In 1928, the American scholar Laufer wrote a historical book on giraffes, originally titled Giraffes in History and Art, when Chinese translators translated giraffes as unicorns, and no one questioned them. Why did people confuse giraffes and unicorns at that time, and people didn't think it strange?
On November 8, 2021, the 4th CIIE was held at the National Exhibition and Convention Center (Shanghai). The picture shows the audience in the Dalian Pavilion taking a group photo with the three-dimensional shell sculpture "Qilin". (Image courtesy of China News Service)
What did the unicorn look like in history?
The unicorn is considered a sacred beast in China, its main taiping, auspicious and longevity, together with the phoenix, dragon, turtle called the four spirits. The ancients worshiped the unicorn for a long time, and if one appeared in a certain dynasty, it often represented the advent of the golden age. "Qilin" may have first appeared in the Book of Poetry, symbolizing benevolence and virtue, but there is no standard answer to what it looks like.
The unicorn has derived different cultural images in different dynasties, and we can only glimpse the qilin in the minds of the ancients from the historical records. There are two things that make the relationship between Kong Shengren and Qilin extraordinary, one is the "Lin tu jade book", which says that before Confucius was born, there was a "Lin Tu jade book in the Que Li family", indicating the extraordinary origin of Kong Shengren. One is "Getting the Ultimate Pen". The "Zuo Biography" mentions that in the spring of 481 BC, when the Duke of Lu'ai was hunting in the west, the Uncle Sun clan's car merchant captured an animal, because he thought it was strange, he killed it, and then Confucius also saw it and judged that it was a qilin. At that time, the public opinion was that even the divine beast Xiangrui like Qilin dared to shoot and kill, which was a signal that the Zhou royal family would die, so Confucius's "Spring and Autumn" was also desperately written.
The so-called unicorn that Confucius saw was actually a bit similar to an elk, except that it was a single horn, and "there was an horn on the head, and there was meat at the end", and the top of the horn was wrapped with meat, symbolizing that although it had weapons, it was harmless to people. The Shuowen describes the appearance of the unicorn in more detail, "qi, ren beast, elk body, oxtail, horn, from the sound of the deer", which looks more like a mixture of several animals.
In the Han Dynasty, the Qilin was frequently seen in history and frequently appeared in the world. Qilin is also referred to as Lin, and when Emperor Yuan of the Han Dynasty went to the outskirts of the city in the first year of the hunt, he found a strange beast called Lin, and later found that this was just a deer with two horns, probably because of a genetic mutation. Other characteristics of the unicorn change from time to time, but the image of the unicorn has always been very fixed.
On the Han Dynasty portrait stone, Lin has a single horn like a meat ball, and the limbs of the body are relatively close to the images of horses and deer. On the Han portrait stone unearthed by Jiawang in Xuzhou, the unicorn has different shapes, with a long neck, a colorful skin, and a fleshy horn on the top of the head. In the Wei and Jin Dynasties, the image of the unicorn was influenced by foreign cultures such as India and Persia, with a single horn and a face like a lion, a body like a strong bull, a tail with scales, a fire under its feet, and a closer to the image of large animals such as lions.
During the Southern and Northern Dynasties, the unicorn image of the unicorn changed slightly, and the unicorn began to curl and roll. The Qilin of the Tang Dynasty were more distinctive, with strong limbs and strong one-sided curves. During the Jiajing and Wanli years of the Ming Dynasty, it was common to see in various local chronicles whose cattle produced a unicorn divine beast with scales and armor all over its body. Since the Song and Ming dynasties, the unicorns have grown scales, which is very different from before, indicating that people's cognition of the appearance of the unicorns has been changing.
Two baby giraffes play together on July 15. (Image courtesy of China News Service)
How giraffes are associated with unicorns
Some people think that the unicorn is a legendary animal, which people imagined; There are also many scholars who believe that the unicorn has a prototype, such as a roe deer, a cow or an Indian rhinoceros. Before the Song Dynasty, people rarely associated giraffes with unicorns, because more than 2 million years ago, due to climate changes, giraffes had narrowed their living range to Africa and southern Europe, and giraffes were rarely seen in China. So, when people first see a strange animal like a giraffe, it's understandable to think of it as a unicorn.
Before the Song Dynasty, people were very unfamiliar with giraffes, and the earliest records of it may come from Li Shi's "Continuing Museum Chronicles" of the Song Dynasty, which said that there was an animal called "Plucking Force" that grew in the berbera country of present-day Somalia in East Africa. This strange beast has the skin of a leopard, has hooves like cattle, has a neck of nine feet long, and is more than one foot tall, and is called a camel cow.
The qilin began to appear in front of Chinese as a living animal, probably during the Yongle period of the Ming Dynasty. During Zheng He's first voyage to the West, a small country called the State of Punggol (present-day Bangladesh) was presented to the Central Plains Dynasty as soon as the new king ascended the throne, causing a sensation in the government and the public. Baiguan was very curious about this, but no one knew what this animal really was, some people called it "Jinlin", some people called it "Golden Beast", and finally someone proved that this was the legendary Qilin.
When it comes to the process of using giraffes as unicorns, it is also quite tortuous. The giraffe has a nickname "Zurafa" (transliteration of the Arabic zarafa), which also refers to the kingdom of Adan, a small country also called "Giri" in the geographical texts, and the Somali language of the wax is also called "Giri". Turning around to this place, so that the clever ministers saw a top-notch pat on the back, "Giri" and Chinese "unicorn" pronounced not very similar? Thus, from then on, the giraffe became a unicorn.
Hearing the translated name of this Chinese, Ming Chengzu Zhu Di was very happy, after all, in the eyes of the ancients, only when the time came and the Ming Emperor reigned, there would be such a beast as the Qilin coming. This was exactly in line with Zhu Di's thoughts, so he ordered the painter to draw the "Qilin Diagram" and attach Shen Du's "Ode to the Ruiying Qilin". There is also a facsimile of the "Bang Ge Into the Qilin Diagram", now in the National Museum of China, and the giraffe in the painting is so vivid that it can be recognized at a glance. In the tomb of Xu Da V in Nanjing, an official uniform was unearthed, and the Kirin complement on it was obviously a giraffe, and the fact that the giraffe was a Qilin had been agreed upon in the Ming Dynasty.
Demystify the giraffe
After Western missionaries entered China at the end of the Ming Dynasty, they brought with them a great deal of exotic knowledge. In the Qing Dynasty, the giraffe was also called Evil Naxiyo in the missionary Nan Huairen's "Kunyu Quantu", but this title did not become popular until the end of the Qing Dynasty. In the seventh year of Tongzhi (1868), Prime Minister Yamen Zhang Jingzhigang, accompanied by the US envoy to China Pu Anchen, visited London and saw an animal called "Zhiliehu" (transliteration of the English giraffe) in the "Garden of Ten Thousand Beasts", shaped like a deer, with a snout hanging like a camel, only five or six feet tall, but twice the length of the neck, which is undoubtedly a giraffe.
The translated names of the late Qing giraffe are very rich, calling it "straight hunting fox" and "tall deer", of course, there are also called "giraffes". In the "Compilation of Manuscripts and Navigation Narratives" compiled by Zhang Deyi in the late Qing Dynasty, it is mentioned that there is an animal in the Ten Thousand Animals Garden, which is called "straight hunting fox", also known as "Qilafu". With the spread of animal knowledge, there are also people who draw maps of hundreds of beasts and popularize knowledge of the origin and physiological structure of giraffes to the public. In modern times, people have been able to identify giraffes, gradually distinguishing giraffes from unicorns, and the confusion between the two mentioned at the beginning of the article has become less and less. (End)