What is a Kilin?

Stock photo of Kilin from Dreamstime.com

I’m visiting Jiaoxing Township in Taiwan. It’s beautiful and busy, full of hot springs and brilliant colored lights. It’s like a Reno on water or a mountainous, lush Las Vegas. A gorgeous mixture of gaudy carnival atmosphere and oriental tradition.

The hotel is the picture of modern restraint and comfort. The name, however, burrowed in my brain, pinging vague memories. It is Kilin, and this whole time I’ve checked into the Kilin Hotel, I wondered “isn’t that a Chinese unicorn?”

So, What is a Kilin?

Well- not exactly unicorns. They are depicted in a couple of ways, but the most popular version has two horns on their heads, deer bodies, and dragon- or lion-like heads that sport thick eyelashes, floating manes, and sometimes scales. They have quite a bit in common with dragons, actually. Sometimes they will be depicted with one horn, and sometimes they are depicted as fish-like or are associated with giraffes.

Like the European unicorn, they symbolize things, generally gentleness and the worthiness of a leader. At this hotel, they are telegraphing fantastical luxury. The intended message may be something else.

How Long Have They Been Around?

I mean as a concept. Their first mention is in a poem called “Feet of the Lin” which was written between the 11th and 7th century before the common era. That is roughly 700 years before Julius Caesar invaded Gaul, for reference.

There has been evolution. They got associated with giraffes around the 1400’s, when China got in contact with Somalia, and they have picked up associations with Confucius and Tang emperors over time. They are sometimes depicted with one horn, starting in the 4rth or 5th century after the common era. So, roughly as Rome faded into Byzantium.

Is It Right To Call Them Unicorns?

Blake Smith once complained that our tendency to lump many traditions from different cultures together in one box is misleading. He’s not wrong, though I get the impulse. Study is easier when you can categorize the things you study with similar things.

But it also glosses over important differences. Yeah, kilins and unicorns tend to be used to represent virtue- a virtuous person in the case of the unicorn and the fact that a leader has virtue in the case of the kilin. Zeroing in on the horns and associating them with a horned animal a Westerner is familiar with makes them easier to remember.

However, the kilin seems to come from a different source and may, depending on how you track the unicorn, be a bit younger in the human imagination. (Though I’m not sure when people started attributing unicorns to the Bible.)

Again, maybe the type of categorization is wrong here: humans seem to need their unobtainable examples of virtue and utopian conditions, so we invent creatures to present them. That kind of puts the kilin in the same category as the Space Brothers of the 1950’s contactees. The horns are misleading. After all, people writing about kilin that have one horn always specify that it is a ‘one-horned’ kilin and there are many monsters that have horns in Chinese mythology that are definitely not unicorns.

Perhaps our archetypes aren’t as simple as ‘has horns.’