Giant pandas like to roll and sell cute, and in recent years, they have gained the nickname of "rolling" on the Internet. The name "rolling" has the joke component of netizens "knowing deeply, loving the cut", which is the latest name of panda.
△ Baby panda Zhang Zhihe / Photography
Since ancient times, there have been many names of pandas or non-pandas, so let's comb through a few names of pandas.
The word "panda" appeared as early as 1915 in the "Zhonghua Da Zidian", which said: "Panda, the name of the beast, like a cat and good at ascending wood", it is said that there is a mammal, like a cat and climbing trees very strongly, called pandas. However, if you look closely at an illustration next to it, it depicts a red panda. This shows that the original "panda" refers to the current red panda.
In the beginning, the English name of the red panda was panda (panda). In 1869, the famous French missionary Armand David went to Baoxing, Sichuan, to discover the panda for the first time, when he gave the panda the name "black and white bear", and also took the world's common Latin name, this Latin name translates to the surname "bear" name "black and white". Later, another scientist in France found through research that the skeleton and teeth of the black and white bear are closer to the red panda, believing that the black and white bear and the red panda are one family, a large red panda, so the English name of the black and white bear becomes giant panda (giant panda). The red panda originally called panda (panda) is not as famous as the giant panda, and after everyone calls the giant panda giant panda for a long time, the English name panda is slowly occupied by the giant panda. The red panda, who is not as famous as a giant panda, had to change its English name to lesser panda (red panda) or directly to red panda( red panda), and its Chinese name was also changed to "red panda" along with the English name because it was occupied by giant pandas.
Giant pandas have lived in China since ancient times, so ancient people must have seen giant pandas. What name would the ancients give it? Regarding the ancient names of pandas, the most widely circulated ones are "tapir" and "cattail".
△ Ancient books "Erya" and "Shang Shu"
"Tapir" has been recorded since the Xia Shang Zhou. The first Chinese dictionary, Erya, records a beast called "tapir", and gives a particularly brief explanation, just two words "white leopard". At that time, people may have understood what an animal the "white leopard" was, but after historical changes, by the Jin Dynasty, people in this period could not understand what the "white leopard" was. So a Jin Dynasty scientist named Guo Pu, through his own investigation and consulting a large number of books, added a note to the "tapir": like a bear, small head, short legs, black and white, able to lick copper and iron and eat bamboo; bones are particularly hard, fur can be waterproof; also known as "leopard", of which white is also called "tapir". Seeing black and white and eating bamboo, you can basically lock in that it is a giant panda. But in the Tang Dynasty, the great poet Bai Juyi wrote a small fu of "Tapir Ping Praise and Preface", which said that the tapir had an elephant nose, rhino eyes, a cow's tail, and a tiger's foot. This kind of description does not look like a giant panda, but it is particularly similar to the Malay tapir that was distributed in China before. This Malay tapir does have a short elephant trunk; obviously different from the panda's eyes, it is very close to the small eyes of the rhinoceros; the tail is also a long tail like a cow, rather than the short tail of the panda.
In addition, the tapirs mentioned in other books are more like the Malay tapir than the giant panda. Coupled with Guo Pu's final addition, it is likely that he did see the giant panda and carefully observed it, thinking that the giant panda and the equally black and white Malay tapir may be the same thing, allowing the giant panda to occupy the tapir's name. And the Malay tapir is gradually becoming extinct from China, so whether it is the tapir occupying the name of the panda, or the panda occupying the name of the tapir, is still an unsolved mystery.
It is also an ancient divine beast "Qi Qi", many people also believe that it refers to the giant panda, and helped the Yellow Emperor defeat the Yan Emperor in the field of Hanquan in that year. However, what helped the Yellow Emperor at that time was a tribal clan with bears, tigers, cats, cats and other beasts as totems, of which cats and cats refer to two kinds of animals, and it was not until later that Guo Pu's Jin Dynasty appeared to be used together. The cat is believed to be a panda because during the Qing Dynasty, a man named Wang Shizhen wrote a description: Emei has an animal called the cat, yellow and white, like a dog but slow to move, and not afraid to see people. However, Wang Shizhen's words are not original, but plagiarized an article written by Hu Shi'an, a Sichuan native. Hu Shi'an said that in fact, the panda was called "Fur Fur" in Emei, which was similar to the pronunciation of 貔貅 in Sichuan dialect, so he deliberately changed it to 貔貅, so that it sounds better to read. At this point, the truth of the confession came out.
Why do pandas have various names from ancient times to the present? In order to avoid humans, pandas use a large area of bamboo forests to shelter, hidden in the mountains unknown to people. And it is the concealment of the panda that makes people who encounter pandas can only rely on their own imagination and the words of their predecessors to describe, which inevitably produces these misunderstandings. (Source: "Look at Panda" Magazine Author: Liu Yao)