The Golden Takin: who, what and when

In previous posts I have described collecting and game shooting trips into the mountains of central China from which specimens were sent to the Natural History Museum in London in the years before the First World War. As a result of the first Oldfield Thomas at the Museum named as a new species a Takin, now known as the Golden Takin. I will return to the question of whether it is a ‘good’ species later. The first specimens, two females and a male, to reach London were from the later phases of the Duke of Bedford’s Exploration, almost immediately followed by George Fenwick-Owen’s travels with his companions over much of the same ground.

Golden Takin photographed in Shanghai Zoo by
J Patrick Fischer in 2011
(shown on Wikipedia)

In China

The leader of the Exploration, Malcolm Playfair Anderson, had an article published posthumously in which he described how he and his party, Frank Kingdon Ward and Dr Jack Smith, had obtained the skins and skulls in January 1910. They were in the Qinling Mountains, west-south-west of Xi’An when they heard reports of a strange animal called a ‘pan-yang’. Being busy with collecting small mammals and birds they hired a local hunter to shoot specimens. This the hunter did and sent a messenger with the news that two females were ready to be skinned. The next day Anderson, Ward and Smith along with porters set off on the steep, ice-bound climb. A village blacksmith had made some heavy iron crampons and these they needed. Ward could not keep up and eventually after a very cold night made his way back down. Anderson and Smith continued. By this time they had climbed from the village at 3,000 feet to above the tree-line at 10,000 feet. They stayed the night with sawyers who gave them food since Ward had been carrying all the provisions. The next day they reached the hunter and the animals. Anderson had no idea what the animals were, with Smith guessing a muskox. The cadavers were in thick ‘bamboo-grass’ on a steep slope and being frozen took a long time to skin. The party then retreated leaving the hunter to bring down the skins and skulls the following day. The descent was difficult in the freezing cold and high wind but a full moon enabled them to continue:

To right and left rose snowy peaks, at our feet was a precipice, and far below us lay vast cañons filled with dark forest. By daylight it would not have appeared an unusual mountain scene, but in this enchanted light it was indescribably majestic. We paused awhile, forgetting that we were tired, shivering, and famished. 

They reached the inn in the village at midnight.

Anderson, Ward and Smith also, said Anderson, attempted to hunt for specimens themselves with the assistance of local hunters. They slept in a cave, more an overhanging rock, which is clearly the cave which Fenwick-Owen, Wallace and Smith occupied in considerable discomfort on their trip in 1911. The party did see takins and got within range for Anderson to have a number of shots shots. However, he missed. Then the hunter appeared to announce he had shot a male just below their ‘cave’. That was the third specimen to reach London.

From the dates in the accounts it would seem that Anderson reversed the order of the two occasions for his magazine article. He states that the party set off to shoot a Takin themselves on 8 January. In his description of the type specimen, one of the females, Thomas  gives the date it was shot as 15 January 1910. To add to the confusion, Wallace in describing the other ‘sportsmen’ who had shot takins in China notes that Smith, ‘our companion’, killed one in Shensi in 1910. So were takins, in addition to those sent to Thomas in London, collected during the Duke of Bedford’s Exploration?

The 'cave' in the Qinling Mountains used by both expeditions
(From Wallace's book)

In London

Oldfield Thomas was obviously delighted with the skins and skulls received from Anderson.

Of the majority of the Shen-si specimens there is little new to record, as Mr. Anderson had obtained the same species on his previous visit to the more northern part of the province. But in any case their interest is dwarfed by the discovery on Tai-pei-san of a magnificent species of Takin, quite different from the known W. Chinese species Budorcas tibetanus, and both in interest and beauty one of the most striking mammals that it has ever been my good fortune to describe. 

He first described it to the Zoological Society of London which was published as an abstract on 2 May 1911. Then in a fuller paper he described the specimens more fully. The type specimen for his new species, Budorcas bedfordi,  was one of the females. He went on:

The discovery of this splendid animal, whose golden-buffy colour renders it by far the most beautiful of its genus, is of the highest interest, and it is with great pleasure that I name the species in honour of the Society's President, during whose exploration of Eastern Asia it has been obtained. Mr. Anderson himself seems to have thought the occurrence of Takin on Tai-pei-san of special interest, and believed that they would probably prove to be new. He says: "The herds on Tai-pei-san are isolated by some hundreds of miles from the nearest others we could hear of, and as I could not learn that any other foreigner has hunted them on Tai-pei, I believe the chance for a new species is good.”

As a matter of fact, however, specimens had previously been obtained and had passed into the possession of the American Museum of Natural History at NewYork. But these were quite young, and showed, as it was not unnatural that the young should show, more or less of the normal coloration of the group, with blackish muzzle and extremities, and therefore in recording them Dr. Allen saw no reason to suppose them different from B. tibetanus. The practically unicolor condition of B. bedfordi proves therefore to be a characteristic of the adult, a fact which, in view of the peculiar specialization of such a colour, is not at all surprising.

Wallace writing in 1913, stated that the New York specimens had been purchased from a local hunter.

Is the Golden Takin a separate species?

The Golden Takin since its description by Oldfield Thomas has been lumped or split according to the views, whims or philosophies of taxonomists over the past century. Thus all the forms of takin, from the Himalayas in the west to the Qinling Mountains of China in the west have been lumped into one species, Budorcas taxicolor. Alternatively, the subspecies, for example B. t. tibetana (from the mountains of Sichuan) and B. t. bedfordi have been regarded as full species, as Thomas maintained. Generally, the lumpers held sway, the differences between the geographical forms being in coloration. The Takin appears as one species, for example, in the 4th edition of Walker’s Mammals of the World from 1983 and in A Guide to the Mammals of China from 2008. Recently however, those adhering to the phylogenetic species concept (PSC) have all the forms split as four species, with B. bedfordi resurrected, for example, in Volume 2 of Handbook of the Mammals of the World. Readers may be aware that I regard those who adhere to the PSC and not the biological species concept as akin to the man searching for his keys under the street light even though he did not lose them there on the grounds that is the only place where he can see. So, yes, you can take it that I see no reason to regard the Golden Takin as a ‘good’ biological species.

I cannot help wondering if Oldfield Thomas may have just got carried away when he erected the golden-coloured takin as a full species. After all, what better way than to recognise a benefactor, whose funding had really pushed forward knowledge on the mammals of China, by naming a most spectacular animal after him?

Takin distribution from IUCN's Red Data List (here). The RED line shows the approximate site of collection of
specimens by the Duke of Bedford's Exploration in January 1910. The BLUE Line shows the approximate site of Tangjiahe in Sichuan where the videos and photographs were taken in November 2017

What is a Takin?

The Takin is undoubtedly a strange looking animal. For years it was thought to be closely related to the Muskox. However, it was eventually realised—and recently confirmed by analysis of the entire mitochondrial genome—that the Takin belongs to the sheep and goats tribe, the Caprini (or the subfamily Caprinae, if following that scheme of classification) sharing immediate common ancestry with the true goats (Capra) and blue ‘sheep’ (Pseudois).

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Takins are animals of the mountains, moving up and down steep forested slopes with ease. In the summer they are most active at dusk and dawn but in winter may feed all day. Similarly, they move to higher altitudes in summer but in winter can be found in the valleys. They are mostly browsers. I have written about our encounters with Takins at Tangjiahe National Reserve in Sichuan previously (link here). The Takin here is usually referred to, not surprisingly, as the Sichuan Takin, Budorcas taxicolor tibetana, or by PSC devotees as B. tibetana. That article has a link to one of my videos. Another, showing Takins at night as well as by day is below. Clearly, as you will see, fallen, ripe persimmons are irresistible.

I have heard but seen little written that Takins are the most dangerous wild animal in China in terms of loss of human life and limb. They will certainly charge at perceived danger. When we tried to see the Takins in the the park in Thimpu, Bhutan, where a number are kept, we could not. The park was closed because one of the males was so aggressive that it had been charging at visitors through the wire fence to the detriment of the fence.

Finally, some photographs by Tim Melling of the same animals I videoed in Sichuan in November 2017. They can also be seen on Flickr along with Tim’s other photographs.

Links to previous articles:

Oldfield Thomas here

Duke of Bedford’s Exploration here, here, and here

Fenwick-Owen’s Expedition here

Anderson MP. 1920. The discovery of the Chinese Takin. Natural History 20. 428-433.

Nowak RM, Paradiso JL. 1983. Walker’s Mammals of the World. 4th edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Smith AT, Xie Y (editors). 2008. A Guide to the Mammals of China. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Thomas O. 1911. The Duke of Bedford’s zoological exploration of eastern Asia.—XIV. On mammals from southern Shen-si, Central China. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 1911, 687-695.

Wallace HF, 1913. The Big Game of Central and Western China. Being an Account of a Journey from Shanghai to London Overland Across the Gobi Desert. London: John Murray

Zhou M, Yu J, Li B, Ouyang B, Yang J. 2019. The complete mitochondrial genome of Budorcas taxicolor tibetana (Artiodactyla: Bovidae) and comparison with other Caprinae species: Insight into the phylogeny of the genus Budorcas. International Journal of Biological Macromolecules 121, 223-232.

The Duke of Bedford’s Zoological Exploration of Eastern Asia in the 1900s—2. Anderson, Sowerby and Ward

We know the following were participants in the 1904-11 Exploration. The leader was Malcolm Playfair Anderson and the following were involved for longer or shorter periods of time: Arthur de Carle Sowerby in 1908 and then Frank Kingdon Ward and Dr J.A.C. Smith after Anderson's return to China in 1909. A great deal is known about and has been published about Sowerby and Kingdon Ward but virtually nothing of Smith, although I now have more information on him than was available previously; he will be the subject of a ffurther article in this series.

Malcolm Playfair Anderson

Malcolm Playfair Anderson
1879-1919

Anderson’s father, Melville, Professor of English Literature at Stanford from 1891 to 1910, had the sad job of writing his son’s obituary for Condor, the ornithological journal. Malcolm Anderson was born in Indiana in 1879. For two years in his early teens he was in Germany with his mother and siblings. He returned to the U.S.A. highly unimpressed with both the educational system and militarist schoolboys amongst whom survival depended on ‘force of arms and fists’.

He graduated from Stanford in 1904 with a degree in zoology. However, from the age of 14 he had been on several collecting expeditions in the U.S.A. Somehow he must have come to the attention of Oldfield Thomas at the Natural History Museum in London for he was immediately employed by the Zoological Society of London to conduct the exploration being paid for by the Duke of Bedford, so his father wrote. However, I am by no means convinced the Zoological Society was involved, with both Anderson and his father seeming to conflate the two organisations. The confusion may have been because the Duke was President of the Society at the time.

He collected, he wrote and he photographed through Japan, Korea and China. This is his description of collecting a wildcat on the island of Tsushima, midway between Japan and Korea:

From our hilltop we wandered on down a trail singing and whistling, till we met a man on horseback and another on foot. The horseman dismounted and bowed, then passed on. The man on foot paused and addressed us. He was a funny old fellow with a bald head. Orii answered, told him our business, and asked him about animals. His answers were not very clear, as he had had too much sake. However we gathered that one of his neighbors had recently killed a wildcat, and the old man thought possibly it was still unskinned. WC asked directions and were told to go to the next village and ask for his house (his name, he said, was ‘Man of the Shining Head’ and he was distinguished as the best drinker in his village). We found the owner of the cat (which was skinned). I bought the skin for two yen, and asked about the body. It had been given away. We went to the neighbor who had received it and found that he had eaten part of the cat and buried the head and vertebrae. To dig the thing up was the work of a moment, and we were in possession of scientific evidence of the presence of the wildcat on Tsu-shima.

The cat is regarded as a subspecies of the Leopard Cat, Prionailurus bengalensis, locally critically endangered and the subject of active conservation measures.

In 1908, he travelled to Europe and worked on his collections but returned to China in 1909 to continue the exploration, to ‘the desert of the north beyond the Great Wall, and in the mountains on the border of Thibet’.

I do not know how the finances of the Exploration worked but Anderson is said to have sold the skin of the last confirmed wolf seen on Honshu to the Natural History Museum in London for 8.50 yen. However, is it not possible that having paid two hunters for the carcass, he was simply reclaiming expenses?

After his work on the exploration Anderson made two collecting trips to South America, the second with his wife whom he had married in 1913. He was ill after the second expedition but managed to write some articles on his travels. In 1918 an appeal was launched to encourage men in the U.S.A. to work in the shipyards. Anderson volunteered but he was killed by a fall from scaffolding from a shipyard in Oakland on 21 February 1919. He was 39. His only child, a son, died in infancy.

Oldfield Thomas named three species after Malcolm Anderson: a vole, Myodes andersoni; a shrew-mole Uropsilus andersoni and a niviventer, Niviventer andersoni.

I have found three articles by Anderson, published posthumously in Natural History in 1920, on experiences in China. They are listed below.

Arthur de Carle Sowerby

In his account of his work on the Clark Expedition, Sowerby explained where he went on the Duke of Bedford’s Exploration:

Before going into details of the present work, it might be well to say something about that already done in the same districts. In connection with the Duke of Bedford’s Exploration of Eastern Asia in the early part of 1908, Mr. Malcolm P. Anderson and the writer had already made collections of mammals in Shensi [Shaanxi Province], at Yen-an Fu and Yü-lin Fu. We also collected in the mountains of Shansi (Shanxi Province], north-west of T’ai-yüan Fu.

As well as a biography published in 1956, Sowerby was the subject of a major article in the Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society for 1998-99. Keith Stevens introduced it as follows:

Although the lives of many Western expatriates who lived in China and experienced the excitements and horrors of travel and the exoticism of the old civilisation cry out to be recorded, most expatriates lived mundane, cliché-ridden existences, apart that is from the occasional excitement caused by the troubles and emergencies of the times, brigandage, rioting and war. They never or only very rarely ventured far from their Treaty Fort and certainly not into the dark hinterland of China. Should they have ventured anywhere at all it would have been to hunt or shoot in the immediate area of the Port or go to a nearby beach or classical tourist site, such as Nanking or Soochou. And of all only a mere handful of those who did venture far afield have left sufficient records to enable a portrait of their life to be disentangled and recorded. Arthur de C. Sowerby was one such venturer.

Arthur Sowerby was born in China to missionary parents in 1885 and lived in interesting times: through the fall of the Manchu Dynasty; the era of the War Lords; Nationalists versus Communists; invasion, occupation and internment by the Japanese. He retired first to U.K. and then to the U.S.A. where he died in 1954. Towards the end of the First World War he served in the Army where, in view of his complete fluency in Chinese dialects, he served as an officer in the Chinese Labour Corps. By this time he was suffering from arthritis which plagued him for the rest of his life.

Stevens describes Sowerby as an explorer and author but as a man who needed to earn his living, at least, perhaps, until he married his second, American, wife in 1922. The dire state of his finances was noted in his correspondence with Clark. There are gaps in the record in which it is not known what he was about. Educated in China, Bath and the University of Bristol, he did not complete his degree course but ran away to sea after a failed romance. He worked his passage to Canada, stayed there for a while before returning to China and his parents in 1905.  He taught at the Anglo-Chinese College in Tientsin but it is thought he only stayed there for the year before he joined the Duke of Bedford’s exploration. He was paid by Robert Sterling Clark for the duration of that expedition and for his collecting expeditions over the next 20 years, and may well have continued teaching in Tientsin.

In late 1911 he took part in the Shensi Relief Expedition to rescue and lead to safety foreign missionaries caught up in the aftermath of the revolution. An account of this successful mission through country where banditti were rampaging was written by Sowerby for an appendix to a book on the fall of the Manchu Dynasty.

Manchuria and parts of Mongolia were the subject of four expeditions. After his demobilisation in 1919 he stayed in Edinburgh for a year to complete his five-volume work, The Naturalist in Manchuria. By 1921 he was off back to China via the U.S.A. where further expeditions followed, again through bandit-ridden country.

For around 25 years he lived in Shanghai. He produced and published a monthly periodical, the China Journal. He served as honorary director of the Shanghai Museum, one of the activities of the Royal Asiatic Society. He was president of the China Society of Science of Art which was incorporated into the Royal Asiatic Society. He later served as president of the latter. He had his publishing business and was a director of other companies. He took an active part in the Shanghai International Settlement, the residents’ associations, for example. 

A jerboa was named after Sowerby by Thomas as Dipus sowerbyi. It is now recognised as a synonym of Dipus sagitta, the Northern Three-toed Jerboa.

Frank Kingdon Ward (publishing as Kingdon-Ward)

Frank Kingdon Ward
1885-1958

I will not dwell on the explorer, plant collector and author, Francis Kingdon Ward (1885-1958) simply because there is a whole website devoted to his life and further information elsewhere. However, he took part in one expedition of the exploration because of his extraordinary family connexions. Ward’s father was Professor of Botany at Cambridge. The early death of his father left Frank needing to find paid work after two years at Cambridge rather than the three needed for a degree. A family friend, none other than one of the authors of the Wade-Giles system of transliteration of the Chinese language into roman characters—and Professor of Chinese at Cambridge—Herbert Allen Giles, pulled strings in Shanghai and Frank Ward soon found himself teaching at a school in that city.

During the long school holidays he visited Java and Borneo but after two years, another school friend—this time Oldfield Thomas—saw him recruited for the Duke of Bedford’s exploration for another collecting expedition. He wrote that trip up, the approximate route of which is shown on the website, in his On the Road to Tibet. He was accompanied by Dr J.A.C. Smith.

Thomas named a vole, Eothenomys wardi and a shrew, Blarinella wardi for Ward.

Ward went on to many further and alarming travels and much plant-hunting in Assam, Burma, China and Tibet. He served in the Indian Army in the First World War, as a spy in Tibet, and taught survival techniques in the Second World War.

Anderson MB. 1919. Malcolm Playfair Anderson. Condor 21, 115-119

Clark RS, Sowerby A deC. 1912. Through Shên-kan. London: T Fisher Unwin

Sowerby RR. 1956. Sowerby of China : Arthur de Carle Sowerby F.R.G.S., F.Z.S. Kendal: Titus Wilson.
The author was Richard Raine Sowerby (1887-1968) a solicitor, farmer and local historian. He described himself as a distant kinsman of Arthur Sowerby.

Stevens K. 1998-9. Naturalist, author, artist, explorer and editor and an almost forgotten president: Arthur de Carle Sowerby 1885-1954: President of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 1935-1940. Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 38, 121-136

Ward FK. 1910. On the Road to Tibet. Shanghai: Shanghai Mercury

Articles by Malcolm Playfair Anderson in Natural History Volume 20:
For the sake of his ancestors, pp 92-99;
The discovery of the Chinese Takin. pp 428-433;
A winter journey in northern China. 517-534.

UPDATED 5 September 2019