Chinese clay figures. Pt. 1, Prolegomena on the history of defensive armor / by Berthold Laufer.

  • Berthold Laufer
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Chinese clay figures. Pt. 1, Prolegomena on the history of defensive armor / by Berthold Laufer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    !°5 what Kuo P'o intends to describe is the two-horned species of rhinoceros, not any other animal: his statement in regard to “the horn on the nose” excludes any other idea, and the bovine animal with such a horn remains as yet to be discovered. Li Shi-chen of the sixteenth century, as will be seen below (p. 150), rejects the definition of Kuo P’o as erro¬ neous; that is to say, he did not know of any three-horned variety, and recognized in it the two-horned species. An illustration of this three- homed creature may be viewed in the Wa-Kan San-sai-zu-e, the Japa¬ nese edition of the Chinese cyclopaedia San ts'ai t'u hui.1 The defini¬ tion runs thus: “The rhinoceros has the hair of swine and three toes on each foot; it has the head of a horse and three horns, on the nose, the forehead, and on the skull, respectively.” The three toes and three horns are exactly drawn in accordance with this prescription; curiously enough, however, the head is not that of a horse, but of a bull. The old tradition of the draughtsmen is retained in spite of the definition. Kuo P'o, in all probability, is not the first or the only author to speak of a three-horned variety. A work Kiao Kuang chi,2 Account of Kiao chou (northern part of what is now Annam) and Kuang-tung, reports, “In the territory of the Barbarians of the South-west occurs a strange rhinoceros with three horns emitting light at night like big torches at a distance of a thousand paces. When it sheds its horns, it hides them in a remote and dense jungle to prevent men from seeing them. The sovereigns hold this strange product in high esteem, and make it into hair-pins. These are capable of checking evil and rebel¬ lion.’ ’ Here we have the testimony of an eye-witness or one reproducing a hearsay account; and, quite correctly, he points out this variety as a freak of nature. The exact date of the work in question is unfortunately not known to me; but as the quotation is placed between one from Kuang-chi by Ku Yi-kung, who according to Bretschneider3 belonged to the Liang dynasty (502-556), and one from Kuang chou ki, a work of the Tsin period (265—419), the inference may be justifiable that Kiao Kuang chi likewise is a production of the Leu-ch'ao period. However remote from truth all these Chinese illustrations may be, most of them are fairly correct as to the outlines of the horn, naturally because 1 The illustration is easily accessible in L. Serrurier, Encyclopedic japonaise, le chapitre des quadrup&des, Plate VIII (Leiden, 1875). This cut is not contained in a recent edition of this Japanese work (Tokyo, 1906), but is replaced by a rhinoceros with two horns, the one on the forehead, the other on top of the skull. These attempts clearly prove that Japanese as well as Chinese illustrators did not draw the animal from life, but from the definitions of the books. In the Chinese San ts'ai t'u hui (Ch. 4, p. 32) only a three-horned animal (san kio shou) is depicted. 2 Quoted in the chapter on Rhinoceros in T'u shu tsi ch'eng. 3 Bot. Sin., pt. 1, p. 164.