What is a White Elephant and Why?
Christmas, Circuses, Asian Kingdoms, Abraham Lincoln
At this time of year, you may have celebrated the holiday season with a gift exchange with your friends or family. You may call it many things: maybe Secret Santa, Kris Kringle, or Yankee Swap. To many Americans, it’s the WHITE ELEPHANT. Various articles connect this name to the myth of a King of Siam bestowing a burdensome gift, but this only scratches the surface.
WHAT IS A WHITE ELEPHANT GIFT EXCHANGE?
One distinct aspect of the White Elephant Gift Exchange is that your gift can be taken from you. Rather than giving and receiving gifts directly from one person to another, the gifts go into a common pool. The participants are each assigned a number and choose a wrapped gift from the pile. Though it’s in a specific order, if the gifts are wrapped then there’s still an element of surprise… and regret.
The next participant can either pull from the pile or take a gift from someone who already has one. One might take another person’s gift either because that one looks better, or because they just don’t want the one they have.
The gift you’d rather get rid of seems to be the element that gives this style of Gift Exchange its name.
It used to be said that The King of Siam (Thailand) would give a White Elephant to someone if he didn’t really like them. You can’t refuse a gift from the King but also you probably can’t afford to take care of animal that’s not only huge, but sacred, and thus not a beast of burden — you can’t have it carry your building materials or your harvest and you certainly can’t ride it into battle.
American newspapers mentioned White Elephants of Southeast and South Asia in the mid 1800’s, often simply as an animal native to the region. Thailand (then the Kingdom of Siam) was the first Asian nation to establish formal democratic ties with the United States of America with a treaty signed in 1833.
King Mongkut of Siam from 1851 to 1868 maintained correspondence with President James Buchanan and after him President Abraham Lincoln. Honest Abe’s first letter to the monarch declined an offer to release pairs of elephants into the American wilderness to breed and eventually be tamed for work and transport. Lincoln wrote that the U.S. was not in the right climate for elephants. He was also dealing with the American Civil War.
The 1956 film “The King and I” fictitiously has Yul Brynner’s King Mongkut mention that lack of elephants must be why Lincoln hasn’t yet won the Civil War
Though these elephants weren’t “White,” they were being offered by the King of Siam and they would have been a burden. Luckily for these elephants, they were a gift that Lincoln could decline. About 25 years later, a few elephants shipped to the U.S. by P.T. Barnum would not be as luckily.
The co-founder of the famous circus Barnum & Bailey’s (which no longer uses elephants) “conceived the idea of importing and exhibiting a sacred white elephant,” (according to Tody Hamilton, Barnum’s press agent). His first two purchases, acquired somewhere in India, fell sick and died on the ship. His third purchased elephant did survive the journey, but Barnum first had it brought to London.
There it was exhibited not only to general audiences but also to by English officers familiar with India and its elephants. They would vouch for its authenticity as a real “White Elephant” as opposed to any old regular elephant.
WHY’S THE ELEPHANT GOTTA BE WHITE?
The Asian Elephant, a species distinct from the 2 species of African Elephant (savannah and forest), is found today in 13 countries across South and Southeast Asia. In these same regions the ancient and now-global religions of Hinduism and Buddhism originated. The elephant is a powerful and prominent symbol in their traditions.
The Hindu pantheon features Airavata as the mount of the Deva (god) Indra. Images of Airavata passed along through Southeast Asia with many other south Asian cultural elements. In Thailand Airawat is often called Erawan and depicted with 3 heads. Neighboring Laos featured this 3-headed elephant on its earliest national flags.
In Buddhist tradition, Gautama Buddha’s mother was visited by a divine elephant with prophecies of the child’s accomplishments.
But while these divine elephants are often depicted in pale colors or white, they’re not necessarily called “White” Elephants. There are two Thai terms that are translated to “White Elephant.”
- Chang Samkhan / ช้างสำคัญ
- Chang Pheuak / ช้างเผือก
Chang (or Chaang, or ช้าง) = Elephant.
Samkhan indicates importance ; can be translated as Auspicious / Lucky
Pheuak = white / albino
The Thai Royal Government today cites 7 criteria from Brahmanic texts for identifying Chang Samkhan: its eyes, soft palate, toenails, hair, skin, tail hair, and genitals must all be white.
However, as P.T. Barnum found out, the Thai Chang Samkhan doesn’t have to be truly all-white. His press agent lamented over 10 years later that…
It was a popular though ignorant belief at that time that a white elephant was all the name implied — as white as the driven snow.
But P.T. Barnum was committed to having his White Elephant be white! In London his elephant, named Toung Taloung, drew attention from audiences as well as competitors. Barnum acknowledged that Toung Taloung’s whiteness was technical rather than literal, but one Adam Forepaugh bought a (regular) elephant in Liverpool and then bleached it.
The two elephants were exhibited in London and New York, but Forepaugh’s “White” Elephant made it to New York first:
The great American public had wanted a white elephant, and Adam Forepaugh had given it to them. Ours was not white, but only spotted, and pretty mouse-colored at that. They would have none of that. They would not even admit that it was a sacred elephant.
So there was our quandry: Our elephant was genuine and a financial failure; Forepaugh’s was a fraud and a success. What was to be done? It was certainly up to us.
Tody Hamilton himself sought a method to whiten one of Barnum’s elephants other than Toung Taloung. Bleaching products for hair (and even skin) were well-known in American newspapers at the time.
Tody Hamilton sought help from a seller of a new bleaching chemical and applied it to one of Barnum’s elephants himself. When Forepaugh’s White Elephant was paraded in a 3rd city — Philadelphia — Barnum and Hamilton’s Whiter-Than-White Elephant was brought out to crash the party.
…and when their parade started, in we popped, little bleached elephant and all, with the sign: “An exact counterpart of Forepaugh’s fraudulent white elephant, only a better job by artists.”
That was a signal for war, and war it was for the rest of the season.
So Barnum’s disappointing White Elephant was outshined by Forepaugh’s fraud and Barnum’s second White Elephant was a joke to discredit Forepaugh and bring attention back to the first one.
Barnum’s elephant who was Sacred White also began and ended as a Burdensome White. The initial burden being poor marketability; the final burden being $125,000 spent on the Elephant-purchasing, shipping, and whitening (and $150,000 for Forepaugh).
THE WASHERMAN AND THE POTTER
Again, Barnum’s and Forepaugh’s White Elephants were not the first to be talked about in American news.
In 1858, the volume XII issue of “The National Era” (Washington, D.C.) features a supposedly Burman (now Myanmar) folk story of a feuding washerman and potter. The Potter sabotages the Washerman in a deceitful way by convincing the king that the Washerman is so good that he can make the elephants in the royal stable White.
The Washer can’t refuse the king’s gracious order to wash his elephants white. But he tells the king he actually needs some huge pots from his friend the Potter to get the work done. The Potter’s pots break as soon as the unwashed elephants step into them. Again, not being in position to either give up on the king nor refuse his offer of work, the Potter is stuck on a hopeless task unable to maintain his real business.
The burdensome gift here is the privilege of making a White Elephant. In this version, the said King is that of Burma (Myanmar), Siam’s (Thailand’s) neighbor and occasional enemy in war. Other sources attribute the story to India, which itself is a large and diverse region.
WHO TURNED THE WASHERMAN/POTTER STORY INTO A GIFT EXCHANGE?
My reading hasn’t yet yielded the answer to this question. But personally I do believe this is the most likely inspiration for the Gift Exchange practice. In the 1800’s, the United States was developing not just as a young nation, but as a global presence. Thailand was the country’s diplomatic and literary gateway into not just Southeast Asia, but Asia at large. Thai and mainlain SE Asian stories and expressions leaked into American rhetoric over the course of the 1800’s.
On the backs of other cultural events, the phrase and the symbolism of “the White Elephant” was born into modern American culture as a roundabout remnant of early Southeast Asian — American exchange.
