Tiger earns its stripes as folk hero and role model
The long-feared predator is also revered as the protector of children
Think about all the nursery rhymes you heard when you were growing up－Baa Baa Black Sheep, Three Blind Mice, Old Mac-Donald Had a Farm and others. It seems that children always sing about cute, harmless animals, or at least these songs fit the picture of Western adults' expectations of children.
You may not know that the first nursery rhymes children learn in China will almost definitely involve Two Tigers. It uses the tune of the classic French song Frere Jacques and has been introduced to China.
Another verse engraved in everyone's childhood memories starts,"One, two, three, four, five; hunt tigers on the hillside." Chinese children seem to have tiger hunting running in their veins even before they grow up and read about mighty heroes who single-handedly defeated tigers in classic novels.
Take a look at the tiger's commanding appearance and robust physique－yellow and white fur, black stripes, and a pair of amber eyes that seem to penetrate one's soul－no sane person would want their child to go near a tiger, but somehow in Chinese culture, the animal has become closely associated with children.
When it comes to small children, senior family members often want their descendants to be "tiger-headed and tiger-minded", which means having a healthy and strong build as well as an honest, down-to-earth character.
Under the Chinese zodiac, 2022 marks the Year of the Tiger. To celebrate Lunar New Year, it is a good idea to prepare a few traditional soft tiger toys to adorn your home or to give to children as mascots for blessings.
Tiger imagery can be found in all sorts of traditional gifts people give to newborns, such as tiger-shaped shoes, stuffed toys and scented sachets.
The classic forms of these products usually come in auspicious colors like red and yellow, and they are dotted with prints of various colors and patterns; eyes wide open and teeth showing, which is supposed to be intimidating but somehow often ends up being amusingly cute.
These tiger-related products may come in different forms, materials and functions, but to tell whether they are authentically Chinese, you just have to look at the forehead－there's always the character wang, meaning "king", written on it, as the prints on tigers' foreheads resemble the character.
The curious coincidence between the character and the tigers' prints is so well-known that when asked to draw a tiger, children usually write this character on its forehead.
It is an established consensus in China that the tiger is "the king of all beasts", with text records dating back to the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220).
According to Zhu Fa, a philology researcher at Shanghai Normal University, one of the reasons the tiger is considered the king of the animal kingdom, as opposed to the common Western idea of the "lion king", is that China has been a habitat for several tiger species since ancient times, while lions are an exotic animal.
"In ancient texts, South China tigers and Siberian tigers, especially the former, make numerous appearances. The Shanghai area alone, while it's such a small area, has recorded in text at least dozens of tiger appearances or attacks, the latest dating to the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). It's been less than 100 years since tigers disappeared from our everyday lives," Zhu said.
In the mindset of the ancient Chinese, the tiger was a sacred animal, as honored as the dragon. The two are juxtaposed in many well-known idioms. For example, "crouching tiger, hidden dragon" denotes that a place is full of talented people ready to be discovered.
This juxtaposition cannot be explained without referring to wuxing (the five elements in ancient Chinese philosophy)－metal, wood, water, fire and earth－that explains the creation and transformation of everything in the world. In this system, the dragon represents wood and the tiger represents metal.
When this concept is adopted into feng shui, the study of the equilibrium of humans, nature and the universe, the saying "green dragon on the left, white tiger on the right" highlights the dichotomy between the two creatures, with the dragon representing the east and spring, the tiger for the west and autumn.
One of the earliest examples of such idolization can be found in an ancient tomb complex in Henan province to which historians affirm a history of over 6,500 years, where a human skeleton was uncovered with tiger and dragon images made from clamshells lying on either side.
In his book Tiger Culture, Cao Zhenfeng, former deputy director of the National Art Museum of China and a folk art researcher, wrote that only after a unified empire was established during the Qin and Han dynasties (221 BC-AD 220), did the dragon officially become a symbol of imperial power. After that, the tiger diminished into folk culture and became the protector of civilians.
Totemic veneration
In some ethnic groups in Southwest China, including the Yi, Naxi and Tujia peoples, the tiger has always been the most sacred animal and local people venerate it as a totem.
The Tujia believe that their earliest tribal lord was reincarnated as a white tiger, while the Yi consider themselves the descendants of tigers and cremation allows people to be reborn as the animal.
According to the Yi epic, which was passed down by word-of-mouth, when heaven and earth were first separated, everything between them was created from a tiger's carcass－its left eye became the sun, its right eye the moon, its whiskers the sunlight and its teeth the stars.
A similar tale is recorded in the epic of the Tibetan ethnic group, which states that when the ancient hero King Gesar slew a tiger, its body parts and organs became the plain, mountains, rivers and tribes. For centuries, tiger skins became the ultimate gift to heroes, and people made rugs with tiger images as a symbol of eminence and protection.
Although today's Chinese style themselves as the descendants of the dragon, the tiger is still given great prominence. Because of the animal's regal qualities and dominant status, in ancient China tiger imagery was believed to repel pests and ward off evil spirits.
Particularly during Dragon Boat Festival, which falls on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month, it is the custom to equip children with ornaments and clothing bearing tiger imagery to protect them from the pests of early summer. Parents draw the character wang on their child's forehead with realgar wine to protect them from being harmed by vermin.
"The change of status between dragon and tiger is relative. The dragon is, after all, a fictional creature. It flies across the sky and takes charge of rainfall, so it has gained a superior status. Tigers exist in reality. A lot of people have seen them, or even been harmed by them. What is important is that even though tigers sit at the top of the food chain, humans can use their collective forces or weapons to defeat them," Zhu said.
Reverence and prowess
Out of a combination of reverence and fear, stories about people singlehandedly killing tigers are often told in historical records and fiction to prove the power of heroes. One of the best-known stories is that of Wu Song from the classic novel The Water Margin, who kills a tiger with his bare hands in a state of alcohol-induced courage.
"The complex image of the tiger is on the one hand determined by the animal's nature, but is also a result of the complexity of human nature,"Zhu said.
"Defeating tigers can allow people to prove their own potency and be written into history. In this sense, tigers can act a steppingstone－thus humans fear tigers, yet possess the desire to defeat them."
As tigers enjoy the highest level of key State protection in China, it is illegal to harm them to prove the existence of human agency. Most people only see tigers in zoos, where their occasionally cute behavior is recorded and spread on the internet, turning them from awe-inspiring wild animals into the "big cats" we know today.
With the Year of the Tiger approaching, a trend has developed of buying children cute tiger knickknacks, so maybe in the future the tiger will become even more of a children's guardian than it already is.
But for today, let us not forget the animal as the king of all beasts, on whom we have for millennia projected our own fears, reverence and ambitions.