Today is the Mid-Autumn Festival! The snake boss first wishes everyone a happy holiday and all the best!
When viewing the moon during the Mid-Autumn Festival, everyone will most likely think of cute rabbits! (Ignore your friends in Sichuan here, they will think of rabbits every day)
The rabbit is not actually an animal, it is a collective term for rabbits in the rabbit family. Rabbits are a large family, with about 40 to 50 species worldwide. So what kind of rabbit is the white rabbit that Chang'e sister is holding?
The legend of Chang'e first appeared in the book "Guizang". Later, the folk further developed the story and evolved into multiple versions of the story. "Guizang" is a classic of China's ancient culture. They are considered to be the precursors of Zhou Yi. From this, it can be basically inferred that Chang'e's moon should have been before the Zhou Dynasty.
The rabbit we see in the market is a descendant of the domestication of the European burrowing rabbit.
After a long period of domestication, rabbits have bred offspring of many different strains such as meat, fur, skin and pets. The various art images we see are also models made of rabbits.
Although the wild burrowing rabbit is very viable, it has been flooded in many places where it has been introduced.
(Tu'ao hunting flooded burrowing rabbits)
However, the ancestral burrowing rabbit of the domestic rabbit is not distributed in China, and the relatives of the hare in China are also very far away. (The market sells hybrid hares or fried breeds are scammers, and rabbits and hares cannot be hybridized)
(High imitation hare, a kind of meat rabbit ~ Belgian rabbit)
The accepted version is that the burrowing rabbit, or domesticated rabbit, was transmitted to China through the Western Regions around the Qin Dynasty. However, the earliest clearly documented image of the rabbit is the "Royal Linhuang Huangyi Flower and Bird Scroll" painted by Emperor Xuanzong of the Ming Dynasty, which is only about 600 years old.
Therefore, if Chang'e's sister really raised a white rabbit in the Moon Palace, it should not be a foreign household like a domestic rabbit.
So what are the native rabbits in China?
The latest list of Chinese mammals records that there are ten species of wild rabbits in China:
Nine out of ten are coated in this way.
Only one snow rabbit turns pure white in winter.
(Unlike the white rabbit in the domestic rabbit, the snow rabbit's eyes and ear tips are black.)
Therefore, it can be inferred that if Grandma Chang'e flew to the Guanghan Palace on the moon before the Zhou Dynasty, that rabbit was a wild snow rabbit in our northeast.
What, you also want to raise one?
No, you can't! Second-level protected animals, the law does not allow ah!
Friends who live in the northeast, Xinjiang and Hainan Island should pay special attention. Your common local hare may be a snow rabbit, Tarim rabbit or a Hainan rabbit, these three kinds of hares are national second-level key protected animals, one can be criminally filed, don't say I didn't remind you!
We are serious about doing popular science
Some of the pictures come from the web