I like museums. I like coin museums, art museums, history museums of all sorts, science museums, you name it. Is there a coin show in Chicago? I wanted to visit the Field Museum there and look at Sue, the Tyrannosaurus Rex. The American Numismatic Association World’s Fair of Money was in Oklahoma City this year, so I planned to go to the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. In Shanghai, there are so many museums it’s nearly impossible to visit all of them in a single visit.
Not long ago I trekked through the Shanghai Natural History Museum. Through a five-story tall wall of glass light floods into a main hall. The space is so large it dwarfs even the dinosaur fossils. The building draws crowds of families, students, and tourists by the thousands each day.
As my friends and I walk around the second level, we approach a small exhibit with a couple of stuffed animals in it. Absolutely no one in the crowd pays any attention to it, but I stop in my tracks. “These are Père David deer!” I exclaim to my surprised companions.
They stare at me as I babble excitedly, “Père David was a great naturalist who searched China for unknown species in the 19th century. He discovered the gerbil in Mongolia and a macaque, or monkey, in a South China jungle. One day in 1866, he came across a herd of strange-looking deer in a Chinese royal hunting preserve. These deer were another new species; extinct in the wild, but a single herd survived in the royal forest. They are now known as Père David Deer.”
“It’s a good thing he found them when he did, too. A couple of decades later most of the herd ran away through a damaged wall. Local hunters were delighted. The last 30 were slaughtered by foreign soldiers in 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion. Fortunately, Père David arranged to legally send some to Europe for study. Eventually a breeding herd in England was gathered together from zoos across the continent — which was a great success. Today there are around 6,000 descendants of that group. Many were returned to China and some now live in the wild here.”
We all stared at the specimens in the showcase. The backward pointing antlers certainly are distinctive. According to a sign the hooves of this species are unusual and the animal spends much of its time in water. It is a very good swimmer and has been called the “Water Deer.”
“There is a really elegant 1994 silver Chinese coin that shows this deer on it. It’s part of the fourth set of Endangered Wildlife of China coins. The 10 yuan coin is 38.6 millimeters in diameter and contains 27 grams of .925-fine, or sterling, silver. The mintage is 15,000. It was designed by Li Xiaochuan and struck at the Shenyang Mint.
“By the way Père David, the priest-explorer, also journeyed into the mountains of Szichuan to look for animals not yet known to the Western world. He was successful there, too. He discovered a black and white bear called the Giant Panda, but, that’s a story for another day,” I smiled.