Goldfish — pets, food, medicine

Press, 26 July 1980, Page 16

Goldfish — pets, food, medicine

The tame goldfish swimming- contentedly round your, indoor bowl, or in the garden pool, have a remarkable story. In spite of their present inflated prices, goldfish are farhil-. iar throughout the- civilised world.

Trading in goldfish is nothing new, and their value as domestic creatures has been known to men for a great many centuries.

Originally, goldfish were found living wild only in China, and for many hundreds of years they were never seen, wild or tame, west of Tibet.

A great many mythological stories exist about the earliest known goldfish. That they were originally confined only to the secluded lake near a great mountain called Ch’ien’ing; that the first goldfish suddenly appeared leaping up out of a well at the

end of a long drought when special sacrifices were being made to beseech the. gods to grant rain; that they were found only- in sacred pools,; and so forth.

: However, all the evidence goes to show that goldfish, as we know them today, were common creatures in the lakes and ponds of central China long before the Western world was civilised. It- was the Chinese who first domesticated “the fish with the red scales,” as they called them. In their T’ang dynasty, which ended in 907 A.D., they made pets of numbers of fish. This is not so re-

markable as it seems, for these Ancient Chinese were the inventors of the modern zoo.

Their interest in keeping wild creatures in . captivity — in their gardens, or “parks of intelligence,” as they called them — was very great, and as these gardens were designed to have numerous pools, ■many kinds of fish were kept and studied. By 960 A.D., in the even more advanced Sung dynasty, pet goldfish were common, and what we know now as goldfish ponds were familiar sights to mandarins and peasants alike. Once wild fish were firmly established in

domestic waters, the people began to start breeding them, and very soon the learned Chinese were writing and discoursing on such technical subjects as colour changes, breeding habits, and diseases of their fish. All this before the Battle of Hastings, by the way. “If goldfish eat the re-

By

DAVID GUNSTON

fuse of olives or soapy water then they die; if they have poplar bark they do not breed lice," wrote a monk who died in the year 999.

Slowly but surely the goldfish invaded the' world. Wherever it was introduced, people were fascinated by the bright colours and the ease with which a goldfish could be kept, and bred indoors and outdoors. The little fish spread to the East Indies, to India, Persia, and Arabia. They

were not only kept to admire, they were known and appreciated as food, and also for medicinal purposes. One Chinese medical authority advised

the use of a small cooked goldfish prepared with plenty of pepper and an onion in salt sauce, as a cure for dysentry. Even the smell, or a taste of the gravy, was said to effect a cure. About this time fancy breeds were beginning to appear. The comets, fantails, shubunkins. dragons, meteors, and the rest, which delight specialists today, were originated by Japanese and Chinese breeders.

The year 1691 saw the first goldfish in England, mostly odd specimens brought in by sailors and merchants, but by the

middle of the eighteenth century, pet fish were becoming familiar. By 1730, the keeping of various kinds of goldfish was a hobby of landowners, who stocked their ponds with specimens bought from traders from the east. Horace Walpole, about whose famous cat Selima, Thomas Grey wrote an elegy after it had been drowned in a “tub of goldfishes,” gave many away to his friends. “They breed with me excessively, and are grown to the size of a small perch,” he wrote to a friend.