A Scroll Out of Chengdu, Bound in Gold Thread
The Bureau’s East Asian desk has spent this season on an object rather than on an argument. What came out of the lacquer tube from Chengdu was a hanging scroll — ink and colour on silk, a hundred and forty centimetres unrolled, a jade toggle, a gold thread wound twice about the roller — carrying five stanzas of verse at the foot and six painted plates said to have been lifted from the original. The covering letter is short and entirely confident. It asserts that the scroll preserves a court diversion called the Giant Panda Racing League, run in the seventh year of the Xuande reign, in which the animals competed willingly, for bamboo, before an emperor and a crowd of his subjects.
The Bureau has no quarrel with the silk. Silk of that grade exists in quantity, the mounting is competent, and the hand that laid the colour understood what a mineral pigment does on a sized ground. Our quarrel is with the calendar. Of every year an author might pick for an event that has left no other trace anywhere, this one has picked among the best-attested years of the Ming century — and then asked the reader to accept that the attestation somehow missed a valley full of bears.
We print the poem entire, in the order the mount gives it, with our correspondent’s plates beside the stanzas they answer to. Then we set out what the record does hold, which turns out to be a great deal stranger than the scroll, and very much better documented.
The Year the Scroll Chose
Fourteen thirty-two is the seventh year of Xuande, and Xuande is not an obscure reign. The Ming dynasty had then held China for sixty-four years of what would be two hundred and seventy-six, over a population climbing from sixty-five million toward a hundred and sixty. The throne was occupied by Zhu Zhanji, born 16 March 1399, who took it on 29 May 1425 and held it until the day he died, 31 January 1435. His era name means “proclamation of virtue”. His administration is the one historians reach for when they want to describe the Ming working properly.
Worse for the scroll, 1432 is a year with a fleet in it. The seventh treasure voyage had left Longwan at Nanjing on 19 January 1431 and would not come home to Beijing until 22 July 1433, which puts the whole of 1432 inside a voyage already under way. That expedition was counted. Its ships were counted, its ports of call were listed, its stores were signed for, and the argument about whether it should ever have sailed was still being conducted in writing decades afterwards. A bureaucracy that could account for Zheng He across the Indian Ocean, hull by hull, is not a bureaucracy that mislays a race meeting held in its own mountains.
That is the difficulty in one sentence. The scroll wants a court too preoccupied to write something down, in the exact decade when the court wrote down everything.
The Poem, as the Scroll Gives It
Five stanzas, six lines each, in a rhyme scheme that wanders — which is either the mark of a translation or the mark of a modern hand working from no original at all. The Bureau reproduces them without correction. The plates are our correspondent’s; the notes beneath them are ours.
In the realm of Middle Kingdom, under heaven’s gaze,
In the year of grace fourteen thirty-two,
There emerged a league, both splendid and true,
Where giant pandas, in their gentle ways,
Did race, not for glory, nor for praise,
But for bamboo’s tender shoots, dew-kissed anew.
“But for bamboo's tender shoots, dew-kissed anew.” — from the first stanza. The verse is set at dawn; the plate hangs a moon above it, and beds the dais with split canes rather than shoots. Of a league, no Xuande record the Bureau can consult says anything at all.
In mountains shrouded by mist, where rivers weave,
The Giant Panda Racing League took its form,
A spectacle rare, breaking from the norm,
As emperors and peasants alike did conceive,
A harmony with nature, they did achieve,
In this gathering, hearts and spirits warm.
“In mountains shrouded by mist, where rivers weave.” — from the second stanza. The rivers weave because the genre requires a path to meander; that is a rule of landscape painting before it is a fact about any valley. Note also that the plate has mislaid the pandas.
Silken banners fluttered, black and white,
As pandas lumbered, a captivating sight,
Through bamboo groves, under skies so clear,
Their soft huffs whispered to those who were near,
A dance of grace, in the soft morning light,
Echoing with laughter, pure and bright.
“Silken banners fluttered, black and white.” — from the third stanza. The scroll never says who paid for the silk, which is the first thing a Ming ledger would have recorded and the item likeliest to have survived.
Scholars penned verses, with brushes fine,
Capturing the essence of this divine sign,
For in these races, no malice was found,
Only unity, in which all were bound,
A lesson from the pandas, a line
Connecting man, beast, in a design.
“Scholars penned verses, with brushes fine.” — from the fourth stanza. Ming scholars wrote in enormous quantity, to a syllabus, in eight prescribed sections; none of what they wrote is this. Note the small red seal at the lower right — the only one on the whole consignment, and the Bureau returns to it below.
Thus, in ancient scrolls, the tale unfolds,
Of the Giant Panda Racing League, bold,
A chapter in history, woven with gold,
Reminding us of the harmony of old,
When man and nature’s paths did closely align,
In the heart of China, a memory enshrined.
“A chapter in history, woven with gold.” — from the fifth stanza. A hanging scroll is built to be shown for a season and then rolled away, which is convenient for a poem that ends by enshrining itself out of sight.
The Poem Set Against the Record
Everything in the left-hand column below is asserted by the scroll or by the letter that came with it. Everything in the right-hand column can be dated, counted, read, or in two cases visited on a Tuesday.
Five Stanzas Against the Ming Archive
What the Chengdu scroll claims, set beside what the fifteenth century actually left behind.
| Asserted on the scroll | On the record | |
|---|---|---|
| The year | “Fourteen thirty-two,” a league newly founded | Xuande 7. The seventh treasure fleet at sea between 19 Jan 1431 and 22 Jul 1433 |
| The document | One hanging scroll, no colophon, one illegible seal, not produced for inspection | The prize scroll of a Xuande painting competition, accession 1981.285.10, New York |
| The spectators | “Emperors and peasants alike,” on one bank, at one meeting | A court that recorded its ceremonies, its colours and its distances by regulation |
| The athletes | Giant pandas racing willingly for shoots | An animal that feeds sixteen hours in twenty-four and digests bamboo badly |
| The literature | Scholars writing free verse about the races | The eight-legged essay: 550 to 700 characters, eight prescribed sections, fixed canon |
| The reaction | A league, then silence for six centuries | One giraffe reached Nanjing in 1414 and was read as a sign of Heaven’s mandate |
| Surviving object | None offered | Scrolls, censers, a fleet itinerary, a panda skeleton in a Han tomb, the bear itself |
What Imperial China Actually Did With a Panda
The first thing to say is that our correspondent has stumbled into a real subject and then mislaid it. Imperial China did know this animal, and did take an interest in it — but the interest ran to skins, skulls, tribute and burial goods, and never once, in any surviving text, to a starting line.
The best evidence arrived only recently. Excavation of the mausoleum of Emperor Wen of Han, who died in 157 BC, produced in 2021 and 2022 the first complete giant panda skeleton ever recovered from an ancient Chinese burial: laid in a sacrificial pit outside the grave, head turned toward the tomb, among golden snub-nosed monkeys, Indian wild buffalo and red-crowned cranes. A panda skull had already turned up in 1975 in the tomb of the same emperor’s mother. The reading offered by the archaeologists is that the animals reconstruct the royal gardens for the afterlife — which means a Chinese court really did keep pandas, in a menagerie, sixteen centuries before the Chengdu scroll, and then buried one rather than racing it.
The written record is patchier and much funnier. The creature called 貘 in the old books has been read as the giant panda, but the books do not agree with one another: the Shuowen Jiezi has the 貘 of Shu as bear-like and yellow-and-black, while the older Erya disposes of it as a white leopard. The same Han tomb settled that argument in passing by yielding a complete Asian tapir as well, a species long since gone from China, which suggests the ancients were describing two animals and later readers merged them. Elsewhere the giant panda makes its appearances as a pelt said to control menstruation, and as urine credited by Sichuan hill peoples with dissolving an accidentally swallowed needle. A grandson of Emperor Taizong of Tang is said to have sent two of them to Japan with a sheet of their skin.
So the tradition is real, and its shape is the exact opposite of the poem’s. Six centuries of Chinese record treat the panda as a rarity to be owned, presented, skinned or interred. Not one line treats it as a competitor.
What the Court Did When an Animal Really Surprised It
There is a control experiment for all this, and the Ming ran it themselves eighteen years before the scroll’s date. In 1414, the twelfth year of Yongle, Zheng He’s fleet landed a giraffe at Nanjing. The court did not shrug. It identified the beast as a qilin — the auspicious creature said to appear at the coming of a sage ruler — entered its arrival in the official chronicles, and read the whole business as evidence that Heaven approved of the administration. A second giraffe followed from Mogadishu on a later voyage and, the sources note drily, made rather less of an impression.
That is the documented Ming response to one unfamiliar quadruped: a chronicle entry, a painting, and a political argument that outlived everybody involved. The tribute lists from the seven voyages run to lions, leopards, camels, ostriches, zebras, rhinoceroses, antelopes and giraffes, each of them catalogued. Pandas are not on those lists at all.
Set that beside the scroll’s proposition. We are asked to believe that a court which turned a single giraffe into a theological event held an entire recurring competition, with banners, an imperial audience and a literature of its own, involving an animal already understood to be rare — and produced not one chronicle entry, not one inventory, not one poem that anybody has ever found.
An Emperor Who Could Actually Draw
Here the forgery comes closest to being clever, and the Bureau will give it that much. The scroll puts an emperor on the riverbank, and it has chosen the one emperor for whom that is nearly plausible. The Xuande Emperor painted. Not in the ceremonial sense in which every literate ruler painted, but properly: landscapes, figures, grass and insects, and above all flowers and birds. He was especially good at animals, and best of all at dogs. He is generally reckoned the finest painter to sit on a Chinese throne since Huizong of Song. He gave court painters rank, appointing men such as Shang Xi as officers of the Imperial Guard.
And — this is the detail our correspondent would have loved, had he known it — the Xuande emperor kept live animals in the palace gardens, to work from. A menagerie maintained for the purpose of painting it is exactly the institution a panda racing league would need in order to be even faintly credible. It existed. It is on the record. The pandas are not in it.
Nor was the reign shy about competitions. Zhou Wenjing, active from about 1430, was summoned to court as a soothsayer and took first prize in a painting competition sponsored by this same emperor; his hanging scroll, ink and colour on silk, image ninety-one centimetres by forty-two, now carries the accession number 1981.285.10 in New York. That is what a Xuande prize scroll looks like when it is real. It has a painter, a subject, a competition, a date, dimensions to the millimetre, and an address. Our correspondent’s prize scroll has a gold thread and a mounter who has not written back.
The Silk, and What a Scroll Is For
The plates from Chengdu are competent pastiche of a real and very old idiom. The hanging scroll descends from the painted silk banners of the Han, of the kind recovered at Mawangdui, and its conventions were fixed under the Tang: the painting proper is the huaxin, the “painted heart”, carried on a top bar for the cord and weighted at the foot by a rod finished in jade, ivory or horn. Mounting one takes anything from two weeks to nine months. The format is not made for permanent display. It is made to be hung for a season, admired, and rolled away — which is a wonderfully awkward thing for a poem that ends by enshrining its own memory somewhere nobody can look at it.
The landscape behind the pandas is equally rule-bound. Shan shui painting, which had been developing since the fifth century, asks for three things in every composition: a Path, which “should never be straight” but must “meander like a stream”; a Threshold, which lets the viewer in; and a Heart, which fixes the meaning. Our correspondent’s racecourse winds beautifully through the second plate. It winds because the genre insists that paths wind. It is not evidence of a course; it is evidence that whoever laid out that picture had looked at a lot of Chinese landscapes, which is the one thing about this affair that nobody doubts.
What the plates lack is very nearly everything a genuine scroll accumulates in the course of being owned: the colophons, the collectors’ inscriptions crowding the margins, the borrowed opinions of four centuries of connoisseurs, the whole apparatus by which a Chinese painting narrates its own custody. Our correspondent’s silk has almost no history written on it anywhere.
Almost. There is one seal. A single square of cinnabar sits at the lower right of the fourth plate, where the scholars are writing, and it is the most damaging object in the consignment. A Ming painting that had genuinely passed through six centuries of collectors would carry seals in drifts, crowded into every free margin, each of them a name and a claim and a date, and it would carry them on every plate and on the mount besides. One seal, on one plate, in a character that will not resolve under a glass, is not provenance. It is furniture. It was pressed there by somebody who had noticed that Chinese paintings have red seals on them and had never asked what the seals are for. Six hundred years of custody, on this silk, comes to one illegible square in one corner — which is a roundabout way of saying that nobody has ever owned it at all.
Brushes, and What They Were Pointed At
The fourth stanza has scholars filling paper with verses about the races, and it is worth being precise about what a Ming scholar with a fine brush was actually doing. The imperial examination system, begun under the Sui and not abolished until 2 September 1905, had been put back at the centre of Ming appointment by Hongwu, who fixed the Neo-Confucian canon in 1370, revived the examinations in 1384, and presided over the first palace examination in 1385. The instrument of that system was the eight-legged essay: between five hundred and fifty and seven hundred characters, in eight prescribed sections, on a set text. By 1600 there were around five hundred thousand licentiates in a population of a hundred and fifty million.
So the brushes existed, in the hundreds of thousands, and the men holding them were formidable writers. They were also aimed, with great precision, at a syllabus that did not contain bears. And when Ming literati did write and paint freely, they did it for one another, inside conventions very nearly as strict as the examination hall’s — a landscape wanted a Path, a Threshold and a Heart before it wanted a subject. Sports reportage does not appear anywhere on that list.
Bamboo, and the Arithmetic of a Racing Animal
Set the archives aside and the biology finishes the argument unaided. The giant panda is a bear with a carnivore’s digestive tract that has bound itself almost completely to one food: between ninety and ninety-eight per cent of what it eats is bamboo, and fossil teeth show the commitment is at least three million years old. It is a poor bargain. The animal extracts very little from what it swallows and compensates by swallowing an enormous amount — nine to fourteen kilograms of shoots a day, across sixteen of every twenty-four hours, with the waste leaving at up to fifty times a day. Its answer to nearly every situation is to sit down and keep chewing.
Nothing in that budget leaves room for a racing league. An animal on a low-yield diet has no surplus to sprint on, still less to sprint repeatedly, before a crowd, for a prize consisting of the same food it was already sitting in. The scroll’s fourth stanza calls the races a lesson in unity. The bamboo makes them a lesson in thermodynamics.
The bamboo itself supplies the closing joke free of charge. There are more than fourteen hundred species of it, some of which put on ninety-one centimetres in a day — very nearly four centimetres an hour, which is to say that over a decent racecourse the track would comfortably outgrow the runners. Every sixty-five or hundred and twenty years, whole species flower at once and the entire cohort dies, taking the food supply with it. A league dependent on that plant would have been an institution with a scheduled extinction date.
The country does not help either. The panda’s remaining habitat runs to roughly thirteen thousand square kilometres of steep, wet, mist-hung forest in Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu, of which the Sichuan Giant Panda Sanctuaries — 924,500 hectares inscribed by UNESCO in 2006, holding more than thirty per cent of the world’s pandas — are the core. It is magnificent country and it is very nearly impossible to assemble anything in, including a crowd. The poem’s misted peaks and weaving rivers are the correct scenery, drawn with real affection. They are also the reason that what is happening in front of them could not have happened.
A Calendar for the Chengdu Scroll
The dates the poem needs, the dates the record actually carries, and the one year it chose to be invisible in.
Emperor Wen of Han is buried in Shaanxi with a complete giant panda among the sacrificial animals — a court menagerie assembled for the afterlife.
The Ming supplant the Yuan. Two hundred and seventy-six years and sixteen emperors follow.
The first Ming palace examination. The eight-legged essay becomes the instrument of a scholar's career.
A giraffe reaches Nanjing with the treasure fleet, is identified as a qilin, and is entered in the court chronicles as proof of Heaven's mandate.
Zhu Zhanji takes the throne. He paints, keeps live animals in the palace gardens to work from, and gives court painters military rank.
The seventh and final treasure voyage sails from Longwan at Nanjing.
The year on the scroll. The fleet is at sea; the court is writing everything down; nothing whatever is written down about this.
The fleet returns to Beijing. Zheng He does not long outlive it.
The Xuande Emperor dies, aged thirty-five, in the reign that our correspondent has chosen to decorate.
UNESCO inscribes 924,500 hectares of Sichuan as the Giant Panda Sanctuaries — the first time the animal is given a formal territory of its own.
The Bureau’s Finding
The finding is narrow and is offered without pleasure. Every institution the poem leans on is real: the dynasty, the reign, the painting emperor, the palace menagerie, the scholars, the mountains, the bamboo, the bear. Not one of them is arranged the way the fifteenth century arranged it. The emperor stands where no emperor stood. The scholars write what no scholar wrote. The landscape meanders because the genre says landscapes must. And the athletes are an animal that this civilisation, over two thousand years of unusually diligent record-keeping, chose to skin, to present as tribute, to argue about in dictionaries and to bury with an emperor — but never, in a single surviving line, to time over a course.
We wrote to Chengdu asking to examine the scroll, or failing the scroll, one plate, or failing a plate, the tube. The reply came promptly and courteously to say that the scroll had gone to a mounter for conservation, that the mounter was excellent, and that the address would follow. It has not followed. The Bureau has entered the matter under Cultural Oddities, where the harmless forgeries go, and notes for the record that the poem’s last line is the truest thing in it. A memory enshrined is a memory that nobody is any longer permitted to check.
