy and in the enormous military hierarchy. Fear was insured by an emperor’s willingness to torture and execute anyone at court found wanting. Yongle’s father had been responsible for the deaths of approximately 100,000 people who may not have seemed trustworthy enough. The founder also used his palace guard to create an infamous secret police with unchecked powers to arrest, torture, and execute.⁷ Yongle was approximately as despotic as his father, and his palace guard was reinforced by a major spy network organized and conducted by the palace eunuchs, who by 1420 were organized into another extrajudicial secret police called the Eastern Depot.⁸ Finally, and again like his father, Yongle would never forget the immense importance of reverence, an emotion he routinely evoked with publications and pronouncements, symbols and rituals, continuously dramatizing his intimate connection with the ancient powers and virtues of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism.⁹

One can imagine that Zheng He, the admiral of the maritime fleet, was generally aware of his emperor’s compelling needs. Moreover, as a leading member of the despised and distrusted eunuch service, Zheng He would have worried about the precariousness of his own status among the bureaucratic literati of the court. Castrated and enslaved as a boy after his Mongol father was taken prisoner while fighting the Chinese invaders of Yunnan, Zheng He had grown up demonstrating his exceptional talents as a leader in war and in peace, but he owed his political success and ultimately his life to the personal admiration and trust of Yongle.¹⁰ The maritime expeditions were financially extravagant, however, and Zheng He may have astutely recognized that presenting the giraffes as ch’i-lin was one way to suggest the unique noneconomic value of the expeditions. Bringing ch’i-lin to China would glorify his own accomplishments, disarm his enemies at court, and flatter and support the emperor while spreading an anesthetizing fog of superstitious awe over the general public with a Ming version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”¹¹

When the first giraffe arrived at the imperial court in 1414, the Board of Rites petitioned Emperor Yongle to accept a Memorial of Congratulation. Yongle modestly declined: “If the world is at peace, even without ch’i-lin there is nothing that hinders good government. Let congratulations be omitted.”¹²

But when the second giraffe arrived the following year and was brought through the gates of the Imperial Zoological Gardens, the emperor himself attended the event, receiving obsequious prostrations from the dignitaries while accepting, along with a celestial horse (zebra) and a celestial stag (oryx), the blessed ch’i-lin. Yongle declared: “This event is due to the abundant virtue of the late Emperor, my father, and also to the assistance rendered me by my Ministers. That is why distant people arrive in uninterrupted succession. From now on it behooves Us even more than in the past to cling to virtue and it behooves you to remonstrate with Us about Our shortcomings.”¹³

Zheng He’s fifth expedition, which sailed two years later, reached the Arabian Peninsula, coming ashore at Aden, and then the eastern edge of Africa, stopping at Malindi, Mogadishu, and some other coastal trading settlements. Among the exotic treasures brought to the imperial court from that venture was an arkful of African animals, including antelopes, leopards, lions, oryxes, ostriches, rhinos, zebras—and more giraffes.

The final expedition ended in 1433, about a decade after Emperor Yongle’s death. Yongle’s successors were not so interested in the world outside, and so China’s great Age of Exploration ended. By then the Chinese ruling class had become jaded about the exotic animals in the Imperial Gardens, so that only the first two giraffes brought from Malindi by way of Bengal during the fourth expedition were hailed as miraculous apparitions, the true embodiments of ch’i-lin, one of the four mythical beasts of Confucian tradition (along with the dragon, phoenix, and turtle), who had come to earth as evidence of a universal harmony induced by the unparalleled qualities of a great leader.

As Shen Tu, a poet and scholar of the Imperial Academy, wrote in his preface to a poem dedicated to the emperor:

All the creatures that spell good fortune arrive. In the ninth month of the year chia-wu of the Yongle period, a ch’i-lin came from the country of Bengal and was formally presented as tribute to the Court. The ministers and the people all gathered to gaze at it and their joy knows no end. I, your servant, have heard that, when a Sage possesses the virtue of the utmost benevolence so that he illuminates the darkest places, then a ch’i-lin appears. This shows that Your Majesty’s virtue equals that of Heaven; its merciful blessings have spread far and wide so that its harmonious vapours have emanated a ch’i-lin, as an endless bliss to the state for a myriad myriad years.¹⁴

Shen Tu declared himself a lowly servant of the emperor and, as such, wished to join the admiring throng. Beholding such an omen of good fortune as the ch’i-lin, he humbly lowered himself one hundred times while knocking his head to the ground in order to present an honorific hymn concerning the glories of the emperor and the unicorn, this “manifestation of the divine spirit,” this very ch’i-lin.

This grand ch’i-lin who, combining a deer’s body and the tail of an ox, stands fifteen feet tall, possesses a “fleshy boneless horn,” and is colored “with luminous spots like a red cloud or a purple mist.”

This gentle ch’i-lin who, anxiously examining the ground he walks on, is careful to avoid stepping on any living creature.

This harmonious ch’i-lin who, walking in such a stately manner, “observes a rhythm” for each movement he makes, while producing, with his “harmonious voice,” the pleasing sounds of a bell or a “musical tube.”

This glorious and benevolent ch’i-lin who, with his wondrous presence, magnifies the glories and benevolence of the Son of Heaven himself: “the Sacred Emperor who excels both in literary and military virtues,” the one “who has succeeded to the Precious Throne and has accomplished Perfect Order and imitated the Ancients!”¹⁵

This chapter tells of the Chinese oceanic expeditions in the fifteenth century and the giraffes brought back and presented to the Ming emperor Yongle as “unicorns,” based on an ancient Confucian tradition describing the unicorn as one of four magical animals. How could anyone mistake a giraffe for a unicorn?

The set below opens with photographs showing giraffe middle (median) horns: important if you’re going to be mistaken for a magical unicorn. Also important was the fact that Confucian legend described the unicorn’s horn as being covered with skin or hair, as are the horns of giraffes. Finally, Confucian legend stressed that the unicorn was a remarkably serene and gentle animal, blessed by nature or providence. These photographs suggest some of the steady grace and quiet gentleness of giraffes.

The Chinese seem to have brought home reticulated giraffes from East Africa. This set of photos likewise concentrates entirely on individuals of the reticulated group in the Samburu National Reserve, Kenya. Some of these giraffes have extra bony protuberances, or “horns,” behind their ears and elsewhere.