Water Deer Interaction with Humans - Culture
Evolving from hunter-gatherer ancestors, humans have an intertwined history with deer that dates back millennia. In Europe, the role deer play in human culture is well documented, with bountiful myths, legends, heraldic crests and so forth. I expect that there is a similarly rich cultural history of deer in Asia but have found the literature more difficult to access. River deer, described as being smaller and "more beautiful" than normal deer, nonetheless appear in the Chu Elegies, an anthology of Chinese poetry from the Zhou dynasty dating back to the second century AD, and, given that early farmers tended to settle near waterways, water deer were probably the most frequently encountered cervids.
In his fascinating review of the translation of Rhapsody in Black, a series of 72 Chinese poems by ground-breaking Chinese writer Jidi Majia (part of the Yi ethnic group in Sichuan province) published in Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews during 2014, Mark Bender notes that zhangzi, the water deer "often appears as shape-shifting transformative beings in Yi folklore" and images of this once-common, antler-less species apparently also appears in many contemporary Nuosu poems and traditional literature.
Water deer remains, including ornaments made from their canine teeth, are often found at archaeological sites. In 2017, for example, archaeologists excavated the recently discovered early Holocene (11,650 to 8,276 BP) site of Xiaogao, in north-east China's Shandong Province. Among many cultural remains (e.g., house remains, pottery, and ash pits) the scientists found multiple animal bones, of which Chinese water deer were the most common. In their 2023 paper to Acta Anthropologica Sinica, Yao Gao and colleagues note that water deer were one of the main animal resources used by prehistoric humans in China, occupying an important position in the prehistoric subsistence activities. Based on various attributes of the bone remains, the authors suggest that humans may have influenced the local water deer population structure by appearing to target individuals between seven and 24 months old, and that deer were mostly targeted during winter and spring, when other food resources were scarce.
In their review of deer at archaeological sites in northern China, published in Human Ecology during 2023, Katherine Brunson and Brian Lander give Hydropotes as the second mostly commonly recovered species, after sika deer (Cervus nippon), with their remains found at 41% of Neolithic (i.e., 8000-1800 BCE) and 22% of post-Neolithic sites. Remains for both sika and water deer were lower in Bronze Age sites, suggesting that the hunting of edge-living species declined during this period, although we continue to find water deer remains dating from this period both here and elsewhere.
Indeed, in his 2014 Ph.D. thesis for University College London, for example, Ying Zhang described water deer among the remains from late Neolithic deposits of the Lower Yangtze River region at a site in Tianluoshan that dates back 4,900 to 4,000 years BP. Likewise, in a paper to Jianghan Archaeology during the same year, Bowen Yuan and his team described dental remains of water deer, as well as hook-shaped objects made from them, buried in tombs of Dawenkou people, who lived in coastal China during the Neolithic. The hook-shaped objects were typically found in tombs of adults, the upper-middle class of society who may have served as the host of ceremonies and rituals. Many tooth remains were clearly unprocessed and held in hands of the tomb occupant. The authors suggest that the tooth remains were related to tooth ablation (i.e., the ritual removal of teeth by prehistoric cultures) influenced by the Peiligang but also practised by the Dawenkou culture. Furthermore, in their 2020 paper to the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, Yue Li and colleagues reported the recovery of water deer remains from an archaeological site at Zaoshugounao in present-day Shaanxi in northwest China, associated with predynastic Zhou, dating back to about 1040 BCE, suggesting that their association with humans persisted well after the Neolithic.
Hunting game was an important element of early Chinese cultures, as it was in Europe, and The Book of Rites describes some of the elaborate rituals associated with hunting deer during the Zhou Dynasty. Brunson and Lander describe how, in general, deer were symbols of wild natural forces that needed to be tamed, and the large-scale hunts by the Shang rulers not only saw to this, but also conveniently cleared the landscape of animals that might damage crops and helped train participants for war.
Card #109 of the Wildlife Fact File series, published in 1990, which covered Hydropotes, mentions that the species was thought to have magical powers in China owing to the ease with which they disappear into cover and remain out of sight. I've also seen some anecdotal suggestion that the water deer was often associated with good fortune, longevity, and spirituality in some Chinese folklore, although there is often confusion about the precise species being referred to in the translations, and I suspect much of this actually relates to the Père David's deer, or mílù (Elaphurus davidianus). I have found virtually nothing with regards to Korean folklore, and South Korean naturalist Junha Kima told me, in December 2024, that "water deer do not appear in Korean myths or folktales that have been preserved so far", going on to mention that a lot of the early literature does not distinguish between water deer and other species, such as roe or sika. The A-Z-Animals website mentions, however, that it was once forbidden to hunt 고라니 (gorani, a Korean name for water deer) in (South?) Korea because the bite was considered fatal. The site doesn't provide a reference for this statement and I've been unable to find anything to corroborate it. I can't help wondering whether that a mistranslation of verminous (i.e., a pest) to venomous lies at the root of it.
Deer are well established in British heraldry, but at the time of writing I don't know how commonly they appear on Chinese or Korean family crests. Having reviewed Kenneth Whitehead's comprehensive section on the subject in his Encyclopaedia of Deer, I found none with obviously tusked deer, but there was a strong European bias in the data. In 2022, YouTube user Zed Dez recounted a story to me that he heard from his grandmother, Chung Rose, about how the Icheon Seo clan came to appreciate river deer, swearing never to hunt them and including them on their family crest, after his ancestors were saved from a rockslide by some:
"It's an old Korean story from back in the times of family clans waging war with each other for land. Our family was sending an army into battle, but along the way they would have to march along a cliffside path. Along the path they found an entire herd of water deer and were forced to stop and move them. This took time because Korean deer can be...grumpy, and they refused to budge. Before the army could move on there was a rock slide just beyond the deer; the soldiers realized that if the deer weren't blocking the path many of them would have been crushed or fallen off the edge. This would have also left the village unprotected in a time of war."
I would love to hear from readers with similar family legends, or who are familiar with water deer in Chinese or Korean folklore. Online there is plenty of reference to deer appearing on charms in Chinese culture, and I have seen 18th century Chinese pottery from the Qing dynasty depicting a deer that could easily be Hydropotes, but again I would like to hear from readers with other specific examples.
I know of no specific introgression of Chinese water deer into British culture beyond the use of their simulacrum to sell an alcoholic drink. Showerings Ltd. are, to the best of my knowledge, the only English brewery to have owned water deer, the family having purchased three from the Duke of Bedfordshire in 1961 and kept on their site at Shepton Mallet in Somerset. According to Frederick Hingston in his 1988 book Deer Parks and Deer of Great Britain, the herd was tended to by one of the factory workers in an enclosure of about one-third of a hectare (0.8 acres). According to the company's website, at its peak, 24 animals were at the site. The water deer were reputedly used as the foundation for a cartoon mascot, designed by advertising agency Masius Wynne-William, that appeared in the advertising campaign for Showerings' sparkling perry Babycham during the 1970s. According to an article in Daily Telegraph on 7th September 1995:
"A Chinese water deer called the Babycham was depicted in advertisements as a prancing cartoon character, similar to Walt Disney's Bambi. It was believed the animal appealed to women."
Curiously, the Babycham caricature is much more akin to a small antelope than a deer, sporting what appear to be horns. Unfortunately, Showerings were unable to provide me with any details of the animals' time on site, or what happened to the population.