WHITE ELEPHANTS

Waipa Post, Volume 32, Issue 1779, 6 July 1926, Page 7

WHITE ELEPHANTS

OBJECTS OF VENERATION. A white elephant is expected at the London zoo this year. These albinos of the Asiatic elephant have always held an extraordinarily important place in the court and religious life of Siam, a s they once did in Burma, says a naturalist in the Daily Mail. They are considered tto be incarnations of Buddha and must be honoured as such. Like treasure-trove in England, they are the property of the Crown, and a find must be promptly reported and delivered. Hence a white elephant, in our saying, is an annoying incubus. You can’t give it away; you are responsible for it. But the Early Victorian' military men who launched this report were under a misapprehension. If you deliver a white elephant in Siam you are mentioned in the honours list, you get a rebate on your taxation, and you used to get as much silver money as you could push across a table with your little finger.

They tell a story in the clubs of the Far East of an enterprising Chinaman who, having found a baby white elephant, barricaded it for weeks in a cave while he trained his little finger for a colossal push. When he delivered his find and shoved along about half a hundred weight of silver the revenue official had a brilliant idea. “Wonderful, my dear fellowwonderful! I’ve never seen such a feat!” he said, or words to that effect. “But it is (the little finger of the other hand that you have to push with.” The captor, repressing with true Oriental phlegm the -triumph he must have felt, shoved the heavy mass back across the table with his other, equally hard trained, finger. \ou have to get up ef.rly to catch a Chinese napping.

When a white elephant reaches Bangkok priests deck it with silver braid and carry a canopy over it to ward off the blazing sunshine. For three .evenings prayers are chanted to it and choirs come and hymn its praises. Delicious bisciuts, -the tenderest herbs and grasses, the most succulent sugar canes to its daily lot. Even the purest of spring water is not good enough for these sacred animals; sweet scented flowers are strewn over it before it is passed to them by members of a special branch of ithe priesthood, the tenders of the sacred elephants. And when the white elephant’s days are over elaborate services accompany its funeral. The white elephant is the most venerated animal in the world.