I was reminded that I should write this article by the reprinting of recollections in the Rodentia* Newsletter (No. 7, Summer 2026). The editors reproduced an article written by the late Clinton Keeling for the now defunct Rodent Appreciation Group. He had kept a number of species of rodents from 1944 until his death in 2007. He wrote:
Does anyone remember the lovely Huang Rat (sometimes mis-called the Huang's Rat) which was a beautiful deep yellow? (In fact "huang" Is Chinese for "yellow" - c.f. Huang Ho" = yellow river.) Come to that, does anyone recall Henry Berman who taught, back in the 1960s, at St. Ivo School in St. Ives, Huntingdonshire (yes, Huntingdonshire, not Cambridgeshire)? Because he obtained the first ones ever seen in this country, and our stock came via him.
I am by no means certain that last sentence is correct since I had some of these rats in the early 1960s. Mine were either the offspring of, or some of the original, animals sent to London Zoo from Hong Kong by the late Ken Searle which I picked up from the Zoo in 1964. The Annual Report shows 13 were bred that year, with Ken having sent one in 1959 and a further five in 1964. The one in 1959 was the first of the species to have been received at the Zoo and is listed in the Annual Report as:
Rattus huang (Bonhote). Huang’s Rat (Southern China)
My bet is that Henry Berman obtained his the same way as I did—directly from the Zoo. In those days all one had to do was to write to the Curator of Mammals, then Desmond Morris. He would write back with what stock was available gratis and all the recipient of his letter had to do was to take it to the head keeper who would catch and box the animals. The South Mammal House contained a treasure trove of small cages and it was evident that the keepers were very glad to see excess stock gone since the place was full to the gunwales. The casual visitor though would be lucky to see much since most of the animals were nocturnal.
Incidentally, until I read the above account I had never heard of Henry Berman. I am pleased to say that I have now found a lot of information on this estimable schoolteacher. He will be the subject of a future article.
In London, as the ZSL Annual Report shows, the animals were known as Huang’s Rats. That was also the case in Hong Kong as we discovered when we arrived in November 1965. The lab colony established by Patricia Marshall was in full swing and I am pretty sure that the ones sent to London Zoo in 1959 and in 1964 were all from the same founding stock. I also suspect that the common name was copied by London Zoo from correspondence with Searle. Huang (the Mandarin version of the Cantonese Wong) is a common name in Hong Kong. It is easy to see how the specific name huang was taken to be an eponym. Perhaps we should have questioned whether that specific name did indicate that the species had been named to honour somebody called Huang. The biggest clue was that huang has no genitive ending, i, ii or ae, to the word.
The species was named as Mus huang in 1905 by John Lewis James Bonhote. That date refers to the abstracts of a meeting of the Zoological Society of London. The abstracts were published before or on the day of the meeting and it is the date of that publication which was used in any dispute over priority in naming a new species. The proceedings of the meeting were published later and Bonhote’s full account there shows why he named it Mus huang.
I have called this species from its Chinese name “Huang mao shu,” meaning yellow-haired rat.
Huang/Wong simply means yellow in Chinese.
There is only one problem. The rat is not yellow and Clin Keeling must have misremembered what his animals looked like. This is how Bonhote described the type specimen (in the Natural History Museum in London) which was caught on 24 April 1898 at Kuatan, a village in Fujian Province.
General colour rufous (ochraceous-rufous, Ridgw.), darker along the dorsal area. The underfur is slate-coloured at its base with a rufous tip, thickly intermixed, especially on the back, with black bristles or spines. On the flanks the bristles become much less numerous and many of them have rufous tips. The colour of the head resembles that of the upper parts. The feet are whitish, with the rufous colour running down the centre of their upper surface. Under parts pure white, the line of demarcation being sharply defined. Tail rather longer than the head and body, clothed with short hairs and bicoloration. Hairs moderately long and sparsely covered with very close, short, dark brown hairs.
Bonhote was using Robert Ridgway’s A Nomenclature of Colors for Naturalists, and Compendium of Useful Knowledge for Ornithologists. published in 1886 by Little, Brown, and Company of Boston. Ridgway was Curator, Department of Birds, United States National Museum.
Below is the illustration of the species from The Handbook of the Mammals of the World Volume 7 Rodents II. 2017 (Barceona: Lynx Edicions). There the common name is given as South China White-bellied Rat. But Huang Rat is much shorter and reflects Chinese usage according to Bonhote’s source who could have been none other than the famous ornithologist and collector of the type specimen John David Digues La Touche (1861-1935) of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service.
Since Bonhote’s time, the species has been moved into the genus Rattus and then, along with other white-bellied rats into Niviventer. Early on it was lumped into Rattus fulvescens but is now recognised as a separate species by some authorities but not others. There is much more information in my earlier articles (HERE, HERE, HERE) since this one was just concerned with killing off the common name Huang’s Rat while pointing out that Huang Rat or Huang Niviventer are both acceptable.
Bonhote JL. 1905. The mammalian fauna of China.—Part I. Murinae. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 1905, 384-397.
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