Hainan Daily
In White Sands Pine Township, Axe Ridge, gibbons weave through fruit trees to feed. Hainan Daily reporter Li Tianping photographed
Gibbons guarded the baby apes vigilantly observing the surrounding movements. (Photographed in 2009) Hainan Daily reporter Su Xiaojie
A photograph of Haikou in September 1898 features a prominent gibbon. (File photo)
"It is a traditional and pure symbol in China, representing both the otherworldly ideals of poets or philosophers and the mysterious bond between man and nature." In his scholarly book "Gibbon Examination", the famous Dutch sinologist Gao Luopei included the history of the cultural changes of Chinese apes in the past three thousand years from the Shang Zhou Dynasty to the Yuan and Ming Dynasties, and outlined the important image of "apes", an important image in the ancient Chinese scholar-doctor Ya culture.
"The wind is fast, the apes are roaring, and the white birds of Nagisa Qingsha fly back." It is a poem that I read and recited when I was a teenager, "The apes on both sides of the strait can't stop crying, and the light boat has passed through the ten thousand heavy mountains." "It is even more familiar, at that time, gibbon life traces spread throughout most of China, so that the literati Moke poetry was casually picked up, and there were nearly 4,000 ape-containing works in the "Quan Tang Poems" and "Quan Song Poems" alone, which showed the degree of preference for them.
Today, when we open the voluminous literature, we will find that in Hainan, which has a dense rain forest, the stories left by gibbons are also richer than we think.
Ape crying has spread throughout most of China
It is now scattered only in Guangxi and Hainan, Yunnan
As close relatives of humans, apes have appeared on Earth as early as the Oligocene. And the cultural memory of its entry into the Chinese may start from the Shang and Zhou Dynasties.
At that time, the ancestors were confused about the concept of animals such as orangutans, apes, monkeys, etc., and the relevant Chinese characters alone created and invented dozens of "猨", "蝯", "狙", etc., of which the most widely discussed was the word "夒". Gao Luopei believes that the appearance of the oracle bone script "夒" is related to the famous gibbon habitat, Kuizhou (夔州, in present-day northern Chongqing), which means that Chinese ancestors have learned to distinguish between apes and monkeys.
Although this claim is controversial, it can be noted from the surviving excavations of sculptures and gilded ornaments from the Eastern Zhou Dynasty that many totems have indeed shown the distinctive characteristics of apes: long arms and tailless.
Tracing the origin of the "ape sound" in the history of Chinese literature, when Qu Yuan's "Chu Ci Nine Songs". Since the phrase "ape chirps and chirps at night", the sound of ape crying has risen and fallen in the pen of countless literati and inkers, and gradually become synonymous with "gentleman" or "hermit".
From The Northern Wei Dynasty Li Daoyuan's "Three Voices of Ape Sounding and Weeping", to the Southern and Northern Dynasties Xie Lingyun's "Ape Ming Sincere Knowledge, Gu Youguang Is Not Revealed", to the Tang Dynasty Liu Yuxi's "Qing Ape Crying in the Highest Branch", Gao Luopei combined the creation era, scenes and other background information such as Fang Zhi in these works, and concluded that in the first millennium of the Western Calendar Era, the coverage of ape habitat was not less than three-quarters of the entire Territory of China, and even once reached the Yellow River Basin.
Through the combing of the appearance, habit description and geographical distribution of these apes in the Fang Zhi historical materials, scholars have judged that the vast majority of ape cries and ape shadows in ancient Chinese culture come from the gibbon family. However, with the construction of roads and bridges, the expansion of villages, and the increase in the demand for arable land, people moved closer to the edge of the forest, and gibbons began to retreat.
In 2013, experts from the Department of Anthropology of Sun Yat-sen University published a paper saying that from 127 record points in 1450 to 17 existing record points, the distribution of gibbons in China has retreated from northeast to southwest in the past five hundred years, with a decrease of more than 90%.
Today, gibbons have only limited reserves scattered in Yunnan, Guangxi and Hainan.
The true "indigenous people" of Hainan Island
Have lived on the island for at least 10,000 years
No one knows when the first gibbon appeared in Hainan, but what is certain is that the primate has lived on the island for at least ten thousand years.
At the end of 1992, archaeologists collected a number of animal fossils, including gibbon mandibles and teeth, during archaeological excavations at the Stone Age site of Luobi Cave in Sanya.
Experts believe that the hot and cold-loving gibbon is likely to migrate to Hainan Island through a land bridge when the Late Pleistocene Dali Ice Age comes, and then under the long-term geographical isolation and differentiation, an independent gibbon species - Hainan gibbon was formed.
Unfortunately, during the Han and Tang Dynasties, when the ape sound was at its peak, the Hainan gibbon did not receive much attention, and it was not until the Southern Song Dynasty that the figure of the suspected Hainan gibbon finally appeared in the two geographical records of the two Guangdong and Hainan customs and customs in the Two Guangdong and the Lingwai Dai answer.
"There are three kinds of apes: yellow for the golden wire, black for the jade face, and black for the pure black face. Gold wire and jade noodles are rare. Or cloud pure black male, golden silk female. And the male can scream, and the female can't also. The "three kinds of apes" recorded in the Guihai Yu Hengzhi correspond to the coat color of the female, male and juvenile of the Hainan gibbon, but because the author does not indicate the specific geographical location of the ape's life, its true identity remains to be examined.
By the last five or six hundred years, "apes" began to appear frequently in local literature in Hainan.
According to Yan Jia'an, a doctor at Nanjing Agricultural University, in his article "Research on the History of Ecological Environment Change on Hainan Island", he investigated 29 kinds of Hainan Fangzhi between 1511 and 1934 and found that qiongzhoufu, Yazhou, Danzhou and other Ming and Qing dynasties had records of apes, which showed the wide distribution.
This precious primate has also attracted the attention of Westerners. In 1753, the Frenchman Duhd wrote in the "Complete Chronicle of the Chinese Empire": "A black ape is produced on the island (of Hainan). In 1870, the Englishman Swinhoe also mentioned the Hainan gibbon in his book "The Famous Collection of Chinese Mammals".
A photograph of Haikou in September 1898 showing Cruise, a Haikou customs employee, holding a Hainan gibbon called "jacko" is even more impressive.
The shadow of the ape is often recorded, which shows that the Hainan gibbon at that time was not too far away from humans.
The status of the Hainan gibbon species is high
It was recognized as a separate species in 1996
In fact, the Hainan gibbon was not originally called the Hainan gibbon.
In the Honjima Fangzhi, it has appeared under various names such as "猨", "Tong gibbon", "black ape", "stone ape", etc., of which "猨" is the ancient name of "ape", "tong arm" describes the arm length of the ape, "stone ape" refers to the small ape, and "black ape" is named because the adult male ape is black. These folk names do not have animal taxonomic significance, and the names are various, indicating that people's understanding of this species was very limited at that time.
Systematic research on the Hainan gibbon began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In 1826, the American zoologist Richard Harlan named it hylobates concolor concolor (a subspecies of the black gibbon nomenclature), and the origin of the type specimen is unknown, only indicating that it may have originated in Hainan or Vietnam. In 1892, the British zoologist Field Thomas first named it a new species, hylobates hainanus, based on a specimen from Hainan.
For more than 100 years, the taxonomic status of the Hainan gibbon has been disputed from being classified as the western black-crowned gibbon, to being placed under the eastern black-crowned gibbon species, and then to being considered a subspecies of the black-crowned gibbon from the Tokyo area.
With the continuous progress of research methods, experts at home and abroad have gradually found that the Hainan gibbon and other black-crowned gibbon populations are significantly different in morphology, coat color, song and other aspects, and believe that it is a hainan-specific subspecies of the black-crowned gibbon.
Until 1996, Su Bing et al., a researcher at the Kunming Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, confirmed that the Hainan gibbon had evolved into an independent species by determining the sequence of the mitochondrial DNA control area. This conclusion has been confirmed many times since then, and at this point, the unique "identity" of the Hainan gibbon has finally been widely recognized by the international academic community.