Chapter Five - Peacock: Auspiciousness Challenged

Summary

THE IMAGE OF the peacock appeared in Chinese documentsas early as the eleventh century bce but merely as aheavenly companion of the phoenix and otherauspicious creatures. It became the centre ofliterary writings during the third century, where itexisted as an auspicious symbol and as a deprecatedexotic. This mixed existence informs the materialexchanges between China and other countries, whichbrought real peacocks into the sphere of Chinesewriters. Chinese writers’ personal speculations overthis exotic bird demonstrates Chinese elites’contributions to their culture by merging foreigngoods into their tradition.

The peacock is called kongque in Chinese, written as 孔雀, andoccasionally it was also called kong. Chinese biologists describe itscrying sound as “ga–wo, ga–wok” or “gaooa–woook,”and Indian scholars describe it like “kok kok.” InVietnamese, the peacock is called công trống, and thus thecharacter 䲲, pronounced as gong, was created to represent thepeacock in Cha-Nom, a logographic writing systemusing classical Chinese characters to representVietnamese words. These sound descriptions are closeto kong or kʰoŋ, the first word orsometimes single word used for the peacocks inChinese. Because of this association, it is likelythat kong alludes tothe crying sound of the peacock. Que, following the meaningsof xiao 小 (small) andzhui 隹 (short-tailedbirds), refers to one surprising feature of thepeacock: although it has enormous fan-like feathers,its tail is relatively small.

Before the third-century's rhapsodies on the peacocks,the bird was often associated with the phoenix. Thephoenix is such a mysterious creature in Chineseculture that there is no consensus even on what itis made of. Some scholars have stated that the imageof the phoenix is based on a wind spirit, based onlinguistic analysis; so that the symbols of the fourdirections were all related to the phoenix. Otherscholars argue that the image of the phoenix derivedfrom the peacock, based on either linguisticanalysis or archaeological discoveries, such asseveral bronzes with the peacock imagery and a jadefrom the tomb of Fu Hao 婦好 (d. 1200 bce) shaped as apeacock. Then there are some scholars who argue thatthe original image of the phoenix might be that ofan ostrich, but its image in history has been closerto the peacock.