THE MYTHIC CHINESE UNICORN ZHI

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Lexia 26

[Plate 123]
Plate 123[173 K]

[Plate 124]
Plate 124[131 K]

[Plate 125]
Plate 125[144 K]

[Plate 126]
Plate 126[138 K]

[Plate 127]
Plate 127[287 K]

[Plate 128]
Plate 128

[Plate 129]
Plate 129[149 K]

[Plate 130]
Plate 130[127 K]

[Plate 131]
Plate 131[238 K]

[Plate 132]
Plate 132[146 K]

[Plate 133]
Plate 133[144 K]

[Plate 134]
Plate 134[78 K]

[Plate 135]
Plate 135[164 K]

THE CINNAMON ROUTE

The Egyptian Galleries at the Royal Ontario Museum feature a full-scale cast of the wall paintings in the temple of Deir el-Bahri in Western Thebes (Plate 123). These paintings are the most important source of information about Queen Hatshepsut's famous expedition to Punt during the period of her reign from B.C.E. 1503 to 1482 86. Located somewhere in north-eastern Africa, in the neighbourhood of present-day Eritrea, southern Sudan or Somalia, (and perhaps even including southern Arabia), Punt was known to the ancient Egyptians as the 'The Divine Land' because it provided an inexhaustible supply of frankincense and myrrh for use as incense in their holy temples. In their minds, Punt was a distant and enchanted place of incense trees, fabulous beasts and wonderful riches.

Among the Punt murals are images of men carrying sacks and various kinds of trees (Plate 124) to be loaded onto vessels for the return journey to Egypt. Just below these figures is a hieroglyphic inscription (Plate 125) which Brested has translated as follows:

"The loading of the ships very heavily with marvels of the country of Punt; all goodly fragrant woods of The Divine Land, heaps of myrrh-resin, with fresh myrrh trees, with ebony and pure ivory, with green gold of Emu, with cinnamon wood [Author's italics], khesyt wood, with ihmut-incense, sonter-incense, eye-cosmetic, with apes, monkeys, dogs, and with skins of the southern panther, with natives and their children. Never was brought the like of this for any king who has been since the beginning."
     (Breasted, 1962, p. 109)

If this translation is correct, and the hieroglyph ti-sps (Plate 126) does, in fact, stand for cinnamon wood 87, then it is of the utmost importance. For this would be the earliest surviving written evidence that cinnamon was imported, together with other fragrant substances from the land of Punt, into the heartland of the Egyptian empire during the Eighteenth Dynasty 88.

Cinnamon is mentioned in pre-Exilic Hebrew texts of approximately the 7th century B.C.E., and Theophrastus (B.C.E.372-288), the so-called father of botany, listed it among his aromata or substances which had a fragrant scent. By the 4th century B.C.E, cinnamon was a well-known commodity in the Mediterranean world, and during the Roman period in Egypt it was an essential ingredient in embalming (Loewe, p. 174). But cinnamon only grew in south-eastern Asia and "no species of cinnamon, it is agreed on the highest botanical authority, is indigenous to Africa or was commercially cultivated there at any time." [Author's italics] (Miller, p. 156). So how on earth did it get to Africa from Asia so long ago?

As we have seen in Lexia 25, the bulk of the trade in spices and silks between China and India was carried in the great ships of the Nanyue and Kunlun peoples. There was, however, a third major group of maritime traders who plied the waters of the South China Sea, and these were the Indonesians in their huge outrigger canoes called sanggara 89. We know that in ancient times the Indonesians had a monopoly on the trade in cultivated Chinese cinnamon bark and wood, partly because these were not shipped via the Maritime Silk Route from China to India.

But how did the Indonesians get control of this particular spice trade? What did they offer in exchange for the cinnamon? How was their role as middlemen in the cinnamon trade kept secret for thousands of years? And finally, what on earth does cinnamon have to do with the mythic unicorn zhi? These are some of the questions whose answers may be found in the extraordinary tale of an ancient maritime connection between south China and the African island of Madagascar - the story of the Cinnamon Route 90.

Let us begin by examining the origins of cinnamon. Wild cinnamon trees first appeared in south-eastern Asia; in the eastern Himalayas, Assam and northern Vietnam (Plate 127). From there it was brought at an early date to be widely cultivated, predominantly for its wood and bark, in the area which later became known as southern China. The Chinese call this cultivated cinnamon gui 91. The character for gui (Plate 128) does not have any special ancient meaning, it is just a compound of "tree" plus a pronunciation indicator, and it does not appear in Chinese literature until the Eastern Zhou period (B.C.E. 770-221). Thus gui may have been a word imported from northern Vietnam or Assam along with the original wild cinnamon.

The cultivation of gui goes back at least to the Bronze Age in China, and possibly much earlier, for the south was the original homeland of the Chinese in the early Neolithic period 92. From ancient times gui was appreciated for its food flavouring and medicinal properties, which essentially mean the same thing, since in China, food is medicine (Plate 129) 93. As a hot or heating remedy it was used to eliminate cold influences, particularly lung and liver diseases and malarial fevers and chills. It was especially valued as a catalyst to activate other ingredients in compound medicines.

The botanical name for the cultivated cinnamon bark of southern China is Cinnamomum cassia auct. (= Cinnamomum aromaticum Nees) family Lauraceae 94. The most likely etymological source for the term "cassia" is that it derives from the Khasi people who exported wild cinnamon from the hills of northern Assam. A modern experiment has shown that the cinnamon bark from the Eastern Himalayas is substantially identical to Chinese cinnamon bark (Miller, 1969, p. 75) 95.

Gui was the principal spice of the Lingnan area of China, south of the Changjiang (Plate 111). So prevalent was its cultivation there, that when Qin Shihuangdi, the first emperor of China, conquered the Nanyue Kingdom in B.C.E. 216, he named this lovely region Guilin (Plate 130) which means "Cinnamon Forest". By this time the Chinese had come to believe that if you ate gui for a long time you would become immortal. (They also believed that if you ate too much at a time you would get a nosebleed!) Wine flavoured with cinnamon is mentioned in several poems in the Chuci (Songs of the South) as a drink fit for the gods.

"In my cloud-coat and my skirt of the rainbow,
Grasping my bow I soar high up in the sky.
I aim my long arrow and shoot the Wolf of Heaven;
I seize the Dipper to ladle cinnamon wine..."
     (Hawkes, 1985, Dong jun, p. 113)

"From the god's jewelled mat with treasures laden
Take up the fragrant flower-offerings,
The meats cooked in melilotus, served on orchid mats,
And libations of cinnamon wine and pepper sauces!
     (Hawkes, 1985, Dong huang tai yi, p.102)

Fragrant beams of gui wood were used for making houses and boats:

"Lady of the lovely eyes and the winning smile?
Skimming the water in my cassia boat,
I bid the Yuan and Xiang still their waves
And the Great River make its stream flow softly."
     (Hawkes, 1985, Xiang jun, p.106)

David Hawkes' translations of these wonderful Warring States poems are without parallel in the English language, but the Chinese characters he translates alternately as "cinnamon" or "cassia" are simply compounds of gui. Eventually gui was exported from south China to Java, whose inhabitants then discovered that the cinnamon tree grew wild on their own island. As a result, they cultivated it and exported it, together with the Chinese gui, giving it the Malayan name of Kayu manis which literally means "sweet wood". Kayu manis is assumed to be the origin of the English word "cinnamon" 96.

From ancient times the trade in Chinese gui bark and wood was controlled by the Indonesians, for the simple reason that they had something even more precious to offer in exchange. These were the dried unopened flower buds of a particular type of myrtle tree (Eugenia caryophyllata Thunb. (= Syzygium aromaticum (L.) Merr. & L.M.Perry), family Myrataceae, which the Chinese call dingxiang or "tiny thing which makes a good smell". Known in English as "cloves", this spice was much in demand by the Chinese for many reasons. Medically it was used to cure a wide variety of diseases, to add spice to food, and to produce oil for scents and perfumes. It was effective as a local anaesthetic for toothache ("oil of cloves") and as an antiseptic to kill insects and germs, particularly those which caused mouth odour.

However, the fact that dingxiang was native only to five small islands which lie off the western coast of Halmahera in the Molucca Sea presented something of a problem, since Ternate, the northernmost of these islands, is 1700 miles as the crow flies from the southern Chinese port of Guangzhou (Plate 127). Only the Indonesians had the knowledge and expertise to expedite this trade, for they were the great long-distance runners of the sea. Thus from ancient times the trade in Chinese gui was controlled by the Indonesians who brought their cloves to China in exchange 97.

Then, incredible as it may seem, they packed the gui in their huge ocean-going outrigger canoes, and making use of the monsoon winds, sailed 4,500 miles directly across the southern Indian Ocean to the island of Madagascar off the north-eastern coast of Africa (Plate 131). From Madagascar the spice reached the important entrepot of Rhapta, on the coast of present-day Somalia. From there it was shipped north up the Red Sea by southern Arabian merchants from Muza in Yemen, who controlled the coastwise trade in cinnamon.

This Arab monopoly was the main reason why the true source of Chinese gui remained hidden for so long. For, according to Herodotus (c. B.C.E. 484-c.424), the Arabs alleged that the sources of cinnamon were to be found among the limestone crags of Abyssinia [Ethiopia] and the swamps of the Sudd [Sudan] (Miller, preface, viii) It was probably these same Arab middlemen who forbade the shipment of any coconuts or coconut products with the gui, as this might have revealed the route by which Chinese cinnamon had come to Africa (Miller, 1969, p. 163). The theory that cinnamon must have been transported north from Somalia overland to Juba in southern Sudan, Ethiopia, and the Nile Valley, is also given weight by these strange stories, so prevalent in antiquity, suggesting an African origin for this precious spice.

The first hint as to the mysterious Asian origins of cinnamon appeared in the writings of Pliny the Elder (23/24-79 C.E.). According to Pliny, the Ethiopians had bought it from their neighbours, who in turn had purchased it from others, who

"bring it over vast seas on rafts which have no rudders to steer them or oars to push or pull them or sails or other aids to navigation; but instead only the spirit of man and human courage. What is more, they put out to sea in winter, around the time of the winter solstice, when the east winds are blowing their hardest. These winds drive them on a straight course, and from gulf to gulf. Now cinnamon is the chief object of their journey, and they say that these merchant-sailors take almost five years before they return, and that many perish. In exchange they carry back with them glassware and bronze ware, clothing, brooches, armlets, and necklaces. And that trade depends chiefly on women's fidelity to fashion." (As quoted in Miller, 1969, p. 156)

In the West, during the period following Pliny, from the middle of the first century to the beginning of the seventh, the use of spices in all their forms became more widespread. Yet no one else pursued Pliny's line of inquiry, and thus the true source of gui remained hidden for another fifteen hundred years. Western scholars disagree as to whether cinnamon (from China) or pepper (from India) was the most distinguished of the spices, but cinnamon was the most expensive because its source lay furthest away from the Mediterranean world (Miller, 1969, p. 154).

As we have seen in Lexia 25, due to the fact that knowledge of the mythic Chinese unicorn zhi moved westward along the Maritime Silk Route through the ports of southern India, some people in medieval Europe came to believe that the unicorn originated in India. Much the same thing occurred in the case of the trade in gui, for into the heart of Africa, along with the cinnamon, went the Chinese myth of the unicorn zhi. As a result, others postulated an African origin for this mythic beast 98. Even in medieval times, people in the West still had only a vague idea of the geography of the world and often confused India with Ethiopia. According to Shepard:

"Ethiopia had been confused with India even by Virgil, and therefore, if for no other reason, it was so confused during the Middle Ages. The bewildering transfer of "Prester John's Court" from India to Ethiopia ... helped on this confusion and the transfer had a definite influence, as it happened, upon the legend of the unicorn." (Shepard, 1982, p. 90) 99.

The fact that rhinos and rhino products, including their horns, were native to both India and Africa only added to this confusion 100.

The ramifications of this ancient African connection with China, the trade in gui, and the unicorn zhi, proved to be quite astonishing. For, as a result, and in spite of the fact that no cinnamon ever grew in Africa, Somalia, instead of Guilin, became known in the West as the "Cinnamon Country". It also gave rise to the strange notion current in medieval Europe, that the mythic unicorn dwelt in Ethiopia, in the Mountains of the Moon. This idea echos the ancient Chinese belief that the natural habitat of the mythic unicorn zhi was the wild and distant Mystical Mountains (Shen Shan), and in China, beginning in the Han period, the limits of the known world became the gates of paradise.

"Beyond the moving infinity of an ocean that drew the eye into the distance, beyond the mysterious labyrinth of mountains and gorges and their confusing echo, men felt that they could hear the whispering of another eternal world which soundlessly eluded the brutal clutches of civilization. Even before the cultural space began to expand, there were rumours of abodes of happiness and immortality allegedly situated in the extreme west and the extreme east of the empire. In the Kunlun Mountains on the borders of Tibet, the "Queen Mother of the West" (Xiwangmu) was said to rule a fairyland, and far out at sea, off the eastern shores of China there was the land of the "isles of the blessed" where the first emperor of Qin had sent his expedition." (Bauer, 1976, p. 90)

Like a mirror image of these ancient Chinese ideas, belief in medieval Europe centred around a vision of an imaginary paradise somewhere far to the East, and spices were considered to be the noble emissaries from this fabled world 101. This idea of spices as a link to paradise, and the vision of paradise as a real place somewhere in the East fascinated the medieval imagination.

It is difficult for us to imagine today, when they are so inexpensive and readily available, that spices imported from the Orient 102 were among the most precious substances known in the Middle Ages. The aroma of spices and incense was believed to be a breath wafted from paradise over the human world (Schivelbusch, 1992, p. 6). This idea may simply have arisen out of the abysmal state of personal hygiene and sanitation in Medieval Europe, where anything that could mask the pervading stench would have been welcome. But it also seems to reflect the ancient Chinese belief in qi as the "breath of life", symbolized by clouds of water vapour and incense 103.

According to Schivelbusch the longing for faraway places, in other words, the longing for the paradise that they thought could be tasted in the spices, was a peculiarly medieval trait. "Paradise, in a mingling of the Christian and the exotic, was a fantastic world beyond everyday local life, not quite of this world nor of the other, located somewhere in the Orient. Something of this notion survives in the censer-swinging of the Catholic mass." (Schivelbusch, 1992, p. 13) Nevertheless, in a strange and rather wonderful way, this belief echos the ancient Chinese idea of the Search for the Elixir of Life which would grant Immortality. In fact, the search for paradise, a vision of a future blissful world society in which everyone would be equal, is a recurring theme in Chinese intellectual history 104, and the myth of the unicorn zhi embodies this longing for justice and equality.

If it is true, as Schivelbusch says, that the symbolic meaning and actual physical taste and scent of medieval spices were closely intertwined, then it is logical to assume a close relationship in the minds of Europeans between cinnamon and the unicorn zhi. In China, the mythic unicorn was an immortal spirit animal which dwelt in the Western Paradise of the great goddess Xiwangmu (see Lexia 12). In the West, during the Medieval and Renaissance periods, a similar mystical association existed between the unicorn and the Virgin which became the basis for the belief in the "Odor Castitas" or Odor of Chastity. This was the fragrance, the so-called "scent of the virgin", which so entranced the unicorn that it laid its head gently in her lap, and was thereby captured and killed 105.

That cinnamon was, in fact, the Odor Castitas is confirmed by drawings such as the famous example by Giorgione entitled the "Allegory of Chastity" (Plate 132). Other images, such as this painting by Moretto (Plate 133), depict a unicorn in association with Saint Justina, or show a team of unicorns drawing a great wagon called the Chariot (or Triumph) of Chastity bearing the goddess Minerva (Plate 134). For it is only if we are aware of the intimate connection between the Odor Castitas (the cinnamon scent of chastity), the lady (virgin/goddess/courtesan), and the unicorn (zhi), which existed in the minds of Europeans, that such images become comprehensible 106. By the late 19th century the erotic aspects of this theme had become even more explicit, as in this splendid painting called "Ladies and Unicorns" by Moreau (Plate 135).

Yet all of these Western images, which link the unicorn with paradise and immortality in the form of a female saint (who represents justice) or a goddess (of chastity, and hence purity of body and mind) are simply reverberations of ancient Chinese beliefs in the meaning and significance of the mythic unicorn zhi.

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