In 1414, the Yongle Emperor of Ming China looked at a giraffe brought back from Malindi by Zheng He's treasure fleet and declared it a qilin, a legendary creature of ancient myth. This episode unpacks how that happened, starting with the earliest references in the Classic of Poetry, the claim that Confucius identified a captured qilin in 481 BCE, and the Warring States naming convention that combined qi for the male and lin for the female.

The conversation describes the qilin as a chimera with a dragon head, antlers, thick eyelashes, an upward-flowing mane, scales, a hooved body, and sacred flames, a benevolent beast that appears only for great sages and virtuous rulers and steps so lightly it will not crush grass. It explores linguist Juha Janhunen's theory linking the word to a steppe root meaning whale or mammoth, the confirmation bias b ...