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The Goddess of the Yangtze 

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The Goddess of the Yangtze  978–0–19–954947–401-Turvey-c01 OUP316-Turvey (Typeset by SPi, Delhi) page 3 of 16 August 22, 2008 16:42 1 THE GODDESS OF THE YANGTZE The dolphin is the most remarkable animal in the world. Calligraphy presented to Professor G. Pilleri by the finger writer Tang Wenri, Yueyang, 1979 nce upon a time, so the story goes, lived a beautiful and O kind-hearted girl on the south bank of the Yangtze. She had lost her parents and lived with her stepfather, a mean-spirited man who showed her no love and beat her regularly. As she grew up into a slim, graceful maiden, she longed to be free of her cruel guardian, but he realized that she would fetch a good price if he sold her to a trader in women on the north bank. He concocted a story to lure her into accompanying him over the river, but when their boat was halfway across, they were caught in a sudden storm and became drenched with rain. The old man, seeing the outline of his stepdaughter’s young body through her thin wet dress, felt a wave of lust and forced himself upon her. Managing to break free, and realizing the fate that awaited her when they arrived at the shore, she threw herself into the fast-flowing river. As she fell into the water and disappeared beneath the waves, she was changed miraculously into a beautiful white dolphin which swam happily 978–0–19–954947–401-Turvey-c01 OUP316-Turvey (Typeset by SPi, Delhi) page 4 of 16 August 22, 2008 16:42 4 the goddess of the yangtze away,free at last. The storm reached new heights of anger, and the stepfather was flung into the river by a mighty wave; the waters closed over his head. As he fell into the depths, he also became changed, but this time not into an elegant dolphin but a ‘river pig’ or ugly porpoise. At least, that is how the story is told in the provinces of Jiangsu and Anhui. Further upstream, between Dongting Lake and the city of Wuhan, the local people tell of a dark general who was called away to war, and who longed to return home to see his daughter. One evening, he met a young lady in an inn beside the Yangtze. After spending the night together, the girl told the general that her father was also a soldier, but he had left home when she was very small. The general was gripped by dread; he asked her quickly where she had grown up, and she spoke the name of the general’s own village. Yelling out his grief and shame, the general flung himself into the waters of the Yangtze. His daughter ran after him and drowned herself in the river as well. The general was changed by magic into a porpoise, and his daughter, pure in spirit, turned into a shining white dolphin. There are many stories like this along the Yangtze—of drowned daughters and grieving fathers, of landlords banning their lovesick daughters from falling in love with poor farm labourers, and even of lazy fishwives drowned by their relatives—but all have the same ending, a strange metamorphosis that allows these victims to overcome a grief that is too great to bear. Echoes of Ovid and the magical sea-changes of Prospero ripple down the Yangtze’s waters. The white dolphin swims on in the river, the stories say, reunited now with her father or swimming forever ahead of her stepfather, and continues to show her kindness and purity by warning fishermen of coming storms. Many old Chinese texts, such as the Tang Dynasty Ben Cao Shi Yi and the Ming Dynasty San Cai Tu Hui, report that the boat people watched dolphins in order to predict the weather, calling the animal ‘the worshipper of the wind’, because when they were seen diving up and down in the waves it meant that strong winds or tidal waves were coming. 978–0–19–954947–401-Turvey-c01 OUP316-Turvey (Typeset by SPi, Delhi) page 5 of 16 August 22, 2008 16:42 the goddess of the yangtze 5 How can you know when ships are threatened by danger, and what makes you aware of the will of heaven even before the oracle, asked the Song Dynasty poet Kong Wuzhong in his Jiangtun Shi, ‘Ode to the River Dolphin’—surely it is affection that you show for humans? Local fishermen along the Yangtze called the dolphin the ‘Lord of the Waves and Billows’, according to Mao Sheng in the ‘Collected Reports of the Kind Deeds of Water Animals’, written during the Song Dynasty (ad 960–1279 ). The reincarnated maiden was revered as the Goddess of the Yangtze, and had many names—jiangma or river horse, taipai, qiangji,thechan fish or the well fish (the last name having arisen because its blowhole was thought to resemble a well shaft). Most often, though, it was simply known as the white dolphin, or bai ji. Baiji have been known and written about by Chinese authors for thousands of years. The oldest known reference to the river dolphin of the Yangtze is found in the Er Ya, an early philological work—a kind of dictionary, defining the correct usage of Chinese characters in the past and the present—that can be traced back with certainty at least as far as the early Han Dynasty,between 206 bc and ad 8. Different theories suggest that it may actually date back to the beginning of the Zhou Dynasty over 3,000 years ago, or may have been compiled by Confucius or his pupil Pu Shang in the fifth century bc; or it may simply be a compilation of fragments written by different scholars at different times. Whoever wrote the Er Ya made a wrong guess about what kind of animal the baiji actually was—unsurprising for someone writing almost three millennia before Carl Linnaeus formalized the classification of the natural world—but otherwise provided a surprisingly accurate and detailed description of the creature: The ji is a kind of shark. Its body is similar to that of a sturgeon. Its tail is like that of the qin fish. It has a large stomach. Its snout is small and pointed. The long upper incisor teeth grow in a single row.When it presses its upper and lower jaws together, it can hold an 978–0–19–954947–401-Turvey-c01 OUP316-Turvey (Typeset by SPi, Delhi) page 6 of 16 August 22, 2008 16:42 6 the goddess of the yangtze object in its mouth. The nose is situated on the forehead. The ji can make noises. Its body consists of a great many bones but very little flesh. It gives birth to live young. It is very fond of eating small fish. It is slightly more than a chang in length. It is common in rivers.1 Throughout Chinese history, baiji have been the subject of both scholarly and popular interest, featuring in encyclopaedias and academic texts as well as poems, stories, and legends. However, for some reason they were never physically portrayed in classical Chinese paintings, ceramics, or sculptures, unlike other animals with symbolic significance in Chinese culture such as tigers or cranes, or even other freshwater species such as fish, shrimps, and prawns, which had great economic importance and were fre- quently represented in visual media. A few of the classical texts that mention dolphins include simple, largely inaccurate illustra- tions, but probably the first ever detailed, artistic representation of a baiji in Chinese art may have been the watercolour painted by Ren Zhongnian, which was presented to the Swiss cetacean researcher Giorgio Pilleri in Wuhan in 1979. This lack of available paintings, sculptures, or translations of the many Chinese texts that mentioned the baiji meant that, although Chinese authors had been familiar with the species for millennia, its recognition by the West took a long time to occur. It seems that the first European to record the presence of freshwater cetaceans in the Yangtze was Lord George Macartney, the first British envoy to China. During his famous visit to the country in 1793, during which he refused to kowtow to Emperor Qianlong, insulted a jade gift, and failed to negotiate any British trading requests, he crossed the Yangtze at Zhenjiang when travelling south on the Grand Canal that links Beijing with the southern provinces. Macartney’s diarist noted that during their Yangtze crossing ‘the waves rolled like the sea, and porpoises are said to be sometimes leaping amongst them’.2This brief account was ignored by the Western scientific establishment, as was that of Robert Swinhoe almost 100 years later. Swinhoe, an industrious English naturalist fluent in both Mandarin and local Chinese 978–0–19–954947–401-Turvey-c01 OUP316-Turvey (Typeset by SPi, Delhi) page 7 of 16 August 22, 2008 16:42 the goddess of the yangtze 7 dialects, journeyed up the Yangtze to Chongqing to assess the navigability of steamships in the river in his secondary capacity as a ‘roving consul’ for the British plenipotentiary in China for Great Britain. In his ‘Catalogue of the Mammals of China (south of the River Yangtze) and of the Island of Formosa’, published in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London in 1870, Swinhoe reported that ‘white porpoises’ could be seen as far up the Yangtze as Hankou (then an independent town which was called ‘Hankow’ by the British, but now absorbed into the sprawl- ing conurbation of Wuhan). Above that port, and upstream as far as Yichang, Swinhoe noticed what seemed to him to be a smaller and apparently different form of white porpoise.
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