Court of the Golden Fishes, Part 2

00:00:03
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.

00:00:12
Speaker 2: Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

00:00:16
Speaker 3: And I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two in our series on fishes of gold the orange, yellow, and golden colored fishes in the carp family, such as the goldfish and its close relative the Crucian carp, and the varieties of cultivated carp known as coy fish. In the previous episode, we talked about the carp family and its historical role in human aquaculture, about how orange, gold, and yellow colors of goldfish today are mostly a result of artificial selection by humans that goes back more than a thousand years in China, and we also talked about how despite the fact that the color of the goldfish is a mostly human selected trait, there are some reasons that animals in nature develop bright orange and yellow colors, including some cases of intra species communication like signaling of reproductive fitness or just self recognition within a species, as well as inter species communication like signaling to predators that you are toxic or bad tasting, or somehow unpalatable, and this is known as appo semitism.

00:01:27
Speaker 2: Yeah, and some animals are just garish and tacky. What can you say? There you go.

00:01:31
Speaker 3: We also talked about how goldfish are actually able to chew, even though if you look at their mouths they have quite smooth, smooth looking, soft toothless jaws. The short version of the story is that goldfish, along with other fish in the carp family, have a grinding chewing mechanism known as phrynge old teeth at the back of their throats, and occasionally these throat teeth fall out for aquarium keepers to find, which be a fun surprise. You think your fish is toothless, you discover it's not. It's just that it's teeth or in its throat. We talked about the historical association of goldfish with royalty in China, and finally we talked about an interesting adaptation in goldfish and other close relatives like the Krucian carp that allows them to survive extended periods of time in oxygen deprived waters that would suffocate many other vertebrates. And the adaptation is actually that they are able to ferment alcohol in their bodies and then purge it out through the gills. They do this as an alternative to the other normal end product of anaerobic respiration, which is lactic acid. So producing alcohol instead and then being able to easily purge it from the gills helps the fish avoid the deadly state of acidosis that usually comes from prolonged extreme oxygen deprivation. And we're back today to talk about that's.

00:03:01
Speaker 2: Right, and we're gonna do a little bit of a carp ketch up here regarding some of the things we were talking about last time. In the last episode, we briefly discussed some carp related bits of folklore and mythology. There's going to be a good bit more of that in this episode. But at the top, I wanted to confirm that, yes, the carp of the Longman of Chinese mythology, this is we're talking about the upstream swimming carp that leaps over a waterfall and transforms into a dragon. This is in fact a carp. Yes, they are known in Japan as Taruman and the Pokemon magic carp. Yes, that we've discussed in the show before is a reference to this transforming from its fish form into the dragon like form of giri. Doose certainly look up images of this if you are not one of our many listeners that has the Pokemon data permanently installed in your cranium.

00:03:55
Speaker 3: I looked this up too, Yeah, because it came up in the last episode. We couldn't quite remember what the tail was, but we remember there was something about a Chinese myth of a fish swimming upstream or jumping over a waterfall and then becoming a dragon, and we were wondering, is that a carp. It absolutely is a carp. Yeah, so you're right there. Based on what I was reading this time, the term long amen it actually means dragon gate. And this is historically understood to be a waterfall, or maybe not literally a waterfall, maybe more like a steep rapid where the Yellow River passes through a gorge, so it's kind of a narrow passageway with strong currents. Allegedly, this path of the river was opened by You the Great, the legendary king who tamed the flood. So the idea is that if a common fish, generally a carp, can swim upstream against the strong current of the dragon gate or can leap over the falls, it will transform into a dragon, as you said, and a dragon comes with strong connotations ritual connotations in Chinese culture, it is it is a powerful, majestic being, and the carp is typically the fish named here because the carp itself, even before any transformation takes place, is commonly associated with courage, perseverance, and hard work in China. And there's an important human interpretation or element added on to this, which is that the idea of leaping the dragon gate is also a standard metaphor for success in like great tests and trials, often in scholastic and academic success. So I think it can be applied more generally that from what I was reading, it is most often applied to like academic success or like passing a test. And in history this was strongly linked with the efforts of young men to pass the imperial examinations, which were the primary path to social mobility historically across you know, many many years in China. So you work hard, you excel at the test, and you will leap the gate and transform into a more elevated existence.

00:06:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, I was reading about this as well. And so outside of these cultures it may come as a surprise that a carp what many of us would you know outside of say Japanese and Chinese cultures and related traditions might just think of as oh, that's just a normal fish, maybe not even an exciting fish. But there is a great deal of power there. There's a great deal of important symbolic power within these traditions.

00:06:33
Speaker 3: Last time, we were talking about whether we should think of the carp as exceptional or as not exceptional, and it's really kind of both. It is exceptional in that they are these very interesting things about it, but it is also from a different perspective, the most normal of fish. They're almost like your standard freshwater fish. They're about as regular as it comes, even though they are remarkable in so many ways.

00:06:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm gonna skip ahead just for a second here. I'm gonna come back and talk about them in more detail later. But the Japanese ningyo, which is like a it's often thought of as a Japanese mermaid when people are applying you know, Western motifs to uh to to other traditions half human, half fish, but the fish part is often said to be that of the fish parts of a carp. And I found this particularly interesting because you know, you think of Japan, you know island nation, you know a great deal of marine diversity that is that is also traditionally you know, harvest and enjoyed for food. And yet it is the carp that is the fish that is drawn upon for this hybrid creature that has you know, all these additional magical properties that I'll get into later. You know, it's it's telling because the carp is important, but also the carp is ubiquitous, like everyone would have some familiarity with the carp. Uh, And so it takes on this this interesting air. We're on one level, it is mundane, it is every day, but then it's also it's also beautiful. But also by being close at hand, by being the familiar thing that we spend a lot of time with, it is the thing we see ourselves in more and it is more readily available for these various symbolic meanings we apply.

00:08:24
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, that's interesting. It speaks to another tension in what kinds of animals would you expect to just be.

00:08:32
Speaker 2: On our minds?

00:08:33
Speaker 3: And in one sense, you could think of the most exceptional animals, maybe the scariest ones, the most dangerous ones, the biggest ones, the ones that if you see them once, you will remember them forever. On the other hand, you could think of. It's the animals that we encounter the most often, that we see every day.

00:08:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and in seeing them every day, we'll occasionally see them in a new way and see them with a new eye. Yeah. Oh. One other thing I wanted to mention is in a reference than nineteen seventy nine Japanese film Demon Pond, which we discussed on our Weird House Cinema episodes in recent months. There is a character in there who is Carp, and he is a carp though if memory serves, basically, he's just wearing a bunch of like you know, dark paint on his body and is kind of like greasy looking.

00:09:21
Speaker 3: Barbles.

00:09:22
Speaker 2: Right. Well, there's the there. Well, there are a couple of different fish people, and I think maybe he's like a catfish monk, the guy with the barbles. I think the other guy is Carp.

00:09:31
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm mixing up two characters.

00:09:33
Speaker 2: Yeah. And then there's Crab of course.

00:09:35
Speaker 3: Right now, Carp is the first guy who's hanging out with Crab, and then they meet the catfish priest.

00:09:40
Speaker 2: Yeah. All right, Well, let's uh, let's talk a little bit first. I want to talk a little bit about about the koi as we touched on in the last episode. The history of koi lines up with the history of goldfish in some key ways. So they're both selectively bred ornamental varieties of wild carp species, and they both have a lot to do with the with both aquaculture and agriculture, specifically as far as rice farming is concerned, so you'll have like flooded rice patties the perfect place for karp to also be bred, and of course both produce a food product that becomes vitally important to the people who grow, slash raise the species in question. But while the modern goldfish is again the product of one thousand years of artificial selection, koi date backed only to nineteenth century Japan. But like the goldfish, they have spread all over the world, like you know, I've seen I've seen koi in you know, in China. I've seen koi in Nashville, Tennessee. Like you know, they're everywhere. Listeners out there, you may have koi just outside your house, in your own pod. So this still even with a much shorter time frame here, it still results in multiple varieties of koi. But as Nick Fletcher points out in the book The Ultimate Koi, which is just an insightful book with a lot of stuff I think geared towards people who are more intimately involved in koi, like raising koi, but it also has some great overview material. He points out that it means that, quote, their body structure and the way they respond to their environment are fundamentally the same as those of their wild ancestors. Any differences are superficial, and the colors and patterns of skin pigment belie an internal uniformity much more consistent than that of their cousin, the goldfish.

00:11:36
Speaker 3: Oh okay, So is this saying that the goldfish is selective breeding has actually really altered the organism in more profound ways than the selective breeding of the koi.

00:11:47
Speaker 2: Yes, and it just has to do with just the again, the fact that the koi is just a much more recent development. We're only going back, you know, something like a century in terms of devoted selective breeding. Now Here is a perhaps less obvious question regarding all of this. How did freshwater carp get to Japan? To begin with? The short answer is that they were introduced from mainland Asia as far back as prehistoric times by human beings, and this has long been the prime explanation, with the Yayoi people in particular being the ones that brought over agriculture and aquaculture in the form of raising carp in flooded rice patties, brought it over from mainland Asia, and we're talking about this happening perhaps somewhere between three hundred BCE and three hundred CE. However, it gets a little more complicated than that, because apparently genetic strains of much older carp have been determined. A genetically distinct wild lineage of carp associated with Japan's largest lake, Lake Biwa, which in this particular strain would seem to go back millions of years and predate the arrival of humans on the Japanese islands. So, depending on the exact genetic strain, Japanese common carp can be considered both a native, prehistoric resident and an ancient introduced species. Okay, anyway you cut it, though, carp have been in Japan for a long time. People there have been utilizing carp, and they were doing so far before goldfish were introduced, which I dated in the last episode of the seventeenth century, but it may have been the sixteenth century depending on the source I've seen both Now, despite the Koy's nineteenth century origins, there were colorful common carp in Japan and in China for many centuries, with accounts going back into the first millennium Sea. However, these were seemingly the product of natural mutation in aquaculture rather than targeted artificial selection by human breeders. Systematic breeding of the amor carp that's cyprinous robru fuscus, or or of the common carp which is a Suprnus carpio did not begin in Japan till around eighteen twenty, and in particular this would be the Nijumarago region of northeast of the northeastern coast of Honshu, the largest of the Japanese islands. Now, we didn't have time to get into this with goldfish last time, but one of the really curious things about their adaptability, which has long been exploited by selective breeders, is that they exhibit significant morphological plasticity in response to water depth and water flow.

00:14:35
Speaker 3: Okay, so they can relatively easily change their body shape or body size depending on their environment, like how deep the water is or other dimensional characteristics of the body of water.

00:14:47
Speaker 2: They inhabit correct. Yes, so shallow, low flow water environments, these encourage more compact body shape, and this is thought to be because they don't need to swim as much and can therefore invest in a shorter, stockier body, and then high flow environments favor slender, streamlined bodies. Now it makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, So not to imply that they're just like T one thousands, like just rapidly changing around, but still as far as you know, organism morphology goes still pretty rapid.

00:15:20
Speaker 3: Well, it kind of reminds me of research we've talked about on the show before, positing that like when you go deeper in the ocean, there's more evolutionary experimentation with fish body shapes, and so you get more kind of more experiments with like weird compact or you know, squat types of body shapes or or extremely elongated ones, whereas when you go closer to the surface, where there is there's more dealing with current or more just pressure on fish to be fast in order to escape predators or to hunt, there is more of a pressure kind of pushing fish towards this standard streamlined body shape that you see in a lot of oceanic fish right.

00:16:04
Speaker 2: Right, And then with the goldfish, like this is something that has been exploited to try and favor, Like you want a nice slender fish, okay, go in this direction. But if you want a chonker, if you want a nice squat fish, then this then this is what you need to do with its environment. Now I want to say, I think this is a good time to mention this. We're talking about you know about goldfish in particular, getting you know, their body shape changing depending on what sort of environment you're in, and we should not let these tantalizing facts accidentally feed the myth that a goldfish grows in accordance to the size of their bowl or tank. Goldfish grow throughout their life no matter the size of the habitat, and as is the case with a lot of organisms, if they're growing larger in a very small environment, it is going to be uncomfortable for them in a number of ways. In general, I would say, and I'm saying this not as someone who keeps fish, so certainly those of you who are the keepers of fish out there may have additional data to share on this, but in general, disregard any myth you hear that centers around the idea that a goldfish doesn't require a proper, well maintained environment, because, yes, as we discussed in the last episode, they can handle some pretty rough conditions, but that doesn't mean they're having a good time or that they are impervious.

00:17:26
Speaker 3: Right right, I mean, just the fact that they can survive some conditions that will kill other fish, that doesn't necessarily mean it's good for them.

00:17:35
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, like you know, you can sleep in a really dirty bet, but that doesn't mean you should or path to Noah, that sort of thing. Now, part of this myth seems to stem as well from historic misunderstandings of traditional Song dynasty goldfish presentation rituals that entailed placing a particularly beautiful goldfish in a say, a small shallow display bowl or some sort of jar for temporary display, and then after you were done, you would return them to the larger pool or pools that the fish lives in. Victorians popularize the use of globular goldfish bowls for displaying the fish, and you know, a lot of this just is kind of a misreading of what the Chinese were doing with the fish. It was like, oh, that's all they need, you can just keep them in a little glass, a little bowl, and they're good to go. That is, it's not really the case. It's a lot more complicated. They need proper care, as any fish does.

00:18:35
Speaker 3: It's almost like if you tried to make Olympic athletes live on the like three steps with the first, second, and third place.

00:18:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, Like this is just a temporary display situation. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, this also connects to the koi though, because the same basic principles apply to these carp as well. Faster moving waters lead to slimmer carp, while slow moving shallows lead to chonkier carp. Now, I have to admit one of the things that drew me into selecting this for our discussion this week, As you know, I was looking at some biological features that were kind of you know, provided an overview of different fish, and I read something in passing about koi living a long time and to be clear, and then we'll get back to more examples of this. Koi and carp in general are sometimes associated with longevity in a magical sense, in a symbolic sense, but when you dive into the subject of long lived individual koi, the results are are not all that convincing. In general, the life expectancy of a koi tends to be around twenty five to fifty years, somewhere in that range depending on how they're cared for and just roll of the dice. But there are accounts of much much older koi, with the alleged superstar being one Hanako, a red karp koi last own by doctor Komei Koshihara and said to have died in nineteen seventy seven. This is the fish at the ripe old age of two hundred and twenty six years old. If true, this would mean that fish was born during the Edo period, a fish of the Togagawa Shogunate. So, you know, a pretty impressive lifespan for a fish, and one that you know kind of is you know, stirs the imagination to think about how long this fish has been going around doing its thing.

00:20:40
Speaker 3: Yeah, but was there like continuous documentation of the life of this one fish or is it just a later person saying, yeah, this fish has been alive for hundreds of years.

00:20:49
Speaker 2: Basically, it seems to be the latter unfortunately, and to be clear, it does sound like like this man and his fish did have a very special relationship he loved this fish, and there were a lot of ideas associated with this fish, and there was this idea that the fish had been passed down through the family and then also sound it's also been attributed to this fish displayed a unique personality. It would like come up and look at you and stuff. But the additional story that is attached to this scientists use scale dating to determine that it was more than two centuries old. This has generally been met with at the very least healthy skepticism for snopes dot com fans out there, they have an article on the topic and they point out that there just doesn't seem to be any way to really fact check this again likely legend, like there's no you know, there's no apparent peer reviewed or scientific journal information about this fish or the alleged dating of its scales. And then also scale dating in and of itself is apparently not the most accurate way to determine fish age. I believe my understanding is that scale based dating is good if you have a live fish and you don't want to hurt the fish, But if the fish is dead, you can do a lot more specific testing based on its remains, and so Yeah, some combination here of inaccurate readings, legend making, and maybe some some shoddy record keeping, you know, But I don't know. I think you can probably attribute most of this to legend that is tying in with traditional ideas about koi and about carb Yeah.

00:22:31
Speaker 3: I would also have to think that you would be informed in this by considering how old is the claimed age of this fish compared to the oldest age of the same species that we can verify. You know, if it's like a little bit older than the otherwise the best known record holder, then you know, you'd be more open minded about it. If it's like this seems like this is maybe I don't know, more than double or three times the age of that anybody's ever really verified for these species.

00:23:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's my understanding as well. And you know it's you know, not to say that fish can't live for a very long time, you know. I think, as we've discussed in the show before, we have some real Sioux superstars out there in the fish world when it comes to living for centuries. But it does not seem to be the case that that the carp specifically the koi, is capable of this. But again, we're largely dealing with dealing with the realm of legend here, and that's perfectly fine. It's as long as we considered a legend, because there are some really fabulous carp legends out there, and I think that's what we're gonna basically be dealing with for the remainder of the episode here, I turned to the pages of one of Carol Rose's encyclopedias of magical creatures to see there was anything I was missing, and she does mention it sounds like a very related tradition from Korean folklore of a dragon carp, a creature with the head of a dragon and the tail of a carp, which, upon being caught by a fisherman, speaks and begs for its own life. The fisherman releases the creature and it turns out to be the son of the dragon king. So he's like, oh, you know, dodged a bullet. There not a lot to that one. I guess they, at least in the version that I read. There may be a more robust version of that out there, but I still found it kind of amusing and plays in with some of the fishing motifs we've been talking about.

00:24:27
Speaker 3: Well, I would wonder what this kind of legend. Does the fishermen get a boon for giving the fish or the son of the dragon it's life back.

00:24:34
Speaker 2: I would hope so. Certainly we have other fishing legends where the talking fish grants a wish or something, So I would hope that this is in some way auspicious.

00:24:45
Speaker 3: This association between dragons and carp. Beyond just the you know, the transformation of the persistent carp who makes it up through the dragon gate turning into a dragon. Beyond that one, this association between dragons and carp will come up in a legend. And I want to talk about in a bit about an immortal Oh excellent.

00:25:04
Speaker 2: Well, before we get to that, let's let's divert briefly over to India. I was looking in Naditha Krishna's Sacred Animals of India, and that book highlights a number of sacred fish, though not all of them are tied in this text to specific species. Two, however, do seem to align with some sort of species of carp. There's the Rohita fish, which is a symbol of Mahayana Buddhism, and it is a right hand symbol of the goddess of Varahi. A pair of golden fish symbolizes happiness as well as possibly holy rivers and also the possibility of transcendental wisdom. The species libeo Rohita or the rohu fish, is a carp found throughout South Asia. Its prized as both a game fish and a product of aquaculture. I don't believe, however, that they are ever golden in color. Now there is also the mahashir or masir, and this is a fish considered sacred in many rivers of India. And this is a carp species of the genus tor And. I was looking at pictures of these. Some pictures I did not trust. Some of these look like they might be ai. But there are some other older images that seemed more authentic that seem to indicate that they can take on some level of golden color. I don't know if this is how much of this is the sun playing on glittering scales once they've been removed from the water, But some potential for golden fish here. And then turning back to Japan, Yeah, once more, there is that the ningyo, which is a Japanese human fish hybrid. Again often sort of described as a merman or mermaid through the Western lens, and it is often invoked with the fish parts being that of a familiar carp. And this was really interesting because the ningo is often described as being a fish, generally again a carp with a human face, sometimes with like parts of a human's upper body, like little arms or so forth, and much like the Fiji mermaid Mumma fied, examples of this creature were created via taxidermy, transforming conjoined fish and monkey parts into a new being. In fact, the Fiji Mermaid is likely a ningyo that made its way into the hands of nineteenth century American showman P. T. Barnum. So just a little rebranding here.

00:27:39
Speaker 3: Okay, wait, so I don't know if you know the answer to this, But is it thought by whoever established this historical record that he knew it was this Japanese creature and he's like, I need to rebrand it for an American audience, or is it just like I have no idea what this is. I'll make something up from.

00:27:58
Speaker 2: What I was reading and perhaps have to get into a more robust history of the Fiji mermaid later. I think it came it didn't come directly. You came through intermediarymediary, so it's very possible that it was rebranded along the way as it made its way to his hands.

00:28:15
Speaker 3: Okay, before it even got to him.

00:28:16
Speaker 2: I see. Now there are different traditions concerning the ningo the eating of its flesh. It said that this will give you long life. But on the other hand, catching one is a bad omen that'll bring about terrible storms. So kind of a catch twenty two there. But there is a tale that is told of a nun by the name of yal Bikuni who attained eight hundred years of perpetual youth by eating the flesh of one of these creatures.

00:28:44
Speaker 3: Wow, you got to get that eternal youth, that's the important part. You don't want to live forever but continually age. Yeah, we watched at least one movie about that.

00:28:53
Speaker 2: I think, yeah, yeah, that's always the curse, right, yeah, or you get immortality, but you don't get that that that wolverine healing factor to go with it. So in any ere, you know, it makes sense that if you hate the flesh of one of these creatures, that it would have some sort of benefit to your longevity, because again there is this long standing connection between carp and longevity and also of transformation again with the idea of the carp becoming the dragon and so forth. Now, an interesting sort of final wrinkle on this particular angle is that koi fish can, with the right markings and the right of observational conditions, maybe the right photograph angle, they can appear to have humanoid faces. Some of these images have made the rounds on the Internet over the past couple of decades. And I'm sure there are some you know, AI monstrosities out there now and men probably some photoshop stuff in the mix, but it's my understanding there are some genuine images out there that, you know, do kind of look like you're looking at a carp with a human face. So and you know, this is not this is not something you just find in cooy. There are other fish species out there that I think are captivating because their face feels a little more human. I'm thinking of various puffer fish, for example, which are sometimes when people photograph them and say snorkeling environments, like the phone will like do the whole like face thing, like it'll like recognize the face of the fish, yeah, which is yeah, I think, I think says something about why we find them so fascinating.

00:30:29
Speaker 3: Yeah, puffer fish in particular are not just they don't just have faces, but they're making a face.

00:30:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they're kind of like all face because they kind of feel like a big head, right.

00:30:41
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like I'm thinking about particular puffer fish faces, and they make good reaction meme style faces. One is kind of a slack jaw are you kidding me? Face?

00:30:53
Speaker 2: Yeah? They always feel to me like and this, especially if I'm observing them in the water, they always kind of look like they're thinking looking at me? Are you still looking at me? And they you know, and they're kind of like drifting away from you the whole time.

00:31:08
Speaker 3: How can I talk myself out of this situation? Yeah? Yeah, Okay, are you ready to talk about carp riding?

00:31:25
Speaker 2: Oh? Yes, let's do that. We haven't touched on this, So.

00:31:28
Speaker 3: I think the best way to approach this subject is to begin with you and I Rob looking at a work of art that we can describe for the listeners at home. So, Rob, I've got the image for you to look at. Here in the outline, I'm going to describe it. This is a Japanese color wood cut from the Edo period, approximately the your eighteen twenty or so, by an artist named Toyota Hoke. I found this in the online collection of the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, which had some good explanatorys along with it. So I'll describe it first and then talk about what it means. The woodcut shows a sagely older man with long hair and a mustache, wearing Taoist ceremonial robes and so he's he's dressed in these robes. The robes are very flowing and his hair is flying back behind him. He has a oh, I would call this a sly look on his face. It's just the slightest hint of a smile, like pretty flat mouth, but just curling up at the corners, like he's onto a pretty funny joke. But he hasn't said anything about it yet.

00:32:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, almost like he's riding a Harley or something. I don't know.

00:32:39
Speaker 3: Yeah, and he's got something in his lap. I'll talk about that in a minute. But so this is all here. Yeah, So he's got the expression, he's got the robes, but he is riding on the back of a giant carp just riding a fish the size of an orca like it's a horse, sort of positioned right back behind the head, around where the first pair of fins is and the fish who how do you describe that fish's face? Fish has We can only see one side of its face, but it has a huge eye. And the fish also appears to be kind of smiling. It's got an upturned corners of the mouth. It looks like a happy fish. It is not unhappy. It is not being broken like a mustang, and you know, having its spirit beaten down. This is a fish that is glad to be giving a man a ride.

00:33:27
Speaker 2: And yet there's a certain wildness to it as well.

00:33:30
Speaker 3: Yes, totally so. The man in this artwork is a figure of legend. The Chinese Taoist immortal known as Chingau or King Ko. Chingao was a sort of holy recluse or hermit, a wise man of letters in a way, a master player of an instrument I've seen in some sources called a zither, like a seven stringed zither, which is a stringed instrument in other sources. I don't know if this is a different instrument or if it's another word for the same thing, but they say he played an instrument called the chin just qi n and so he was a player of this instrument, and he was known as a painter of fish. So I guess if you paint him and there's a fish in the painting, you're really inviting scrutiny of your craft. But according to legend, the transformation of this Taoist sage Chingau into an immortal was signaled by him appearing before his students or his disciples riding on a magical carp and then after this it was said that he traveled up and down all the waterways of the world on the back of this carp steed. But in some representations, such as this artwork that you and I are looking at, Rob, in this one, he is shown flying up into the clouds. He's going to the heavens, and this is why the fish is surrounded by clouds on this woodcut. I didn't actually notice the clouds at first, but Rob, if you look at, say the outline of the fish, you can see kind of the fluffy edges of the clouds that it's almost almost like the fish is sitting on the clouds.

00:35:12
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, very much. And you see similar depictions of outright dragons, yes, in Eastern traditions, where they're like he had nested on the cloud.

00:35:23
Speaker 3: Did you notice that this carp is also its body appears to you said, it looks very wild, and I think that is suggested in part by the implied motion of its pose. It appears to be writhing. In fact, it is writhing in an S shape, the same kind of S shape we often see Chinese dragons depicted. So yeah, it's there in the clouds. It's writhing like this. It's having a great time. One thing I did want to point out about Chingao here is that in this woodcut he is not observing hands free eyes on the road driving rules because he has some kind of text spread out in his lap and he's reading it while he is writing the fish. I don't know if rules are different when you're like writing an animal that has its own, you know, some degree of its own intelligence and guidance, versus driving a car. But the museum explanatory text here says that the papers in front of him are thought to be possibly a work of sheet music because he was a a player of the stringed instrument, or maybe a treatise on painting because he was a painter. Also on the woodcut below the image, there are two short poems, which the museum explains touch on the themes. One of the themes is it is good to read and study, so text is good text life. And one of the other themes is it's good to have a long life. Thumbs up the longevity. And it quotes one of these poems saying, in translation quote count all the great karps Scales, read all the Master's works and grasp his nature on the long spring days. So, if you're going to make that bumper stickery, I think the message is sort of live long, read books, joy, enjoy nature.

00:37:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, or count read, grasp, but I think the whole thing it would be a long bumper sticker. It would cover the whole bumper. But I think count all the Great carp Scales read all the Master's works and grasp his nature on the long spring days. That would look pretty good. I think maybe that would calm traffic a little bit. You know, the person writing your bumper might back up and say, yeah, I should count the Great carp Scales a little more often. I'm not doing enough of that in my life.

00:37:37
Speaker 3: Also, not while you're driving, though you stop before you count the scales.

00:37:41
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:37:41
Speaker 3: Another annotation to this work is by a scholar credited here named Veronica de Jong, and this note points out the broader cultural significance of the carp in this legend and in the artwork. We've already talked about some of this. So the carp is again an auspicious animal bring success and good luck. She points out, I hadn't read this anywhere else that it's also associated with faithfulness in marriage. Kind of interesting, but you can see how that pairs with general themes of persistence over time, that you are sticking to your commitment. And then she also links it to the myth of the karp leaping the dragon gate like we talked about, and mentions that in Japan, historically the carp was not only associated with success and good personal qualities like we're talking about in the Chinese examples, but historically with samurai, which I thought was interesting. So Rob, I want to look at a couple of other artistic representations of Chingau or kin ko. The one is called the Immortal Chingau Riding a Fish. This is an anonymous ink on paper artwork from the sixteenth or early seventeenth century. Also from Japan. It's in the collection of the Princeton University Art Museum of you scroll down in the out line and see it here once again, it is a man in Taoist robes riding on a fish, and there are a few differences. Unlike the last painting where the fish was flying up into the clouds, here it is shown gliding through the water, and you can see even some representations of the bank, like there are branches of bamboo in the lower left foreground. And the material explaining this piece of art has a bit more detail on Chingao's legendary biography. So this comes from a text known as Biographies of Exemplary Immortals attributed to Lu Jiang. And I want to note that there appear to be some different versions of the legend of this guy's life which have different details, so I'm reporting what I read from this one. But the story says that Qingao lived during the Warring States period, and he at one point served as an advisor to a king, either an advisor or possibly a musical performer to the King Hung of the State of Song, and he studied under two other renowned immortals named Peng Zhu and juan Zi, and then he went wandering for two hundred years. You got to get some experience, and then finally we get to the carp. So, after the two hundred years of wandering, Chingau tells his own students, his disciples that he is going to jump into a lake. He's going to jump into this lake called Lake Juou to go looking for dragons or looking for a particular dragon. In one of the sources I was looking at that seemed a little less This one was not citing its sources, so I was a little less sure of it. But it mentioned that he was actually looking for a carp that was thought to be the son of a dragon, bringing back to what you mentioned earlier about a different legend of a carp being the son of a dragon. But in this telling, it's just says that he goes looking for dragons or for a dragon in the lake. And so he said, yeah, he goes into the water, and he gives his disciple a time and date that he's going to emerge from the lake and says that they should be there to meet him. But first they got to do some preparations. They should bathe and fast and put together a shrine or a temple at the edge of the water. So his disciples do as they are told. They wash themselves, they fast, they build the shrine, and they're there waiting, and at the appointed hour, Chingao finally pops up out of the water and he is riding on the back of a red carp. So after this, I guess this signals, okay, he has become an immortal now, and he hangs out at the shrine for a month while everybody comes to see him. The story says that thousands of people flocked from all over to come see him. The sources I was reading do not say whether he was on the carp the whole time, or whether he only came out on the carp and then dismounted. I would like to think he's on the carp the whole time. That would make him much more interesting to see, right for all the people coming from all over over. But anyway, after this month long visitation at the temple or shrine is up, he goes back back into the water, and from this point on I think he either ascends into the heavens on the carp or he rides around on the carp going to the lakes and rivers of the world.

00:42:17
Speaker 2: You know. That that that that that second idea does tie in with some things I was reading about about the carp, about how the its ability to again you know, not to not to apply too much logic to this, but the idea that a carp can travel on all the rivers and all the oceans of the world, you know, or something like that, it implies a kind of supernatural ability to travel, like and a unif you know, like a uniformality to bodies of water. You know, like you dip your finger in one body of water, you're touching a distant shore. And the carp has this kind of magic in it that it can it can travel that great distance. It's like, you know, it's you know, it's just part of its magical ability and just how in touch with the natural world it is.

00:43:04
Speaker 3: Yeah, the theme of the magical theme of the adaptability of the carb connects to the reality, the biological reality of the adaptability of the carp. And then we have these other themes that we see popping up again and again in these stories. One is longevity or long life. Again, probably some of these carp that are said to be hundreds of years old or probably not really, but you know, at least we have this cultural association with long life.

00:43:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they do live long enough that conceivably you could have people pass a carp on from one generation to the next, you know, if things panned out just right. They're just not living to be two hundred. Yeah.

00:43:42
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, they're not like they're not tetras or something. I actually I don't know how long those live, but I assume, you know, I remember having a small freshwater aquarium at my house that a lot of these fish did not live too long, though partially that could have been our fault. I don't know, I hope.

00:44:00
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, I mean this is one of the you see, this discussed a lot in the literature about particularly goldfish, is that by being such a popular species and thought of it and times thought of as being an easy species to keep, it leads to a lot of unfortunate mortality in goldfish.

00:44:17
Speaker 3: Yeah. But so, yeah, you got that theme. And then you have these themes again of perseverance, grit and courage, of faithfulness, and of success in the face of hardship, which are all wonderful things to associate with this fish. This comment very very common, very diverse family of fish. One more artwork I wanted to look at before we wrap up this section. This is an artwork called Taoist Immortal Chingau or Kinko sin in riding a carp This is a Japanese ivory sculpture. This is more recent. It's from the early twentieth century, and I just wanted to make a let's see, where did I find this? I think this was online from the Museum of Asian Art, and I just wanted to flag it because I really like how in this representation the fish is significantly less vehicle or steed designed. It's like the wise man is not riding the fish here, He's sitting in the fish. He's totally absorbed in his reading, and the fish looks like a comfy reading chair. Do you do you get the same thing.

00:45:24
Speaker 2: Out of Absolutely? I love this. This seems like exactly the sort of little icon you might have, you know, on a desk or a shelf that is inspiring you to count the scales and to read all the texts and to live along life.

00:45:39
Speaker 3: It made When I saw this, I was like, I don't want to work today, I just want to read my book.

00:45:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, just yeah, yeah, cuddle up with a good book and a large fish and waste the day away. Yeah.

00:45:53
Speaker 3: So that's all I've got on Chingao or Kinko. But I like this guy new new favorite legendary figure unlocked.

00:46:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely when it comes to figures writing fish, right, Yeah, all right, Well, we're gonna go ahead and close out this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, but we'd love to hear from everyone out there, your stories about goldfish, your stories about KOI, also just carp in general, including the eating of carp. Do you have a favorite carp recipe or is there a particular carp dish that you've greatly enjoyed at some point? All that's fair game as well, and certainly any legends works of art that we didn't touch on here write in. We would love to hear from you.

00:46:32
Speaker 3: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

00:46:54
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.