In Chinese literature, the rhododendron gains its red color from the cuckoo. But if we look at the real world, we can find other connections too.
Whether the rhododendron really got its Chinese name of "cuckoo flower" from the song of the cuckoo is somewhat debatable. But that the rhododendron flowers just when the cuckoo arrives is an undisputed fact. To use ornithologists' phraseology, most cuckoo species are migratory, and fly south to avoid the cold of winter. When the weather turns warm again, the cuckoos move back northwards, following the sun and the availability of food. In the northern hemisphere in spring, birdwatchers, who "call the birds on the branches their friends," and farmers in their fields at their plowing, can all hear the cuckoo sing.
Flowers and birdsong all around
In Europe, when people hear the song of the cuckoo they throw open their windows and look outside, knowing that the snowy cold of winter has passed and spring has come. On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring by the English composer Frederick Delius, who loved rural scenery and has been described as a "keen observer of nature," is a tune well known to all young lovers of classical music, even here on the tropical isle of Taiwan.
The song of the first cuckoo in spring is a sound also heard on the continent of Asia. The cool days of March are a time when in mainland China, which has over 500 native rhododendron species, "a thousand mountains resound to the cuckoo's call" as the cuckoo flowers are joined by the birds which gave them their name. Thus the great Tang poet Li Bai (701-762) was reminded that this was the time when cuckoos were singing and rhododendrons blooming far away in Bajun in Sichuan, where he grew up.
Yang Wanli (1127-1206), one of the Four Great Poets of the Southern Song dynasty, who saw rhododendrons flowering by the wayside in Jiangxi Province, believed it was pure coincidence that they flowered at the same time as the cuckoo sang. In the south, Liu Guan (1270-1342) of the Yuan dynasty wrote in his Hearing the Cuckoo: "In myriad thickets south of the Yangtze grows a flower named the cuckoo./ It blossoms when the bird arrives, and farmers tell each other to plant their spring fields. . . ."
Even further south, on the island of Taiwan, when the flowering season begins of the many native rhododendrons on Mt. Ali and Yangmingshan, sharp-eared bird-watchers also hear the voice of the cuckoo among the mountains. A bird guide published by Yangmingshan National Park clearly marks the areas within the park to which the oriental cuckoo (Cuculus satur-atus) and the lesser coucal (Centropus bengal-ensis-another cuckoo family species) return each year. People going up into Yang-mingshan to enjoy the flowers should not fail to make the best of this information so thoughtfully provided by the park management and listen out for the cuckoo's song, or take a pair of binoculars and try to spot the birds themselves.
Cuckoos do not begin to fly south until July, but rhododendrons also flower until July or August. The children's song goes: "The Spirit of Spring is here, the plum flower and the oriole announce his coming." But in areas where both rhododendrons and cuckoos are found, they too are a pair of heralds of spring.
When spring comes, all the earth becomes restless and the mountain valleys are busy with activity as the breeding season gets under way. All kinds of flowers blossom and all kinds of birds sing. Surely someone would have to be especially alert to notice that the cuckoo flower's flowering season matches the sojourn of the cuckoo?
Du Yu's lament
Evidently the close connection between the rhododendron and the cuckoo is based on more than just the fact that they appear in the same season.
Recently art professor Chiang Hsun was reminded by the flowering of Taiwan's rhododendrons of an ancient legend about the cuckoo. He vividly and romantically recounted how the Sichuanese monarch Wang Di ("Emperor Hope") turned into a cuckoo and bled to death crying mournfully, and how his body was buried by falling rhododendron petals. This gave rise to the story of the cuckoo flower.
Comparing this legend with historical records, Shu Wang Benji (Biographies of the Kings of Shu) describes how in the late Zhou dynasty, when China was divided into seven kingdoms all acknowledging the supremacy of the state of Zhou, in the neighboring land of Shu (modern Sichuan) Du Yu proclaimed himself emperor, with the title Wang Di. Wang Di commanded his prime minister Bie Ling to bring the flood waters under control, and-like previous kings-abdicated his throne to Bie Ling, to himself become a hermit. When he died his soul turned into a cuckoo, which always appeared in late spring, calling "Better go back!" (bu ru gui qu). Hence the cuckoo is also known as Du Yu.
Why did Emperor Wang Di keep reappearing after his death, as if he had unfinished business on his mind? Myths and legends are not constrained by logic, and today all we know is that as the story was passed down through the dynasties it was embellished bit by bit, for anyone with a fertile imagination can add color to a fairy tale. In the end, we see the cuckoo in late spring crying out "Better go back!" and rhythmically singing its broken-hearted song, until finally its dripping blood stains the rhododendron flowers red.
In an essay about rhododendrons, author Chang Hsiao-feng wrote that she fell in love with them mainly out of love for this legend about the cuckoo. Every time she looked at rhododendrons she would think of this story. In her view, the finest things will always be "married" to legend.
But if the cuckoo singing in spring is a "good thing," one cannot help wondering why it should be associated with such a melancholy legend, instead of being greeted as ushering in the new season like the plum blossom and the oriole.
This may have something to do with the cuckoo's real-life natural history. The saying goes that "all birds have their singing hour, but the cuckoo never stops." Other birds grow tired and rest, but the cuckoo doesn't sleep. It just carries on singing night and day. The cuckoo is a "full-time" chirper, so in the small hours of a cool spring night, when all the mountains are quiet, it may still be heard singing alone to the moon, in a desolate voice which makes travelers think of returning home.
Cuckoos weeping blood?
The cuckoo is also a loner. Its range stretches from the plains right up to the high mountain forests and grasslands. After its breeding season is over, in June or July the migratory cuckoo flies south. For humans, who stay in one place, the way the cuckoo's song suddenly falls silent in July and just as suddenly starts up again the next March gives rise to all kinds of imaginings. Taiwanese birdwatchers have also noticed that Taiwan's lesser coucals especially love to stay around graveyards. It is not hard to imagine how the eerie sound of a cuckoo calling at night amid the graves led people to feel that its song could not be a good omen.
In Song of the Pipa, poet Bai Juyi (772-846), expresses his deep memories of the cuckoo weeping like a wandering ghost. This disgruntled sub-prefect of Jiangzhou, whose "tears wet his gown," asks himself just what it was he used to hear at dawn and at dusk around Penjiang in Jiangxi? "The song of the cuckoo, its mouth dripping blood, and the doleful calls of the monkeys."
But why the belief that the cuckoo's mouth drips blood as it sings? Does it really, as said in the Erya, one of China's earliest dictionaries, "cry through the night until dawn, its blood spattering the grass and trees?" Unlike poetry, the calmer and more scientific observations recorded in travelogues and herbal compendia point out that in fact it is the cuckoo's red mouth which gave rise to the mistaken beliefs or poetic allusions about it dripping blood.
Liang Chieh-te, who has conducted bird surveys for the Academia Sinica's Institute of Zoology, was once passing by a field in Changhua County when he saw a cuckoo caught in a net trap and went to release it. When the bird opened its beak, he saw that the inside of its mouth was a color "like the fiery red of the setting sun." Even today, many years later, Liang clearly remembers the bright, blood-red color.
In fact, most bird species have red mouths when young. When they sit in the nest with their greedy beaks wide open, the bright red gives their mothers an easy target when returning to drop food into their gullets. However, as birds grow up, their mouths naturally turn a paler flesh red. But the cuckoo's mouth does not change color in this way. This peculiarity baffles today's scientists, but it has also fueled human imaginations for thousands of years.
A fearful song to hear
For writers from the Tang dynasty through the Song, the Yuan, the Ming and the Qing, and right down to the republican era, the cuckoo has been a byword for sorrow. Whether the anguish of the collapse of a nation, the pain and fear of illness, grief for the departed, nostalgia for distant friends, or the commiseration of shared adversity, in the end they are all sure to be compared with the cuckoo singing out its sorrow.
When Du Fu (712-770)-who was called "the god of feelings" by early-republican writer Liang Qichao (1873-1929), as the poet most able to describe the gamut of human emotions-heard the cuckoo, he too wondered why this bird should choose to sing in the third and fourth lunar months, in a voice so sorrowful that blood flowed from its mouth. But national hero Wen Tianxiang (1236-1283), who was unable to stave off the destruction of the Southern Song dynasty, hoped that he himself would turn into a cuckoo, so that even though drenched in blood he might fly out of his captivity and back to his native place. Even astrologers put their oar in, claiming that "to hear the first song of the cuckoo is an omen of unhappy departure." No wonder some have wished the cuckoo could be silent, saying that the blood which flows from its beak does no good, so it would be better if it kept it shut for the rest of the spring.
For people in the grip of sadness, the cuckoo's continuous cry is more melancholy than any flute or zither. This also rubs off on the rhododendron, which has been gratuitously lumped together with the cuckoo. Literary polymath Lin Yutang (1895-1976) called the rhododendron a desolate flower, steeped in the cuckoo's blood. Paintings in the Chinese bird-and-flower tradition include even such subjects as the medicinal berries of the Chinese matrimony-vine (Lycium chinense). Yet despite the fact that the rhododendrons form China's largest genus of flowering plants, not a single painting of a rhododendron appears in the 15 weighty volumes of Calligraphy and Paintings of the National Palace Museum. It seems the cuckoo flower is just too inauspicious.
The sorrows of Shu
But if we were to say this is all because of a legend, or the cuckoo's own nature, we would not be telling the whole story.
As well as the legend of Emperor Wang Di being Sichuanese in origin, the emotions of poets who refer to the cuckoo are also often aroused by a visit to Sichuan, and one might even be fooled into thinking the cuckoo was only found in that province. Compared with cities such as Chang'an (now Xi'an), Luoyang and Beijing, which have all been capitals for long periods, Sichuan is a distant, remote place with rugged terrain which makes it difficult of access. In ancient times it was a separate country, and from the Han dynasty onwards it became one of the main places to which Chinese emperors banished "dissidents."
For literati, travelers and merchants throughout the ages, Sichuan was a sorrowful place. Many great poets such as Du Fu and Su Shi (1037-1101) were at one time or another demoted or exiled to Sichuan, or fled there. Leaving behind the central plains, they entered Sichuan on paths which were narrow and winding, difficult and dangerous. When, far from home, they heard the cuckoo sing, the legend of the Emperor of Shu turning into a cuckoo drifted into their memories. The rigors of a journey in Sichuan were enough to make the normally robust Li Bai write, "Again the cuckoo sings to the night moon, bringing melancholy to the empty mountains," and lament that "The roads of Shu are difficult."
In 756, during the An Shi Rebellion, the Tang emperor Xuanzong's favorite concubine Yang Yuhuan (Yang Gui Fei) was done to death below Mawei Hill, and Xuanzong fled into Sichuan. The rebel armies were far away, but at dusk under a sullen, overcast sky, the sound of the cuckoo's song of blood redoubled the heartbroken emperor's grief. In the novel The Palace of Eternal Youth, in which the early-Qing writer Hong Sheng (1645-1704) tells the story of Yang and Xuan-zong, the cuckoo appears many times.
The difficult roads of Shu and the particular mood of people driven far from home made those entering Sichuan especially sensitive to the song of the cuckoo, which amplified their melancholy. The compilers of the mainland Chinese Reference and Appreciation Dictionary of Ancient Chinese Landscape Poetry even write that only people who have been to Sichuan know what the cuckoo's song is.
Their grief is not of the cuckoo's making
Having read too many stories about "Sichuan cuckoos," one person wrote in disgust: "They are found everywhere-why does it have to be Sichuan?" For example, the mainland Chinese Zhejiang Fauna lists eleven cuckoo species in Zhejiang Province alone. But lacking the disconsolate mood and the eulogizing of the literati, this "land of fish and rice" could not become the source of cuckoo literature.
In fact, from a literary perspective, after people of former times had built up such a rich literary tradition around the cuckoo, perhaps the biggest challenge became how to write something even more brilliant about the bird. From that point on, where the literary allusions came from, or whether one had really heard the cuckoo sing, seems to have been less important.
In The Dream of the Red Chamber, when Lin Daiyu holds a funeral for the flowers, as she buries them she laments at how throughout the year the wind's saber and the frost's sword keep up a merciless onslaught, so how long can the bright beauty and fresh splendor of the flowers last? Thinking of how the souls of flowers and birds are doomed to depart, she says: "When the cuckoo falls silent it is the dusk." Just for the cuckoo not to sing was enough to depress this mourner.
At the youthful age of 27, the late-Qing scholar of Chinese culture Wang Guowei (1877-1927), seeing literature full of people sobbing and birds wailing, did not eulogize the cuckoo, but satirized it: "Cuckoo! Oh Cuckoo! Every year, everywhere, you weep out your blood, but how many people can you persuade to go back? They are used to living far from home. What business is it of yours whether they go back?" Such mocking lines are surely unique in cuckoo poetry.
Wept enough! Belly-ah!
That the cuckoo came to be seen as a bird of sorrow probably first stemmed from its real habits in nature. But the human world, after all, gains its significance from human existence, so naturally in literary allusions how the cuckoo sings its sad song, and why, have become divorced from the cuckoo's real behavior.
In The Cuckoo, by early-republican poet Xu Zhimo (1896-1931) the bird "speaks" thus:
"The cuckoo, sentimental bird, it sings all night;
. . .
It sings, it sings "Cut wheat, plant rice"
Startling farmers from their sleep at dawn.
. . .
It sings, mouth full of fresh blood, drop by drop
Staining the dew-speckled grass tips and dawn light,
Gently rocking the garden's dream;
It calls, it calls out "I love Elder Brother!"
Why does the cuckoo "sing all night"? And what does it sing? Surely the song the sorry bird of Shu has sung ceaselessly for a thousand years is "Better go back" (bu ru gui qu), and "Quick, quick, sow grain" (kuai kuai bu gu)? How could it now be "Cut wheat, plant rice" (ge mai cha he) and "I love Elder Brother" (wo ai gege)?
According to one birdwatcher's observations, the cuckoo really does sing at different times from other birds, and its voice can be heard throughout the day. But it does not spend all its time sobbing like a character in a cheap melodrama. Cuckoo, weep no more? Ornithologist Dr. Sun Yuan-hsun says that in fact it is cuckoos which have failed to find a mate in the daytime that have to make a special effort and do overtime at night. As night falls over the mountains the lonely cuckoo is left singing alone, so of course its song is a bitter one!
But just what does the cuckoo's song say? Modern ornithology defines the cuckoos (Cuculidae) as a family of around 130 species which are found almost everywhere except at the two poles-their song can be heard all over Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. In this huge family, not only does each species have a different language, even cuckoos of the same species may sing different songs. Populations in different areas each have their own "mother tongue," so to solve this ancient mystery is not so easy.
Have you seen the true Buddha?
Never mind that to most people's ears the cuckoo's song seems none too "uniform"-even the versions expert ornithologists hear are often poles apart. One field guide to the wild birds of Taiwan describes the song of the large hawk cuckoo (Cuculus spar-ver-io-i-des) as a hurried "Wept enough! Wept enough!" (ku gou le), with a rising intonation at the end. Heard at night, this shrill sound is melancholy in the extreme. But another guide interprets its song as "Oo-oh! Belly-ah! Belly-ah!" (wu'ou, dupi ya, dupi ya) like a ravenous bird busily searching all around for something to fill its empty craw.
When we look at the analysis made by Japanese ornithologist Seinosuke Uchida from tape recordings of the cuckoo's song, we are surprised to discover that in Japanese, the words the cuckoo keeps repeating so assiduously are: "Have you been to the highest place? Have you seen the True Form [of the Buddha]?" (tepen kaketa ka; honzon tateta ka).
Thus it seems that people everywhere merely project their own words and desires onto the intonation of the cuckoo's song. So it is nothing remarkable if in China it is heard as "Sow grain" or "Better go back."
In India, people think the song of the lesser coucal, which is also found in Taiwan, sounds like "Where is my love?" in Sanskrit-which seems a better guess at the cuckoo's real intentions. When the lesser coucal serenades its sweetheart in the middle of the night like a half-crazed, guitar-toting lover boy, people in the West give it another name: the "brain-fever bird"! And perhaps because the cuckoo keeps up its mating call for so long that it seems completely addle-headed, in English its name is also used to describe someone as crazy.
The cuckoos took up their perch rather early on the avian branch of the evolutionary tree, and their song is not as varied or agreeable as that of the oriole, the skylark or other birds which, in Bai Juyi's words, "warble glibly beneath the flowers." But to the ears of humans, who do not understand birds' language, the cuckoos' repetitive song is actually easier to recognize and to imitate-a fact to which countless cuckoo clocks bear hourly testimony. The cuckoo's call is also used by many peoples as the basis of its name. For instance, in mainland China the short-winged cuckoo (Cuculus micropterus) is also known as "better off single" (guang gun hao guo) and as "quick, quick, cut wheat" (kuai kuai ge mai), while the koel (Eu-dyn-a-mys scolopacea) is also called the "good song (ge hao) sparrow."
Some members of a subfamily of the cuckoos, the Cuculinae, are always telling Chinese farmers to "Sow grain! Sow grain!" (bu gu). Modern taxonomy divides them into the European cuckoo (Cuculus canorus) and the oriental cuckoo (Cuculus saturatus), which in Taiwan is also known as the "bamboo bird," because its song "Bu-bu! Bu-bu!" is like the sound made by blowing into a length of bamboo stem.
Apart from singing in the spring plowing season, in the age before chemical pesticides the cuckoos also helped farmers by eating beetles, locusts and moths. This made them an even better candidate as the bird to urge farmers to plant their fields.
A scruffy bird
When Bai Juyi, who grew rhododendrons in his courtyard, saw how people were always going on about the cuckoo, he spoke up in the bird's defense, saying that it was only because people had too many of their own troubles that they imagined the cuckoo wept with overwhelming sadness. He also made a statement echoed by conservationists today: these mountain birds did not exist for the sake of humans.
Over the centuries there have been writers who looked at the cuckoo on its own terms, simply as a bird. Bao Zhao (c.414-466) of the Southern Dynasties state of Song, writes of the cuckoo: "Its plumage is ragged like the shorn head of a convict; it flies among the trees and pecks up insects and ants." The Ming-dynasty Compendium of Materia Medica describes the cuckoo thus: "Shaped like a harrier, grey in color, red mouth." But the most unflattering description must be this one "Clothed all over in shabby black feathers"-in other words, no beauty, and not much better than a crow. So not only was the cuckoo's song considered inferior to that of orioles and swallows, after singing its doleful plaint for a thousand years, its appearance was also scruffy, and no match in beauty for the glossy, brightly colored plumage of the Muller's barbet, kingfisher or black-naped oriole.
However, what the ancients were describing were probably a few individual cuckoo species. Modern bird guides describe the cuckoo as having a body shaped like a pigeon's but longer and less plump, or like a small goshawk, with stripes across most of its chest, belly and tail. Although most cuckoo species are more or less similar in shape, they do differ in color, and some also have different winter and summer plumages. For instance, in summer the lesser coucal, which can often be seen in Taiwan, is brownish black all over its body, but its wings are chest-nut red, as if it were wearing a brightly colored shawl. Bird painter Ho Hua-jen describes it as having "chestnut wings with a metallic sheen." This cuckoo, at least, is not so bad looking after all.
Where is the cuckoo's nest?
Something that has long aroused people's curiosity about the cuckoo is its parasitic reproductive habits. The hens of many cuckoo species wriggle out of their maternal duties by laying their eggs in other birds' nests, to be reared by the other species. Every cuckoo that entrusts its eggs to other birds in this way chooses a particular species as foster parents, and lays eggs which closely mimic those of the foster mother.
With so many other birds rearing the cuckoo's offspring for it, it is as if they were treating the cuckoo as their king. Du Fu, the "king of poets," believed this must be why Emperor Wang Di turned into a cuckoo. Thus whenever Du Fu saw a cuckoo, he would bow to it as if greeting a monarch.
In the West, the cuckoo has also been used as a vehicle for advising kings. In Shakespeare's King Lear, Lear's fool warns him to beware his daughter Goneril, for "The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long,/ That it's had it head bit off by it young."
Whether the cuckoo really treats its "wet-nurse" so badly is rather doubtful. But Eric Simms' A History of British Birds describes how the hen cuckoo carefully prospects her territory for nests in which to lay an egg. Having chosen one, she first picks up one of the foster mother's eggs in her beak while she lays one of her own, then flies away and eats the stolen egg at her leisure. The mainland Chinese Compendium of Chinese Fauna also notes that the chicks of the azure-winged magpie (Cyano-pica cyana) which lives in the Yangtze River basin, often fall to their deaths when they are pushed out of the nest by young short-winged cuckoos.
That being so, surely ornithologists who know the truth of the cuckoo's ways can hardly imagine that the cuckoo sings such a sad song because of a tragic fate.
Chen Chia-shen, who has had countless opportunities to hear birdsong during the many years he has spent photographing birds in Taiwan and on mainland China's Tibetan plateau, quite simply describes the cuckoo's song as "monotonous."
Flowers are easier to see than birds
However many meanings the cuckoo's song takes on in human ears, the discarded officials of fallen nations who in ancient times stood idle on bridges over streams, their sleeves covered in poplar catkins and their ears full of the cuckoo's song, had flowers, but were in no mood to enjoy them, and they had birdsong, but were in no mood to listen to it. Instead, these things only made them even more downcast. But people today can't get enough of them, for in today's cities birds are hardly seen, and many people who have grown sick of the city long to "banish" themselves and get out for a while. Their feelings are quite different from those of the frustrated exiles of past ages-they are not burdened with sorrows, they don't have to worry where their next meal is coming from, and transport is also easy. As they rush all over the countryside, surely their first reaction when they hear the song of the cuckoo is one of joy. All the more so if they are dedicated birdwatchers, for cuckoos are not easy to catch a glimpse of, and if they think they have the chance to see one they will not let the opportunity slip, but will wait patiently for the birds to appear. The ancients may have felt that "If only Du Yu were not in the mountains, roaming among the scenery we would forget to go home"; but bird lovers today all over the world would surely want to change this to: "If only Du Yu is in the mountains, roaming among the scenery we will forget to go home."
p.98
Are the green mountains turned red by the song of the cuckoo? When the European cuckoo opens its blood-red mouth to sing, does it weep into the wind? (photographed by Chen Chia-sheng in Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai Province)
(opposite): The "bloodstained" petals of rhododendron flowers. Botanists call this speckled pattern the "landing strip," because it attracts insects to land and collect nectar. (photo by Vincent Chang)
p.100
In the eyes of dissidents or the ministers of fallen dynasties in distant exile, the lonely cuckoo seemed to share their sad fate. The oriental cuckoo's oft-repeated cry of "bu-bu! bu-bu!" seemed to be urging them, "Better go back!" (photo by Kuo Chih-yung)
p.101
An oriental cuckoo's egg in the nest of a strong-footed bush warbler (Cettia fortipes). It closely resembles the eggs of the host. Does the bush warbler's call "You-go back, go back, go back, no-go back" express the anguish caused by this uninvited guest? (photo by Wu Sen-hsiung)
p.102
Seven cuckoo species have been recorded in Taiwan, but only the lesser coucal is a resident bird which stays all year round. However, it only sings its distinctive repetitive song in spring and summer. It differs from many other cuckoos in that it still builds its own nest and rears its own young, so people really can see this one "fly over the cuckoo's nest." (photo by Chen Chia-sheng)
p.105
The large hawk cuckoo takes advantage of its similarity with a raptor to frighten host species from their nest, in which it then quickly lays one of its own eggs. (photo by Wu Sen-hsiung)
The large hawk cuckoo takes advantage of its similarity with a raptor to frighten host species from their nest, in which it then quickly lays one of its own eggs. （photo by Wu Sen-hsiung）
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