Author Archives: Joel

Joel's avatar

About Joel

Executive Editor, Journals Dept. University of Hawai‘i Press
by | 12 December 2006 · 12:57 pm

Reshaping the U.S. Coal Industry

THERE MAY BE NO POLLUTANT in all of history that people have worked harder to defeat than sulfur dioxide. In the United States alone the battle against it has absorbed years of effort and billions of dollars. Although it is nowhere near won, it has already utterly transformed the coal industry. It has also created deep political fissures between states and regions, as local fortunes rise and fall and as states struggle to decide how much they are willing to sacrifice to fight this invisible foe and to stop 11 killing their downwind neighbors.

Coal provides just over half the electricity for the United States, with huge and politically important regional variations. Many states, especially in the coal-producing regions, get virtually all their electricity from coal; others, especially on the West Coast and in New England, burn next to none. They rely instead on the three power sources that make up almost all the other half of the nation’s electricity—hydroelectric dams, nuclear power, and natural gas—though sometimes they also import coal-fired electricity from other states. However, the number of people a state’s coal plants actually sicken or kill (and the amount of acid rain and lost visibility they cause) depends not just on how much coal they burn bur on the kind of coal they use and how they burn it.

People who run coal-fired power plants can cut their SO2 emissions in two ways: They can scrub, or they can switch…. It’s often cheaper and a lot easier, though, just to switch to a kind of coal containing less sulfur. This option has caused some painful changes to the traditional U.S. coal industry by wrenching much of it away from the high-sulfur coal fields of the East and moving it to the low-sulfur coal fields of the West. Western coal has always been easier to dig because it lies in thick seams near the surface; but it is younger and generally packs less of an energy punch than the older eastern coals. In 1970, before environmental laws made sulfur content so important, only a tiny, share of U.S. coal came from west of the Mississippi. Today, more than half of it does, and the growing western low-sulfur coal fields are continuing to drain business away from the suffering high-sulfur eastern fields. Wyoming, with its vast surface mines, is now the nation’s top coal-producing state. One result of the shift is that the coal industry can no longer view the environmental movement solely as a threat; the western coal fields, at least, owe much of their growth to environmental laws, and could benefit even more from stricter SO2 limits.

The shift to the western United States has transformed this ancient industry in other ways, too. Even though coal fueled the rise of the machine in virtually every sector of the economy, the extraction of coal (as opposed to mine drainage or coal transportation) long depended far more on manual labor than on machines. Today, though, nearly two-thirds of American coal comes from surface mines, where it has been scooped up by some of the world’s most gargantuan machines. This mechanized mass production has helped make the direct cost of coal incredibly cheap by any measure.

The mechanization of mining has also devastated the work force. Because only the largest mines can afford to mechanize, the smaller mines that characterized the soft-coal industry for so much of the twentieth century have finally been driven out. More than three-quarters of the coal mines operating in the United States in 1976 have closed, and the current work force of 72,000 coal miners is less than a third of what it was a quarter century ago. The once mighty UMW now represents a mere 20,000 miners, who produce less than a fifth of American coal.

SOURCE: Coal: A Human History, by Barbara Freese (Penguin, 2003), pp. 177-180

Leave a comment

Filed under industry, U.S.

by | 12 December 2006 · 7:47 am

Legacies of a Passing Age: Offprints and Philately

Caleb Crain, who blogs at Steamboats Are Ruining Everything, remembers the role offprints used to play in scholarly publishing–and stamp collecting.

Offprints are unbound printed pages of an article, which a scholarly journal provides to the article’s author so that he may share them with colleagues. The protocol is — or rather, was — that when a researcher wanted to read an article that happened to appear in a journal he didn’t subscribe to, he would send a postcard to the author, care of his institutional address, asking for an offprint. And the author, as a matter of scholarly courtesy, would mail it to him free. My father is a scientist, and when I was little and collected stamps, most of them came from the postcards sent to him and the other scientists at his institution, requesting offprints. In those days, the 1970s and 1980s, the requests by and large came from developing countries, where the research institutions had less money for their libraries. The postcards came from all over the world, in other words, from countries I’d never heard of and imagined I would never see, and it gave me a thrill to see them, emblems of the glamour and global reach of the life of the mind.

He’s also offering to send you an offprint if you send him a postcard.

Leave a comment

Filed under publishing, stamps

by | 10 December 2006 · 4:50 pm

Darfur Conflict Spreads into Central Africa

Lydia Polgreen of the NYT reports on the southward spread of yet another conflict not worth stopping, although France has intervened at the request of the current government of the CAR.

KALANDAO, Central African Republic — The Central African Republic — so important as a potential bulwark against the chaos and misery of its neighbors in Chad and the Darfur region of Sudan — is being dragged into the dangerous and ever-expanding conflict that has begun to engulf Central Africa.

So porous are its borders and ungoverned are parts of its territory that foreign rebels are using the Central African Republic as a staging ground to mount attacks over the border, spreading what the United Nations has already called the world’s “gravest humanitarian crisis.”

The situation is so bad in some places that 50,000 residents have fled the Central African Republic to find refuge in Chad, of all places, while starvation threatens hundreds of thousands who remain.

“This is the soft belly of Africa,” said Jerome Chevallier, a World Bank official who is trying to help stabilize the Central African Republic. “It has little protection from whatever might strike it.”

There’s much more on Darfur and the fighting in Chad at Passion of the Present.

Leave a comment

Filed under Africa, Central African Republic, Chad, Darfur, war

by | 10 December 2006 · 4:35 pm

Head Heeb on the Somalian Regional Proxy War

The ever-vigilant Head Heeb has been closely following the growing likelihood of a regional proxy war in Somalia. Here is are the final paragraphs of his latest post.

Ethiopia and its local allies will push south from Puntland at the same time as they try to break the encirclement of Baidoa. This may, in turn, spiral into a proxy war; the same UN report that estimated the Ethiopian troop presence at 6000 to 8000 noted ominously that up to 2000 Eritrean soldiers may be in the country fighting on the Islamist side. In addition to Ethiopia’s jitters over the possibility that an Islamist state in Somalia might support domestic insurgencies, its fears of a second front against its long-time regional enemy now seem to be materializing.

And as if this isn’t enough, the possibility of Somalia being torn apart in a regional proxy war has a truly ironic postscript. A report on the fighting in the Independent notes sardonically that “the Palestinians are next in line to take over as head of the Arab League – raising the bizarre prospect of the Somali peace talks (if they are ever restarted) moving from Khartoum to Gaza.” Bizarre this may be, but not necessarily inappropriate. Given the number of contending factions in Somalia, the diversity of their interests, the unlikelihood that they can be persuaded to compromise and the number of foreign countries that want a hand in the outcome, Gaza might be the perfect place for them to negotiate.

Leave a comment

Filed under Africa, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, war

by | 10 December 2006 · 1:32 pm

Haruki the Hybrid

Emily Parker in today’s Wall Street Journal profiles the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. Here’s a snippet that detours from the primary focus on how Murakami deals with Japan’s dark past.

Even as he chooses to spend much of his time in Honolulu, Mr. Murakami appears to reveal the punctilious ways of his homeland. (He reminded me to take off my shoes before entering his home, an airy Hawaiian residence that offers a breath of quiet and anonymity for the celebrity writer. Then he promptly sat down at a light wood table–in formal repose–and looked at me expectantly, waiting for the interview to begin.) And as if to confirm this impression, the Kyoto-born Mr. Murakami says that, in some ways, he is 100% Japanese. “The difference,” he says, “is that I’m kind of individualist.”

In truth, he is a cultural hybrid. He has spent time living in the U.S., and in our conversation he jumps back and forth between English and Japanese. His own books are dotted with Western cultural references, and he has translated several American classics into his native language, such as the work of J.D. Salinger, Raymond Carver and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He claims to be somewhat of a black sheep in his home country, in part due to his distaste for drinking parties or social conversation. How about Karaoke? “I hate it,” he says in Japanese. “If I enter a store and there is a Karaoke machine there, I leave immediately.”

I wonder if the author knows that removing shoes at the door is a custom that is nearly universal in Hawai‘i.

Leave a comment

Filed under Hawai'i, Japan

by | 9 December 2006 · 1:45 pm

Anthracite Elites vs. Bituminous Boondocks

THE 1902 STRIKE [in the anthracite fields of northern Pennsylvania] served to emphasize how the nation had divided into clean anthracite cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, and dirty bituminous ones, like Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Birmingham.* In New York City, as the strike-induced shortage caused anthracite prices to rise, more and more coal users turned to bituminous, violating city laws and alarming city residents. Some plants allegedly switched to bituminous after dark when the smoke would attract less attention. In June of that year, the New York Times carried the distressing headline “Smoke Pall Hangs Over the Metropolis,” something that was true every day in the soft-coal cities. A letter to the editor, bemoaning the growing illegal use of bituminous during the strike, asked, “Are we to have fastened on us the frightful infliction which curses Pittsburg and Chicago?” Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate whose bituminous-burning mills in Pittsburgh added greatly to that city’s “frightful infliction,” chose to live in New York City, and warned: “If New York allows bituminous coal to get a foothold, the city will lose one of her most important claims to pre-eminence among the world’s great cities, her pure atmosphere.”

Pure atmospheres were something most bituminous cities had not seen, and would not see, for a very long time. Most of the bituminous cities saw their coal smoke as the inevitable byproduct of industry, and saw industry as the source not merely of their material wealth but of modern civilization itself. And yet, this belief was not unshakeable. By the late nineteenth century, it was starting to clash with other firmly held attitudes that linked civilized life to cleanliness, beauty, health, and ultimately morality. In short, coal smoke was coming into conflict with an emerging environmental philosophy.

*In fact, nearly every city west of the Appalachians depended heavily on bituminous except the emerging cities in Texas and California, where oil and natural gas were locally available. The reason was the cost of transportation; bituminous was mined in some twenty states by 1900, anthracite only in eastern Pennsylvania. In St. Louis, for example, anthracite could cost four times more than soft coal from the mines of Illinois.

SOURCE: Coal: A Human History, by Barbara Freese (Penguin, 2003), pp. 148-149

Leave a comment

Filed under industry

by | 9 December 2006 · 1:18 pm

Wood-burning Trains: "A Storm of Fiery Snow"

Anthracite country is often called the cradle of American railroading, and with good reason. Apart from a couple of relatively minor exceptions, the anthracite mine operators were the first Americans to use rails, and they greatly advanced the science of building railways. White and Hazard built a nine-mile rail line from their Summit mine down to the Lehigh [River] in 1827. Gravity carried the coal cars and a carload of mules (who refused to walk down once they had experienced rail travel), down to the Lehigh, and then the mules pulled the cars back up.

Rails spread quickly throughout the anthracite region, and the rest of the East, and eventually locomotives followed. Schuylkill county had more track than any other small area in the country. Companies building railroads alongside the canals drained away canal business and bought up much of the region’s coal property. The Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, one of the nation’s largest and most powerful companies, dominated the area, but there would be five railways so intermingled with th anthracite trade that coal and railroading were often considered a single industry.

Surprisingly, these trains didn’t run on coal. For the first few decades, American trains burned wood, even those that existed for the purpose of hauling coal. Anthracite did not burn well in locomotive fireboxes as they were then designed, and the bituminous fields were not yet widely exploited outside of Pittsburgh. Wood was bulky and burned fast, though, so the trains had to stop often to refuel. All along the tracks, people made money cutting wood to sell to the railroads—just one more way that trains would help turn the United States from a forested nation into an agricultural and industrial one.

The era of wood-burning trains is one that train buffs look back on with particular nostalgia. With clean-burning wood, locomotives could be much flashier: They were painted bright red and fitted with polished brass ornamentation. Engineers were flashier, too, often wearing ornate suits and vests with shiny buttons. When the switch to bituminous coal occurred later in the century, the inevitable accumulation of soot and grime meant that engines had to be painted plain black, and engineers switched to overalls. Some say that when the engineer’s uniform was toned down, his status as a workman fell, too.

One problem with the shiny, wood-burning engines proved hard to ignore: They spewed out a continuous shower of sparks and cinders wherever they went, “a storm of fiery snow,” as Charles Dickens called it when he visited the United States. It was a beautiful display at night, but it had a predictable downside. Wood-burning trains commonly set nearby fields and forests ablaze; some said the trains burned more wood outside the firebox than inside.

SOURCE: Coal: A Human History, by Barbara Freese (Penguin, 2003), pp. 121-123

Leave a comment

Filed under industry

by | 7 December 2006 · 10:33 am

German Pogroms Before the Black Death, 1348-49

In German-speaking Europe, reaction to the Chillon transcripts [of “confessions” extracted by torture as the plague began to work its way north from the Mediterranean]—and other incriminating docurnents—was swift and furious. “Within the revolution of one year, that is from All Saints Day [November 1] 1348 until Michaelmas [September 29] 1349, all the Jews between Cologne and Austria were burnt and killed,” wrote Heinrich Truchess, Canon of Constance.

In November, barely a month after Balavigny, Belieta, her son Aquetus, and Agimetus were executed, the first pogroms broke out in Germany. The towns of Solden, Zofingen, and Stuttgart killed their Jews in November; and Reutlingen, Haigerloch, and Lindau killed theirs in December. As January 1349 dawned cold and bright along the Rhine, it was Speyer’s turn. The Jews who did not immolate themselves in their homes were hunted down in the winter streets and bludgeoned to death with pikes, axes, and scythes. This happened so frequently, unburied corpses became a public health problem. “The people of Speyer …,” wrote a chronicler, “fearing the air would be infected by the bodies in the streets … shut them into empty wine casks and launched them into the Rhine.” Farther down river in Basel, the city council made a halfhearted attempt to protect the local Jewish community, but when a mob protested the exile of several anti-Semitic nobles, the council lost its nerve. Basel spent the Christmas season of 1348 constructing a wooden death house on an island in the Rhine. On January 9, 1349, the local Jewish community was herded inside. Everyone was there, except the children who had accepted baptism and those in hiding. After the last victim had been shoved into the building and the door bolted, it was set afire. As flames leaped into the cobalt blue sky, the screams and prayers of the dying drifted across the river and into the gray streets of Basel.

In February, when the pogroms reached Strassburg, a bitter winter wind was blowing off the Rhine. The mayor, a tough patrician named Peter Swaber, was a man of conscience and resolve. If the Jews are poisoning wells, he told an angry crowd, bring me proof. The city council supported the mayor, and officials in Cologne sent a letter of encouragement, but in the end, all Swaber had to offer the people of Strassburg was the opportunity to act righteously, while his opponents could promise relief from Jewish debt and access to Jewish property. On February 9, a government more in tune with the popular will unseated Swaber and his supporters. Five days later, on February 14, under a dull winter sun, the Jews of Strassburg were “stripped almost naked by the crowd” as they were marched “to their own cemetery into a house prepared for burning.” At the cemetery gates, “the youth and beauty of several females excited some commiseration; and they were snatched from death against their will.” But the young and beautiful and the converts were the only Jews to see the sun set in Strassburg that Valentine’s Day. Marchers who tried to escape were chased down in the streets and murdered. By one estimate, half of Strassburg’s Jewish population—900 out of 1,884—were exterminated at the cemetery….

According to Canon Truchess, “once started, the burning of the Jews went on increasingly…. They were burnt on 21 January [1349] in Messkirch and Waldkirch … and on 30 January in Ulm, on 11 February in Uberlingen … in the town of Baden on 18 March, and on 30 May, in Radolfzell. In Mainz and Cologne, they were burnt on 23 August …

“And, thus, within one year,” wrote the Canon, “as I have said, all the Jews between Cologne and Austria were burnt. And in Austria they await the same fate for they are accursed of God …. I could believe that the end of the Hebrews had come if the time prophesied by Elias and Enoch were now complete, but since it is not complete, it is necessary that some be reserved.”

SOURCE: The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time, by John Kelly (Harper Perennial, 2006), pp. 255-257

Despite all these “preventive measures” in the German lands, the plague rolled on in anyway, hard on the heels of the mass executions.

Leave a comment

Filed under Germany, religion

by | 6 December 2006 · 9:04 pm

Corsairs of Malta and Barbary in the 1600s

The corsairs of Malta and Barbary were a mirror image of maritime predation, two businesslike fleets of plunderers set against each other and against the enemies of their faith, but united in motivation, organisation and customs, these being known generically as ‘the custom of the corsairs’. They both kept their vessels clean and fast by careening at least every two months, an essential measure for all pirates which involved completely unloading the ship, guns and all, hauling it down on one side and then scraping or burning off all the weed, barnacles and other marine accretions before making the hull watertight by sealing the seams between the planks and coating them with pitch. Both used the same deceptions, those used by all pirates and privateers such as flying false flags and luring ships into danger by pretending friendship. Both rewarded the vigilant and brave among their crews—the first man to sight a prize, the first ten men to board it. Both usually captured their prizes without a fight by fear and overwhelming strength, neither having any desire to kill any of the captured crews, since dead men paid no ransoms and could not be sold as slaves. Both knew all the likely hiding places aboard a ship and both used torture to discover what could not be found, though this was mild compared to the practice of many pirates, a beating usually sufficing, on the feet by the Barbary corsairs, on the buttocks bent over a gun by the Maltese. And other factors were almost identical, right down to such detail as the small share of Barbary prizes given to the marabouts who prayed for their success and of Maltese prizes which went to the nuns of the Convent of St Ursula in Valletta ‘who pray continuously for victory against the Infidel’.

The corso, Muslim and Christian alike, was underpinned, indeed made possible, by a very sophisticated commercial network of merchants, sea captains and ransom brokers whose activities spread through the whole of the Mediterranean world. [Shall we call them the ‘media’, or the ‘international community’, or ‘NGOs’?] Such men bought the prize goods at auction and then recycled them into legitimate trade, having first taken the precaution of altering the marks on bales so that they could not be identified by their original owners. They were also in the forefront of the ransom business, raising loans for captives, negotiating with their friends, relatives and business partners, seeking out Muslim slaves to exchange for Christians or vice versa, arranging for the passage home of those who had raised their ransoms. Such men could be found in all the corsair centres and in the great commercial cities of the Mediterranean, such as Alexandria and Marseilles, from where they built up networks of correspondents many of whom were kin. But there was one city which stood out above all others as the financial nexus of this strange world of the corsairs. This was Leghorn [Livorno] in Tuscany, the great commercial entrepot of the central Mediterranean whose slave market rivalled those of Malta and Algiers and whose merchants were in the forefront of every aspect of corsair and pirate business, whether this derived from Christian or Muslim sources. Much of this business was handled by Jewish merchants and bankers, the nearest thing to neutrals in this holy war between Christendom and Islam, who had close commercial relations with the large Jewish populations in the corsair cities of North Africa and in Malta. Jews had no monopoly of such profitable business, however, and they were joined by Greeks and Armenians, two other groups who were able to span effectively the gulf between Islam and Christendom, as well as by Muslim and Catholic merchants throughout the Mediterranean. Such commercial networks were a necessary feature of piracy wherever it should flourish and they were always to be found.

These corsairs are difficult to fit into a history of piracy, since in a legal though not functional sense they were not pirates. They were sponsored by their governments and their captains carried licences which entitled them to rob and enslave the so-called enemies of their faiths. As a result, a career in the corso was perfectly respectable and unlikely to suffer from any shortage of recruits, given the dual motivation of religion and profit. But, legal and respectable or not, the corsairs were a terrible scourge which sowed fear and did an immense amount of damage throughout the Mediterranean and along the western Atlantic seaboard, a scourge which seemed at times as though it would bring the normal rhythms of maritime commerce to a halt. And of course it was a scourge which coincided in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries with the great upsurge of English and other Western European privateering and piracy. It was not a good time to go to sea unless you were a predator.

SOURCE: The Pirate Wars, by Peter Earle (Thomas Dunne Books, 2003), pp. 50-52

Leave a comment

Filed under piracy

by | 5 December 2006 · 9:36 am

What Giraffes Can Tell Us about Zeitgeist

The December 2006 issue of the Journal of World History (Project Muse subscription required) contains an extraordinary article about the effects of a particular exotic creature in three different times and places.

Renaissance Europe

By the Renaissance, people looked at exotic animals with new eyes. In general there was a great desire for new visual experiences; people took an enormous joy in looking at the unexpected, the monsters, prodigies, and the freaks. Even though people refuse to give a farthing to “a lame beggar,” as William Shakespeare put it, “they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian” or a “painted fish.” The emphasis was on the marvelous. When suddenly seeing something that surpassed the expected in beauty, diversity, or abundance, the mind was overwhelmed. People were first astonished, then delighted, and finally excited. Clearly there was something highly addictive in this mixture of emotions. It piqued people’s curiosity, and once they had seen a little, they wanted to see more. Obviously, in terms of height and sheer impact, there was no more marvelous, or more curious, animal than a giraffe….

The giraffe situation improved dramatically in 1486 when a real example of the species was presented to Lorenzo il Magnifico by Al Ashraf Kait-Bey, the Mamluk sultan of Egypt. The Florentines were on good terms with all Muslim rulers, but above all with the Turks because they were at war with the Venetians—Florence’s main Italian rival—and because the Turks favored the Florentines as trading partners in the eastern Mediterranean. Yet this particular giraffe came from Egypt, and this for a particular reason. Since 1467, the Mamluks had been in open revolt against the Turks who occupied their country. The giraffe was an attempt to establish good diplomatic relations with the Florentines in order to make them intervene on their behalf in the inter-Muslim conflict. As far as the Mamluks were concerned, the giraffe played much the same role in their foreign policy as pandas did in the foreign policy of China in the 1970s.

Bourbon France

In 1827, after an interval of some 350 years, another giraffe appeared in Europe, this time in Paris. This giraffe was also a gift from the ruler of Egypt, and it too was a pawn in a diplomatic game. As always, the giraffe produced a lot of excitement wherever it went. Reacting to the tall and composite creature, the French too came to reveal just how they thought about the extra-European world, and this at a time when the country was about to embark on its first imperialist venture. Only three years later, fighting a cruel and genocidal war, France invaded and occupied Algeria. The question is what, if anything, the animal can tell us about these subsequent events….

Making sense of these reactions, it is clear that the giraffe appeared just at the intersection of several interpretative possibilities. Most ordinary Frenchmen reacted much the way ordinary people always have—with wide-open eyes and slack jaws. What was unprecedented, however, was the degree to which this spontaneous curiosity was commercially driven. In the course of the eighteenth century, a mass market was for the first time created in consumer goods, clothes, and knickknacks, and, to fuel demand, this market constantly required new fads and fashions. In the summer of 1827 the giraffe played this part. It was turned into a product that people did not see as much as consume. Like contemporary celebrities, you came closer to it, and experienced it more fully, by means of the merchandise associated with it. Yet, as with all commercial fads, the public’s interest in the giraffe was fickle, and before long they turned to other attractions. Three years after her arrival in Paris, Honoré de Balzac noted, the giraffe was visited only by “retarded provincials, bored nannies and simple and naïve fellows.”

Ming China

The Chinese are interesting for our purposes both for what they could do and for what they did not do. Their overseas explorations preceded those of the Europeans, their convoys were far larger, and, before the middle of the fifteenth century, they ventured farther afield. Then the expeditions suddenly stopped. In a series of increasingly draconian decrees, overseas travel was restricted and eventually outlawed completely. The question is why. Again we have a giraffe to help our analysis along. A giraffe arrived in Beijing in 1414, not long before the first of the antiexpansionist decrees was promulgated….

The animal, when it arrived, was treated as a sign of the benevolence of heaven, and as such it had to be interpreted by scholars before its meaning could become clear. Fortunately Chinese literati were highly skilled at interpreting signs. From the earliest times, scholars had spent much of their time reading the cracks in tortoise shells or the patterns formed by yarrow stems, and a set of imperial astronomers was constantly at hand watching the night sky for omens. Unusual sightings were immediately identified as portents and vested with huge political significance. Whatever happened was quickly interpreted in terms of the established canon. Hence Chinese scholars were never all that surprised.

The giraffe, when it appeared, was treated as such a sign. Checking with their encyclopedias, the scholars determined that it must be a unicorn, a mythological creature that traditionally was said to have a “horn in its head made out of flesh,” “the body of a deer, the tail of an ox, and the hooves of a horse,” and to be of such a gentle disposition that “it only ate grass and never hurt a living being.” As they saw it, this description fitted well enough with the beast standing before them—giraffes, after all, do have horns, a curiously composite body, and a gentle nature. When the Chinese literati, in addition, learnt that the animal in the Somali language was known as girin [now pronounced geri], that settled the matter. To Chinese ears, girin sounded very much like qilin, the Chinese name of the unicorn. [In modern Mandarin, the q is pronounced much like English ch, but in earlier times–and in regional varieties of Chinese–the q would sound more like English k. Sino-Japanese also preserves the k sound in Kirin.–J.]

SOURCE: Erik Ringmar, “Audience for a Giraffe: European Expansionism and the Quest for the Exotic,” Journal of World History 17 (2006): 375-397 (footnotes omitted)

Leave a comment

Filed under China