Pandas are almost absent from classical Chinese art
Dragons, tigers, cranes and even crickets fill Chinese painting and poetry. The animal now synonymous with China barely appears at all.
Look through three thousand years of Chinese art: Shang bronzes, Tang poems, Song landscape paintings, Ming novels, Qing porcelain. You’ll find dragons, phoenixes, tigers, cranes, carp, even cicadas and crickets. You will struggle to find a giant panda.
Why the panda was missing
The historian E. Elena Songster, in Panda Nation (2018), gives two reasons:
- No symbolism. Traditional Chinese art usually showed animals for what they meant. The crane stood for long life and the carp for perseverance, often because of puns on their names. The panda carried no such meaning.
- Nobody saw them. Giant pandas are solitary and live in remote mountain forests. Few people ever met one. The handful of possible references in old texts appear in medical compendiums, and were forgotten in modern times.
How it became China’s animal
In 1869, the French missionary and naturalist Armand David sent a panda skin to Paris and introduced the species to Western science. Western hunters and zoos followed in the early 20th century. In the second half of the century, China made the panda a symbol of conservation and of the nation, and used it in diplomacy.
Songster notes that pandas began appearing in “traditional” Chinese art only within the last few decades. Some national symbols are very old; this one is surprisingly new.
The question was popular on History Stack Exchange, and the accepted answer makes a point worth remembering: an animal’s absence from art says more about what artists valued than about whether the animal existed.
Bring it up
“Pandas are almost completely missing from traditional Chinese art. They only became a symbol of China in the 20th century.”
Follow the thread
- Same patternKazakhstan’s national symbol might be a woman National symbols are often chosen, and sometimes reinterpreted, in modern times.
- RelatedThe “Laughing Buddha” isn’t the Buddha How a figure or animal becomes an icon of a culture can be quite different from what outsiders assume.
- Part ofChina owns nearly every giant panda on Earth The panda’s rise as a modern national icon is what made panda diplomacy possible.
- Same patternThe Mona Lisa became famous by being stolen Both show that fame can be manufactured by modern events rather than ancient tradition.
