(from The White Elephant of Attapeu)
By the late 19th century, nearly a dozen missionaries, statesmen, and explorers had described the shimmering gold-chained pomp and scarlet-draped glamour of Burma and Siam’s royal white elephants. Looking for a way to profit from the western world’s newfound fascination with these sacred beasts, in the early 1880s, famed circus proprietor Phineas Taylor Barnum sent his agent J. B. Gaylord to Southeast Asia to purchase a white elephant for “The Greatest Show on Earth.” While Gaylord was met with indignant refusal from the court of Siam, in 1883, he found a Siamese nobleman willing to part with his white elephant for one hundred thousand dollars (over two million dollars today). The elephant was smuggled through Burma, but when on the point of being shipped to Singapore, it and its mahout were “poisoned on the eve of departure by its attendant priests rather than that it should fall into the hands of profane Christians.” *
Not one to be discouraged by such a setback, Barnum had Gaylord continue his search for a white elephant. Now offering two hundred thousand dollars, Gaylord was able to purchase a royal white elephant from King Thibaw Min of Burma. Originally christened Toung-Taloung by the monarch, for the purposes of his travelling show, Barnum renamed the elephant “Buddha.” Toung-Taloung arrived in England in January 1884 and was displayed at the Royal Zoological Gardens in London. In the 1888 edition of his autobiography, Barnum writes:
This absolutely unique curiosity was accompanied by a Burmese orchestra and a retinue of Buddhist priests in full ecclesiastical costume, the sacred animal being surrounded by the same attendants and the like paraphernalia as during the performance of religious ceremonies in his native country.
Scientific American described the elephant as “seven feet six inches high, and of a piebald color. His face, ears, the front of his trunk, and his front feet, and part of his breast are of a pinkish flesh color; the rest of his body is of light ashen hue.”
The spectacle garnered much curiosity, but overall, according to Barnum, “a large portion of the public, having expected to see a milk-white elephant, were disappointed.” In March of that year, the elephant was shipped to New York where it was first shown in a private reception to
several hundred naturalists, scientists, Eastern travelers, scholars, leading physicians and clergymen, editors of New York and other papers, and other persons, whose closest scrutiny I invited, but who none of them doubted that the animal was what he was described to be, namely, a genuine white elephant from Burmah.
Among those in attendance were Frank Vincent, Jr., author of the travelogue The Land of the White Elephant (1874), and Colonel Thomas W. Knox, “the only American to whom the King of Siam has ever presented the Order of the White Elephant.”
Toung-Taloung’s stay in America, however, would be short-lived. In November 1887, with the exception of thirty elephants and a lion, Barnum’s “entire menagerie perished in the flames” that engulfed his circus’ winter quarters in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Amongst the dead was Toung-Taloung. Barnum writes:
The white elephant determinedly committed suicide. Liberated with the rest of the elephants, he rushed back into the flames. Driven out again and again, each time he returned until the keepers were forced to abandon him to his fate. In the fiercest of the flames he was seen wildly thrashing his trunk in the air, then with one loud cry fell and was seen no more.
Barnum, who had already experienced four other devastating fires, was unfazed. In his 1891 book, The Wild Beasts, Birds and Reptiles of the World: The Story of Their Capture, Barnum writes: “Like the public, I was greatly disappointed in [Toung-Taloung]. He was as genuine a white elephant as ever existed, but, in fact, there was never such an animal known. The white spots are simply diseased blotches… I cant say that I grieved much over his loss.”
If Barnum did not grieve over the elephant, it is certain that Burma’s King Thibaw Min did. In late 1885, not quite two years after selling his white elephant, the forces of the British Empire invaded Thibaw’s kingdom in Upper Burma, starting the third (and final) Anglo-Burmese War. Within three weeks, Mandalay, Thibaw’s capital, would fall, and Upper Burma would be become part of Great Britain’s Indian Empire. The defeated king was forced into exile in India, and only a few months later, Toung-Taloung leapt into the flames. Thibaw Min was the last king of Burma.
* Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are from The Life of P. T. Barnum
WORKS CITED
The Land of the White Elephant by Frank Vincent, Jr., 1874.
The Life of P.T. Barnum: Written by Himself by P. T. Barnum, 1888.
Scientific American, March 8, 1884.
The Wild Beasts, Birds and Reptiles of the World: The Story of Their Capture by P. T. Barnum, 1891.
Copyright © 2011 by Daniel Shawn Otis
