Giraffe Reflections. Dale Peterson
the essential rarity of giraffes may well account for the paucity of accurate descriptions we have. What notably remains, in the classical record, is a pair of evocative passages from two writers of the early third century AD. The first writer, Oppian of Apamea (in Syria), portrays giraffes, in his poem on hunting, Cynegetica, as animals of “a hybrid nature and mingled of two stocks,” the camel and leopard. The poem is dated by its dedication to the Roman Emperor Caracalla, meaning it would have been finished a few years after AD 210.
The second work is the Ethiopian Romance, a fictional entertainment that appeared around AD 220 and was written by someone using the pseudonym Heliodorus. Set in a North African world as imagined to have existed several centuries earlier, a giraffe appears in a grand procession marking the conclusion of a major war. Here, the triumphant Ethiopian king Hydaspes receives tribute from defeated enemies as well as congratulatory gifts from his friends and allies, the latter including the Auxomites, who offered “a marvelous animal of extraordinary appearance.”20
“Chi-me-ra: 1) In Greek mythology, a fire-breathing female monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail. 2) Any mythical animal with parts taken from various animals” (New Oxford American Dictionary).
The ancient Greeks may have originally decided to call giraffes camel-leopards as a quick and simple reference to physical appearance: an animal with camel-like face, camel-like gait, camel-like legs, who is, however, covered with spots roughly suggesting a leopard. The name could have been nothing more than an easy shorthand for appearance. The description was sooner or later accompanied by a theory of giraffes as true hybrids: a remarkable cross leading to the rather miraculous convergence of physical features in the way that chimeras were imagined as miraculous conglomerations.
The opening photograph for this chapter shows a lone Masai giraffe standing near his reflection in a pool of water. The seguence below is a visual fantasy based on a concept of chimeras and the theme of reflections and resolutions, separations and convergences. The photographs show both Masai giraffes (in Masai Mara, Kenya) and reticulated giraffes (in the Samburu National Reserve, Kenya). Note how different the patterning is between the Masai and the reticulated: two groups of giraffes who live in the same general area of East Africa but have not interbred for more than a million years.
UNICORNS
IN THE HISTORICAL ANNALS of the Chinese, the earliest known reference to Africa appears in the Yu-yang-tsa-tsu, written by the scholar Tuan Ch’eng-shih, who died in AD 863.
Relaying stories and information that had been provided by travelers from the West, Tuan described a land called Po-pa-li, which probably corresponds to a coastal portion of today’s northern Somalia. This hostile, faraway land was home to some strange animals, the scholar wrote, including “the camel-crane” (ostrich), the “mule with red, black, and white stripes wound as girdles around the body” (zebra), and “the so-called tsu-la, striped like a camel and in size like an ox. It is yellow in colour. Its front legs are five feet high and its hind legs are only three feet. Its head is high up and is turned upwards. Its skin is an inch thick.” Both these odd quadrupeds—the striped mule and the tsu-la—are “variations of the camel,” which “the inhabitants are fond of hunting and from time to time they catch them with poisoned arrows.”1
The tsu-la, then, was probably a giraffe.
At various times following that earliest reference, the Chinese traded with African countries through intermediaries, particularly as, during the tenth and eleventh centuries, their trading ships sailed as far as southeastern India to exchange their own valuables for such luxury goods as elephant ivory, rhinoceros horn, pearls, and precious aromatics. But the Chinese would not see or touch an actual giraffe until AD 1414.
That gorgeous creature arrived during China’s Age of Exploration, a great if brief period that lasted from AD 1405 to 1433 and was inspired—or commanded—by the Ming emperor Yongle, who opened China to an assertive form of maritime trade with countries to the south and west. This new orientation may have been a natural consequence of the disintegration of the Mongolian Empire, which ended the Silk Road and an extensive overland trade between China and countries to the west. Under Yongle, the Chinese turned to the seas in seven enormous expeditions that eventually reached halfway across the world, through the Indonesian archipelago to India, the Arabian Middle East as far as Mecca, and on to the eastern shores of Africa as far south as the coast of today’s Kenya.
Guided by magnetic compasses and complex star charts, the expeditions carried huge quantities of Chinese-made goods—copper and iron products, furniture and porcelain, cloth and silk and paper, sugar and salt—and returned to China with foreign envoys who oversaw the presentation of gaudy treasures to the emperor and his court while also profiting through commerce outside the court.
Nearly sixty years after the last of these fleets returned to port in Nanjing, Christopher Columbus sailed from Spain, leading a brave expedition that, in a disoriented search for the oriental Old World, would accidentally stumble onto an occidental New World. Columbus’s three-ship expedition included a crew of about 120 men; his flagship, the four-masted Santa Maria, was approximately 80 feet long. By contrast, Emperor Yongle’s first maritime expedition (commanded by Zheng He, a thirty-four-year-old Muslim eunuch who had previously served as Grand Director of the Imperial Harem) carried a crew and army of around 28,000 men aboard 62 nine-masted ships and an additional 255 five-masted vessels. The larger ships, known as “treasure ships,” were nearly 450 feet long and 190 feet wide.
Tribute Giraffe with Attendant. Chinese, Ming Dynasty, Yongle Period (1403–1424). Philadelphia Museum of Art.
So the full imperial fleet would have been a stirring or an alarming sight when it appeared on the horizon before the ports of various settlements and kingdoms in the Indonesian archipelago during the year 1405 and, from there, west as far as the southwestern coast of India. That first expedition returned in 1407 carrying several foreign emissaries along with their goods and treasures.
The fourth expedition left China in the fall of 1413 and sailed farther west than ever before, eventually reaching Hormuz, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, and Aden, on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula at the mouth of the Red Sea. A subsidiary fleet from this expedition also sailed along the eastern coast of India to Bengal, where the sailors were greeted by a newly ascended Islamic king. It happened that envoys from the Islamic coastal settlement of Malindi, East Africa (in an area claimed by today’s Kenya), were in the Bengal court at the time, having traveled there to offer their own tribute—some live giraffes—to the new king.
The Chinese visitors were clearly fascinated by those tribute giraffes. They encouraged the Bengali king to give them one, and they persuaded an envoy from Malindi to accompany that particular animal on one of their treasure ships that was returning to China before the rest of the fleet. China’s first giraffe thus weakly wobbled onto stable land on September 20, 1414. Within the year, at least one more giraffe was brought by sea from Milandi to Bengal and, from there, to the imperial capital at Nanjing, where it was presented to Emperor Yongle at some time before the full fleet returned home in August of 1415.2
The giraffes were introduced to the emperor and his imperial court as unicorns.
Ch’i-lin—the name given to the unicorn described in ancient Confucian