Article

Rhinoceros

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Rhinoceros

The Javan Rhinoceros in the Malay World

The Javan or lesser one-horned rhinoceros (Rhinoceros sondaicus) was, until the early twentieth century, a resident of the dense forests of the Malay Peninsula, Borneo, Sumatra, Java, and the Indochinese mainland, where it occupied a position of considerable economic and cultural significance. Known to the Malays as the badak raya, badak gajah, or badak sumbu—terms distinguishing it from the two-horned badak kerbau or badak himpit—the species was the object of a continuous trade in horns between Malay communities and Chinese merchants, and its capture and killing were matters of local legend and superstition as much as of commerce [1, pp. 133]. By 1937, when C. W. Loch published his comprehensive survey in the Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, fewer than seventy individuals were believed to survive across the entire range, and the species stood on the verge of extinction [1, p. 144].

Taxonomic Confusion and the Borneo Puzzle

The identification of rhinoceros species in the Malay Archipelago was long beset by error, most notably in Borneo, where the one-horned sondaicus was erroneously assigned to the island for over fifty years. The confusion originated in 1840, when Salomon Muller reported, on the basis of a single second-hand account from a Bejadjo-Dayak, that a one-horned rhinoceros occurred in the upper Kahayan region [2, p. 54]. Because the animal was described as unicornate, and because the Indian Rhinoceros unicornis was still (incorrectly) believed to range as far east as the Malay Peninsula at that time, the natural conclusion for most nineteenth-century naturalists was that the Bornean animal must be the Javan sondaicus [2, p. 54]. This identification was reinforced in 1869 when George Busk described two semifossil M2 molars from Sarawak as belonging to sondaicus, a paper that became highly influential and was accepted without serious challenge for decades [2, p. 55].

The resolution came gradually. From the 1870s onward, an increasing volume of material—skulls, horns, and skins—reached European museums from Borneo, all attributable to the two-horned Sumatran rhinoceros (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis) [2, p. 57]. Yet the sondaicus tradition proved remarkably stubborn: between 1884 and 1893, most authorities listed both species for the island. It was not until 1895, when Jentink and Everett independently concluded that sondaicus had never existed on Borneo, that the question was finally settled [2, p. 57]. Rookmaaker demonstrates that even after this resolution, the error continued to reappear in the literature well into the twentieth century, with authors as late as 1962 still listing sondaicus for Borneo without qualification [2, p. 57]. The Kuching museum collection, described by Bartlett in 1891, comprised four heads and three horns, all belonging to sumatrensis; no sondaicus material was ever confirmed from the island [2, p. 57].

The taxonomic history of the Sumatran rhinoceros itself was equally turbulent. Ten specific or subspecific names have been proposed since G. Fischer’s 1814 description of Rhinoceros sumatrensis; only three are currently recognised as valid subspecies: D. s. sumatrensis (Sumatra and the Malayan Peninsula), D. s. lasiotis (northeast India, Bangladesh, Burma), and D. s. harrissoni (Borneo) [3, p. 21]. The Bornean subspecies was formally described by Colin P. Groves in 1965, diagnosed by a markedly smaller skull with a forward-sloping occiput; the holotype is a young female skull from Suan-Lambah, Sabah [2, p. 53]. The classification was shaped as much by institutional and personal rivalry as by scientific evidence: the dispute between P. L. Sclater and J. E. Gray over the specific status of the Chittagong and Malayan rhinoceroses that arrived at the London Zoo in 1872 was resolved only after Gray’s death in 1875, when W. H. Flower’s osteological work and Oldfield Thomas’s examination of the Chittagong animal’s remains after its death in 1900 gradually stabilised the classification [3, pp. 16].

Distribution, Numbers, and the Malay Peninsula

Loch’s 1937 survey provided the most comprehensive account of R. sondaicus distribution available at the time, drawing on correspondence with French colonial administrators in Indo-China, the British Museum, the Zoological Museum at Buitenzorg, the Indian Museum at Calcutta, and the Sarawak Museum, as well as on Barbour and Allen’s 1932 paper in the Journal of Mammalogy, which supplied the most complete museum specimen inventory then available [1, p. 146]. His approximate estimate placed the total living population at 66 individuals, with a probable range of 40 to 70 [1, p. 144].

In the Malay Peninsula, only six individuals were believed to survive in 1937: three in the Erong and Chawang areas to the west of Trolak (Perak), one in the Lekir district near Sitiawan (Perak), and two in the Kuala Selangor–Bernam River district (Selangor) [1, p. 133]. Loch noted the possibility that even these might prove to be sumatrensis, citing the case of Major Guy Rowley, who in June 1933 followed what was believed to be a solitary sondaicus in the Sungai Bugis area for four days before shooting it; the animal turned out to be a very large specimen of R. sumatrensis, now in the New York Museum [1, p. 133].

The species had been extinct in the Sunderbans delta by approximately 1890, with the last tracks recorded around 1887 and the last live capture—a three-foot-high female—brought to London in 1877 [1, p. 130]. In Assam, Colonel Pollock’s account of shooting forty-four rhinoceroses to his own gun over seven years in the 1860s illustrated the former abundance that made extinction all the more rapid [1, p. 130]. The last sondaicus shot in Burma was a full-grown female obtained by Theodore Hubback in 1920 near Victoria Point, Tenasserim; four specimens were thought to remain in the Kahilu Game Sanctuary [1, p. 131]. In Indo-China, the species was still present but in ever-decreasing numbers, with M. de Villa reporting it “fairly well represented on both sides of the great Annamite Range” and Professeur Bourret estimating that perhaps thirty one-horned rhinos had been killed by European hunters since 1900 [1, pp. 140–141]. The single most secure population was a dozen or more in the Ujung Kulon Peninsula reserve in west Java, where the animals were closely protected [1, p. 144].

Economic Value and the Chinese Horn Trade

The economic significance of the rhinoceros in the Malay world was inextricably linked to the Chinese demand for its horn as a medicinal substance. In Sumatra, the Chinese would gladly pay up to 4,000 guilders—nearly £500—for a single horn of sondaicus, while the two-horned sumatrensis, not being so valuable, would fetch only one-tenth of that price [1, p. 139]. In the Dindings district of the Straits Settlements, a captured Javan rhinoceros in 1905 was sold at Penang to a Muslim merchant for S$200, resold for S$500 to another merchant in Singapore, and later shipped to Madras where it fetched Rs. 1,500 [1, p. 136]. In Indo-China, the horn and feet of a rhinoceros were worth about $2,000, which probably explained why so few specimens found their way to museums [1, p. 140].

The trade had deep historical roots. Early Portuguese and Dutch writers referred to the badaks to be found inland, and there must have been a continuous trade in rhinoceros horns between the Malays and merchants from China [1, p. 133]. In Siam, the extermination of both rhinoceros species was attributed mainly to the Chinese for their horns for medicinal purposes, the horns being “probably worth their weight in gold” and subject to a special customs duty [1, p. 131]. In the Dindings, Granville M. O’Hara recorded observations on the commercial value of the urine, dung, and horns to the Chinese for medicinal purposes, and noted that some thirty years before 1932, rhinoceroses were not uncommon in the district and were often trapped by the Malays [1, p. 136]. The 1907 Government of the Straits Settlements order prohibiting the catching of rhinoceroses in the Dindings was undertaken at the request of the Singapore Museum authorities [1, p. 136].

The cultural dimension was equally significant. The famous “Pinji” rhinoceros, shot by Sir George W. Maxwell in 1899 in the Pinji Valley, Kinta, had been the terror of the district long before the British occupation of Perak in 1874. It was a kramat animal—sacred and impossible to kill—and had killed at least three men on three separate occasions. A pawang (shaman) made a feast and invoked the Earth Spirits, asking them to give up the rhinoceros and to accept compensation [1, pp. 135–136]. When the Ujong Permatang rhinoceros was shot in 1928, hundreds of Chinese fell upon the remains and cut it up, collecting the blood and flesh as obat (medicine), and during the ensuing week there were continual rows and several court cases amongst the Chinese bargaining and quarrelling over the carcass [1, p. 137].

Research and Documentation

The Society’s literature on the rhinoceros spans more than three decades and reflects a shift from general natural history observation to focused conservation-oriented surveying. H. N. Ridley’s 1901 paper in the Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, while primarily a botanical survey of Mount Ophir, recorded animal observations including tiger tracks and deer footprints, and his earlier 1891 account of a large grey rhinoceros seen in the Tahan woods district of Pahang remains the only recorded case of the possible occurrence of sondaicus on the east side of the Malay Peninsula [1, p. 134], [4, p. 106]. Ridley’s description—of an animal much larger than the ordinary sumatrensis, distinctly grey, and not making the usual cry of the two-horned species when startled—was never conclusively verified, but it was placed on record precisely because of its uniqueness [1, p. 134].

Loch’s 1937 article represents a decisive advance in scope and method. Writing in the immediate aftermath of the 1932 Sungai Lampan shoot, which had provoked public controversy in the Malayan press, Loch set out to consolidate all available evidence on the species’ range, numbers, and trajectory toward extinction [1, p. 127]. His approach combined field observation from his residence at Changkat Pa’Badak on the Kinta River (1929–33), where he first became interested in the subject through Malay and Sakai accounts of a large badak in the jungle to the south, with exhaustive correspondence with colonial administrators, museum curators, and big-game collectors across the region [1, pp. 127]. The article includes a detailed list of museum specimens, a map of geographical distribution, and two photographic plates—the Sungai Lampan rhino in the British Museum and a male from Java in the Buitenzorg Museum [1, pp. 145].

The 1970s and 1980s saw a new phase of scholarship, driven by the urgent conservation context of the Sumatran rhinoceros. Rookmaaker’s 1977 article, published in a volume dedicated to the memory of Tom Harrisson, reconstructed the fifty-five-year taxonomic controversy over the Bornean rhinoceros and provided the first systematic account of the error, clearing the ground for subsequent work on the actual distribution and conservation status of D. s. harrissoni [2, p. 52]. His 1984 follow-up traced the full taxonomic history of the Sumatran rhinoceros from Bell’s 1793 account through the chaotic species-splitting of the 1870s to the modern recognition of one species with three subspecies, demonstrating how the sporadic arrival of specimens—first as descriptions, then as skins and skeletons, and finally as live animals—triggered repeated and often contradictory taxonomic revisions driven by limited material and personal rivalry among naturalists [3, pp. 12–25]. Together, these works transformed the rhinoceros from a subject of colonial natural history curiosity into a focus of rigorous, source-based historical and conservation research.

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. C.W. Loch (1937). Rhinoceros sondaicus JMBRAS 15(2): 130–149. Read on JSTOR
  2. L.C. Rookmaaker (1977). The rhinoceros of Borneo: a 19th century puzzle JMBRAS 50(1): 52–62. Read on JSTOR
  3. L.C. Rookmaaker (1984). The taxonomic history of the Sumatran rhinoceros JMBRAS 57(1): 12–25.
  4. H.N. Ridley (1901). The Sumatran rhinoceros JSBRAS 35: 105–106.