Giraffe Reflections. Dale Peterson
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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