Article

Some early accounts of the Malay tapir

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Some early accounts of the Malay tapir

W. George Maxwell published this short article in the Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1909, examining how the Malay tapir (Tapirus indicus, then tapirus malayanus) was recorded by early Chinese and European observers. His central thesis is that a 1416 Chinese account calling the animal “The Divine Stag” is in fact a phonetic transcription of the Malay word tenok, and that the author of that account was almost certainly a Hainanese (Hylam) speaker.

Summary

Maxwell opens with the passage from the Ying-yai Sheng-lan, a Chinese travel account of Sumatra dated to A.D. 1416, which describes a “supernatural animal” in the mountains that “looks like a large pig,” is about three feet high, has a black forepart and white hindpart, and possesses three-grooved hooves. Groeneveldt’s translation rendered the two Chinese ideographs as “The Divine Stag” (sin-lok), but Maxwell notes the obvious difficulty: the tapir bears no resemblance to a stag, and no known Malay folklore could account for such a name. He proposes that the writer was attempting to render the Malay word tenok in Chinese ideographs, and that the Hylam dialect (spoken in Hainan) provides the closest phonetic match, with the first ideograph pronounced “tin” rather than “sin.” He supports this hypothesis with a parallel example from the same work, where the ideographs for a type of mango are rendered in Mandarin as the meaningless yam-pa but in Hylam as jam-bu—excellent Malay for the guava, revealing the writer’s confusion of the two fruits.

The article then turns to the history of European confusion surrounding the tapir. Maxwell catalogues how Newbold (1839) proposed the seladang (the Indian gaur, Bos gaurus) might be a variety of tapir, and how Marsden, Abbe Favre, and Swettenham all erroneously glossed the Malay kuda ayer (the little sea-horse) as “hippopotamus,” thereby implying the animal was known in the region. These errors, Maxwell argues, illustrate how little even well-informed British residents knew of the Malay forests at a comparatively recent date.

The final section reproduces two primary documents from Asiatick Researches (Vol. XIII, 1820): Major Farquhar’s letter of 29 January 1816 from Malacca, describing the tapir’s dentition, colouration, and habits, and G. J. Siddons’ letter of 6 December 1816 from Fort Marlborough, Bencoolen, reporting a tapir caught in a paddy plantation and sent alive to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta. Maxwell notes that the 1416 Chinese account thus anticipates Farquhar’s “discovery” by exactly four centuries.

Key Findings

  • The Ying-yai Sheng-lan (A.D. 1416) describes the tapir as “The Divine Stag” (sin-lok); Maxwell argues the ideographs phonetically represent the Malay tenok in the Hylam dialect, where the first character is pronounced “tin” (p. 97–98).
  • A parallel passage in the same work renders a fruit as yam-pa in Mandarin but jam-bu in Hylam—correct Malay for guava—confirming the author’s Hainanese origin (p. 98–99).
  • Newbold (1839, British Settlements of the Straits of Malacca, vol. I, p. 435) proposed the seladang (gaur) might be a variety of tapir, a confusion Maxwell uses to illustrate the ignorance of even senior British residents (p. 99).
  • Marsden (1812), Abbe Favre (1875), and Swettenham (1881) all glossed kuda ayer as “hippopotamus,” a persistent lexicographical error (p. 99).
  • Major Farquhar’s letter (29 January 1816) records the tapir as “tinnoo” in Malay, notes it is “perfectly harmless” and “destitute of any natural means of offence or defence,” and speculates it may correspond to Cuvier’s fossil tapirs of France, Germany, and Italy (pp. 100–101).
  • Siddons’ letter (6 December 1816) reports a tapir caught in a paddy plantation at Soongye Lamswe; the Pangeran of that district stated he had seen only one other in his lifetime, when he was about ten years old (p. 102).

Conclusion

Maxwell’s definitive takeaway is twofold: the 1416 Chinese account is not a fanciful misidentification but a competent, if phonetically imperfect, rendering of the local Malay name, and the tapir’s presence in the Malay Peninsula was known to native inhabitants long before European “discovery.” The article serves as a compact corrective to the accumulated errors of European natural history, demonstrating that the animal was as well known to the people of Malacca and Sumatra as the elephant or rhinoceros, and that the four-century gap between the Chinese record and Farquhar’s publication reflects European ignorance rather than the animal’s obscurity.

Context

  • The article draws on Groeneveldt’s translation of the Ying-yai Sheng-lan, the published correspondence in Asiatick Researches (1820), and the author’s own consultation of Chinese interpreters attached to the Supreme Court (p. 98).
  • Maxwell was writing from within the British colonial administrative milieu of the Straits Settlements; his framing of Newbold’s error as evidence of how “unknown” the Malay forests were “even to the best informed English residents” reflects the contemporary colonial assumption that European observation constituted the primary channel of natural-historical knowledge (p. 99).

References