Why Your Chinese Dictionary Is Wrong About Baboons (And What It Says About History)

Here’s a linguistic mystery that will make you rethink everything you thought you knew about animal names: In Chinese, most monkeys have the character 猴 (hóu) in their name. Gibbons? 长臂猴. Macaques? 猕猴. But then there’s the baboon—狒狒 (fèi fèi). The mandrill—山魈 (shān xiāo). The gelada—狮尾狒. Not a single 猴 in sight. Why? The answer isn’t biology. It’s a 150-year-old translation war, a forgotten Japanese scholar, and a Chinese encyclopedia editor who picked names based on folklore.

The naming of animals is never about the animals—it’s always about us. When we call a baboon 狒狒, we’re not describing its DNA. We’re telling the story of a 19th-century scramble to map ancient Chinese myths onto Western science. And it’s a story full of missteps, cultural biases, and one very stubborn monster.

Let’s start with the monster. 狒狒 wasn’t always a baboon. In ancient Chinese texts, the 狒狒 was a man-eating, laughing creature with a long lip that covered its eyes when it smiled. It was the villain of the animal kingdom. Meanwhile, 猩猩 (xīng xīng) was the gentle giant who loved wine and could almost talk. This was the folklore that Li Shizhen codified in the Compendium of Materia Medica (1596). Fast forward to 1823, when Scottish missionary Robert Morrison published his Chinese-English Dictionary. He matched 猩猩 with “orangutan”—the Malay “forest person.” 狒狒? He left it untranslated, just a generic monkey.

But Morrison’s sons disagreed. When they edited his posthumous Foreign History in the 1840s, they swapped 猩猩 for 狒狒 as the translation for “orangutan.” This created a mess. Chinese intellectuals reading Wei Yuan’s Illustrated Treatise on the Maritime Kingdoms (1852) adopted the 狒狒 version. Meanwhile, Japanese scholars were watching. Enter Tanaka Yoshio, a Meiji-era bureaucrat building Japan’s natural history lexicon. In 1872, he faced a choice: should “orangutan” be 狒狒 or 猩猩? He chose 猩猩, based on Morrison’s original dictionary. 狒狒 was now homeless. Tanaka looked at the aggressive, terrestrial African baboons that Europeans had brought back from colonies—and slapped the leftover monster name on them. One dictionary entry, one bureaucratic decision, and the baboon became a mythical cannibal.

The story gets weirder. For the mandrill—a colorful, huge monkey—Tanaka’s team simply used the Japanese pronunciation mandoriru, no Chinese characters. But when Du Yaquan, a Shanghai-based editor, compiled the influential Zoological Dictionary in 1923, he had to find a name. Du was from Zhejiang, where 山魈—a one-legged, red-hatted goblin from local folklore—was a household word. He thought: “Mandrill looks like a goblin. Let’s call it 山魈.” And he named the chacma baboon 山都 (shān dū), another ancient monster. That’s right: the mandrill’s Chinese name literally means “mountain goblin.” Du’s dictionary became the standard for Chinese scientific terminology. The names stuck. Even today, when you see a baboon in a Chinese zoo, you’re looking at a 2,000-year-old folktale dressed in a scientific name.

This isn’t trivia. It’s a lesson in how power works. The Japanese Meiji state controlled the naming of nature, and China imported those names. 狒狒 isn’t wrong—it’s colonial. And the next time you hear someone say “science is objective,” remember: we call a baboon a monster because a Scottish missionary, a Japanese bureaucrat, and a Chinese folklorist happened to read the same book.