Zouyu

In the autumn of 1404 something white came up the road under guard. A prince had taken it in the hills at Shenhou, in what is now Henan, and he sent it on to his elder brother, who had held the throne for two years and had taken it by force. The court did not call it a tiger. The court called it a zouyu, and the difference was worth more than the animal.

A painting of it survives in Taipei, an anonymous Ming hand scroll in ink and colour on silk, about half a metre high and a metre and a quarter long. What it shows, past all the ceremony, is a rare white tiger. That was enough. The appearance of a zouyu meant that heaven had looked at the reigning emperor and found benevolence and good faith in him, and an emperor who had come to power over his own nephew needed exactly that sentence said out loud by something other than a courtier.

The creature the Ming court thought it had caught was already very old and very slippery. The characters first surface in the Book of Songs, in a short piece in the Zhaonan section that runs to six lines. Rushes grow thick. One shot brings down five sows. Then the exclamation: ah, the zouyu. Nothing in the poem describes an animal. Nothing in the poem rules one out either.

The commentators filled the silence. The Mao tradition made it a righteous beast, white tiger, black markings, and set down the detail everything afterwards would hang on: it does not eat living things. Around the year 100, Xu Shen entered it in the Shuowen jiezi as a white tiger with black markings and a tail longer than its body, a humane beast that feeds on flesh already dead. The Huainanzi gave it the same colouring, the same scruple about killing, and added speed, a thousand li in a day. By then the zouyu had a full character sheet and no habitat.

The Classic of Mountains and Seas offers a rival account and refuses to reconcile with the others. In the country of the Lin clan, it says, there is a rare beast as large as a tiger, showing all five colours, its tail longer than its body, and its name is zouwu; ride it and you travel a thousand li in a day. Not white, then. Not a moral example. A mount.

There is a further problem, and it goes to the name. The graph 騶 belongs to the men who ran the royal stables and hunting park, and 虞 is the officer who kept the game in it. Read that way the zouyu is not a creature but a warden, and the poem is about a gamekeeper flushing boar out of the reeds for his lord, which is what the Han and Lu schools of the Odes appear to have thought, and what Jia Yi set down in his Xinshu, and what the Tang subcommentator Jia Gongyan repeated. The sinologist J.J.L. Duyvendak, working through the Ming records fifteen centuries later, called the animal reading of that little poem very doubtful. The oldest text may not contain the beast at all.

What the tradition settled on is a large predator that has laid down its predation. It comes to a carcass a day old, in the heat, with the flies already at it, and eats what is there and nothing else. It steps around live grass. A creature the size and shape of a tiger moving through a hillside without breaking anything is a strange thing to picture, and that strangeness is the whole point of it: the shape says one thing and the behaviour says another, and the gap between them is where the moral lives.

Before it was ever a specimen it was a piece of music. The Rites of Zhou records that at the great archery ritual the musicians played Zouyu while the king shot, and Lishou while the feudal lords shot, so the word was a court tune with a fixed rank attached long before anyone claimed to have caged the thing. Later it became a flag. Under the Jin a banner bearing the zouyu was carried out to order armies to stop fighting, and in the middle of the fourth century the minister Yin Hao considered sending it to halt Huan Wen’s mobilisation. An image of an animal that would not kill had become the strongest available word for stop.

Which brings the story back to the cage on the road. At court the reports thickened around it, as reports do. Two tigers were said to follow it wherever it went. It ate nothing living and trod on nothing living. From a distance it looked savage and up close it was entirely tame. A second zouyu was sighted in Shandong. Writers of the day filed these alongside the other wonders of the reign, the Yellow River running clear and the giraffe that came off Zheng He’s ships from a Bengal embassy and was received as a qilin. Duyvendak, reading the file, could not work out what had actually been carried into Nanjing and asked in print whether it could possibly have been a panda. Others since have argued for the panda in earnest; Riordan and Shi have suggested the snow leopard for this and several other elusive spotted predators in the old texts; the linguist Wolfgang Behr has placed zouyu, zouwu and zouya in a family of ancient borrowed words that meant lion.

Its powers are all negative ones, and they follow from that. It does not hunt, so nothing has cause to flee it. It cannot be tracked to a lair, because no source gives it one. It moves a thousand li between one sunrise and the next in the accounts that let it move at all, and in the mountain classic a rider on its back moves that far with it. Its real ability is legibility: the zouyu is a statement about a reign, delivered in a form the whole bureaucracy already knew how to read.

The limits are the same fact turned over. It cannot be summoned, bribed or bred, since it answers to a quality in the ruler rather than to any command, which means no emperor can produce one on demand at the moment he most needs it. It has no defence of its own and never needed one. And because everybody at court knew precisely what a zouyu was supposed to look like, white, black-marked, long in the tail and mild, the beast was permanently open to counterfeit by anyone who could lay hands on an unusual tiger. The scroll in Taipei is the honest end of that story. It shows a big pale cat standing in a landscape, painted with care, looking like nothing that could settle a succession.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the zouyu?

The zouyu is a legendary Chinese beast described as a white tiger with black markings and a tail longer than its body. It eats only animals that have already died and will not step on living grass. Its appearance was treated as proof that the reigning ruler possessed benevolence and good faith.

Where does the zouyu come from?

The characters first appear in the Book of Songs, in a short poem in the Zhaonan section, though that poem never describes an animal. The Mao commentary, Xu Shen’s Shuowen jiezi and the Huainanzi supplied the white coat, the black markings and the refusal to eat living things. The Classic of Mountains and Seas gives a different version under the name zouwu, a five-coloured beast the size of a tiger that can be ridden a thousand li in a day.

Is the zouyu the same as a gamekeeper?

Possibly, and the question is old. The graph 騶 refers to a groom of the royal hunting park and 虞 to the officer in charge of its game, so an early line of interpretation running through Jia Yi and the Han and Lu schools of the Odes read zouyu as a court official rather than a creature. J.J.L. Duyvendak considered the animal reading of the original poem very doubtful.

Did anyone ever catch a zouyu?

In the autumn of 1404 a beast identified as a zouyu was captured at Shenhou by Zhu Su, Prince of Zhou, and presented to the Yongle emperor, with a second reported in Shandong. An anonymous Ming hand scroll painted of the captured animal survives in the National Palace Museum in Taipei, and it shows a rare white tiger.

Is the zouyu a giant panda?

Duyvendak raised the possibility in print, asking whether the animal caught in the Yongle era could have been a panda, and later writers have argued the identification seriously. Others have proposed the snow leopard, and the linguist Wolfgang Behr has grouped zouyu with old borrowed words for lion. The one Ming painting made from a captured specimen shows a white tiger.

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