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 the creatures that spell good fortune arrive. In the ninth month of the year chia-wu of the Yongle period, a ch’i-lin came from the country of Bengal and was formally presented as tribute to the Court. The ministers and the people all gathered to gaze at it and their joy knows no end. I, your servant, have heard that, when a Sage possesses the virtue of the utmost benevolence so that he illuminates the darkest places, then a ch’i-lin appears. This shows that Your Majesty’s virtue equals that of Heaven; its merciful blessings have spread far and wide so that its harmonious vapours have emanated a ch’i-lin, as an endless bliss to the state for a myriad myriad years.14
Shen Tu declared himself a lowly servant of the emperor and, as such, wished to join the admiring throng. Beholding such an omen of good fortune as the ch’i-lin, he humbly lowered himself one hundred times while knocking his head to the ground in order to present an honorific hymn concerning the glories of the emperor and the unicorn, this “manifestation of the divine spirit,” this very ch’i-lin.
This grand ch’i-lin who, combining a deer’s body and the tail of an ox, stands fifteen feet tall, possesses a “fleshy boneless horn,” and is colored “with luminous spots like a red cloud or a purple mist.”
This gentle ch’i-lin who, anxiously examining the ground he walks on, is careful to avoid stepping on any living creature.
This harmonious ch’i-lin who, walking in such a stately manner, “observes a rhythm” for each movement he makes, while producing, with his “harmonious voice,” the pleasing sounds of a bell or a “musical tube.”
This glorious and benevolent ch’i-lin who, with his wondrous presence, magnifies the glories and benevolence of the Son of Heaven himself: “the Sacred Emperor who excels both in literary and military virtues,” the one “who has succeeded to the Precious Throne and has accomplished Perfect Order and imitated the Ancients!”15
This chapter tells of the Chinese oceanic expeditions in the fifteenth century and the giraffes brought back and presented to the Ming emperor Yongle as “unicorns,” based on an ancient Confucian tradition describing the unicorn as one of four magical animals. How could anyone mistake a giraffe for a unicorn?
The set below opens with photographs showing giraffe middle (median) horns: important if you’re going to be mistaken for a magical unicorn. Also important was the fact that Confucian legend described the unicorn’s horn as being covered with skin or hair, as are the horns of giraffes. Finally, Confucian legend stressed that the unicorn was a remarkably serene and gentle animal, blessed by nature or providence. These photographs suggest some of the steady grace and quiet gentleness of giraffes.
The Chinese seem to have brought home reticulated giraffes from East Africa. This set of photos likewise concentrates entirely on individuals of the reticulated group in the Samburu National Reserve, Kenya. Some of these giraffes have extra bony protuberances, or “horns,” behind their ears and elsewhere.
ZARAFAS
FOLLOWING THE GREEK AND ROMAN HABIT, Arabic authors of the Middle Ages continued to identify giraffes as camelopards, but Arabic speakers began applying a word that sounded like zurafa or zarafa. The word, according to one early commentator, came from a linguistic root meaning “assembly,” in reference to the idea that this animal was an assemblage of parts of different animals. Another Arabic scholar insisted that it derived from the Ethiopian zarat, meaning “thin” or “slender.”1
Rome and the classical world had depended on Egypt as the sole gateway to deeper Africa and thus the sole source of giraffes, but after the disintegration of the Roman Empire in AD 476 and the subsequent expansion of Islamic civilizations that would finally control three-quarters of the Mediterranean, these animals were typically destined to become the private property of Islamic nabobs in the Middle East, who may have had occasion to speak among themselves about the rare, strangely formed, and remarkably gentle animals called zarafas.
The giraffes arrived, as before, from lands along the Nile to the south of Egypt—a part of Africa the Romans
