Tyger

 ...Picking chrysanthemums
at my east fence, I see South Mountain

far off: air lovely at dusk, birds in flight

going home. All this means something

something absolute: whenever I start

to explain it, I forget words altogether.

-- from Drinking Wine by T'ao Ch'ien (365 – 427), who lived on Thatch-Hut mountain.

An etymological analysis of the pictograph for Thatch-Hut, writes David Hinton, reveals a simple roof at the top, a dish with a pedestal at the bottom, above it a kitchen vessel, and the symbol for something else:

And what dwells in this household [and within the pictograph representing it] shares the mountain's nature, for it too eludes our words and concepts. It's a tiger, which ancients revered for the spontaneous power of its movements, the clarity and immediacy of its mind. It's a tiger that lives in the everyday world of our human dwellings...

From the department of tortuous animal metaphors

‘America is the global tiger and Japan is Asia’s wolf and both are now madly biting China’, Colonel Liu Mingfu the National Defence University in Beijing is quoted as having said. ‘Of all the animals, Chinese people hate the wolf the most.’... Liu advised Australia to be a ‘kind-hearted lamb’; to that end China would ‘discourage it from being led astray’. He further opined that: ‘Australia should never play the jackal for the tiger or dance with the wolf.’

Geremie R Barmé

Chickens in heaven

Manufacturing #17: Deda Chicken Processing Plant, Dehui City, Jilin Province, China (2005) by Edward Burtynsky.

Poetical essays on the dark gibbon

[In China] gibbons were praised for their quiet, serene nature and spiritual qualities. Elusive and rarely seen, they inhabited remote areas thought to be haunted by supernatural beings. Gibbons were considered magical animals, capable of assuming human form. Their evocative cries were associated with the eerie atmosphere of these mysterious places and inspired melancholy feelings in travellers. A famous image in Chinese poetry was of 'gibbons calling at the gorges', reflecting the fact that these animals were often heard but seldom seen among the high, woody, mist-covered cliff sides they inhabited...

Chinese paintings often associate gibbons with cranes. Gibbons' long arms and cranes' long necks indicate longevity and both creatures are appreciated for the graceful movements. A common notion was that, by linking hands, gibbons formed themselves into chains that allowed them to dangle from branches and dip drinking water from streams. Another popular image from Chinese and Japanese art depicts gibbons, sometimes linked in chains, grasping for the moon's reflection in a pool of water...The image is a parable for greed and striving for things that cannot be attained...

-- from Ape by John Sorenson


Black-crested gibbons

Overflowing

The moon is reflected on the river a few feet away,
A lantern shines in the night near [midnight].
On the sand, egrets sleep, peacefully curled together,
Behind the boat I hear the splash of jumping fish.

-- Du Fu


Image: brainbow

Witness

The extinction of the Baiji has become iconic but it was just one of the topics outlined by Sam Turvey in a hard-headed presentation about priorities in conversation at a 20 June conference called The Open Ground. [1]

My contribution was less focused and more touchy-feely: a few half-formed comments on 'values' and 'stories'. It's posted here.

Turvey, whose work includes Witness to Extinction, applied some welcome caustic to the sentimentality that can sometimes creep into Western accounts of the death of this dolphin. [2] Western agencies failed to put money where their mouths were, and the Chinese authorities were hopeless. The extinction, Turvey and others have shown, was probably not inevitable.

That said, with the Yangtze as a main highway, sewer, food and power source for about one tenth of humanity it's remarkable that the baiji and other remarkable species such as Chinese sturgeon survived as long as they did. [3], [4]


Footnotes

[1] Emily Nicholson was equally rigorous. I cannot comment on presentations by Mel Challenger, Ruth Padel, John Fa, Armand Leroi and others because I left before they spoke in order to take part in a workshop titled Changing Climate Stories, on which see Ashdenizen, Springcoppice and Samantha Ellis. It was one of those days when you want to be in at least two places at once.

[2] I asked Turvey (whose book I have not read; I will now) if it was true that people only started eating the Baiji during the 1958-61 famine. He said, if I understood him correctly, that consumption (a contributory factor in its decline but not a main driver) probably began before that. Westerners tend to over-idealise earlier Chinese views of nature (appealing as some of those memories and imaginings are)

[3] In a piece of framing that was new to me, Turvey called the Yangtze 'the Amazon of the East.' This phrase may have been shamelessly manufactured by conservationists with an agenda. If so, good for them. Before large-scale human impact the banks of the river may have been as wondrously rich with life forms as the river itself. No sooner is the point made than you say 'of course', but it is not necessarily a thought that readily occurs otherwise. Time to go back to Mark Elvin's The Retreat of the Elephants.

[4] Du Fu writes

The solitary goose does not drink or eat,
It flies about and calls, missing the flock.
No-one now remembers this one shadow,
They've lost each other in the myriad layers of cloud.
It looks into the distance: seems to see,
It's so distressed, it thinks that it can hear.
Unconsciously, the wild ducks start to call,
Cries of birds are everywhere confused.

Langurs linger

See: It Takes Just One Village to Save a Species.

Vestige of a beginning, prospect of an end

chinadialogue.net has published my review of J.E.N. Veron's A Reef in Time in Chinese and English.

I don't speak or read the language, but am interested to note that the title of the book in Chinese -- 大堡礁的岁月：从产生到终结 -- reverts (via Google) to something like

Great Barrier Reef the years: from generation to the end.

Another version of the review is here on Coral Bones.

image: Antelao - an ancient reef