Some Early Accounts of the Malay Tapir.
By W. George Maxwell
In Groeneveldt's translation[1] of the Ying-yai Shêng-lan, an account of Sumatra written by a Chinese traveller in A. D. 1416, there is the following quaint statement:—
"In the mountains of this country a supernatural animal is found, called The Divine Stag. It looks like a large pig, and is about three feet high; the forepart of the body is black, the hind part white, and the hair is sleek, short, and very fine. The mouth is like that of a pig, but not flat in front; the hoofs have three grooves, and it only eats plants, not other animals."
The tapir (tapirus malayanus) is of course the animal here described, and the account, for all its quaintness, is excellent. The question is why should the tapir be called "The Divine Stag." Groeneveldt in a foot note gives the two Chinese ideographs, which he has translated by these words.
The ideographs are 神 (pronounced sin in the Mandarin dialect) which means spirit or soul, and 鹿 (pronounced lok) which means a deer or stag; and "divine stag" is thus the straightforward translation of the two words.
The obvious difficulty however is that the tapir most certainly is not called "the divine stag" by the inhabitants either of Sumatra or of any other country in which it is found. There is nothing divine or stag-like in its appearance, nor is there, so far as I am aware, any folk-lore or folk story that could be distorted, by the natural mistake of a traveller or by any stretch of imagination on his part, into such an expression as the divine stag."
- ↑ Notes on the Malay Archipelago and Malacca. W. P. Groenveldt (Verhandelingen van het Genootschap van Kunsten on Wetenschappen. Volume XXXIX. Batavia 1879.) Miscellaneous Papers relating to Indo-China, Second Series Vol. I. p. 199.
