Nineteenth-century, Thai painting (pigment on wood) of Prince Vessantra, a pre-incarnation of the Buddha, delivering the white elephant, named Peccaya, who had the ability to bring rain, to eight brahmins from the neighboring state of Kalinga who greedily desired it. Vessantra was exiled for giving Peccaya away. A man, Vessantra, riding a bejeweled, white elephant with a handler behind, pours a bottle of water on seven men (brahmins), while an eighth watches from nearby.
22 April 2022
A white elephant can be one of two things. It can be a literal elephant with pale skin, or it can metaphorically refer to a supposed benefit or gift that entails ruinous costs. But how did the literal meaning evolve into the metaphorical?
Some Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) are born with pale skin. (Contrary to popular belief, they are not true albinos, just light skinned.) And in Southeast Asia, especially Thailand, they have been traditionally revered. Ownership of them was restricted to royalty, and those that were owned were not put to work but lived a life of relative luxury and indulgence.
The phrase white elephant first appears in English in Richard Eden’s 1555 account of a voyage to Ethiopia. Here the reference is, though, to African elephants:
The other Ethiope cauled [Et]hiopia Interior (that is) the inner Ethiope, is not yet knowen for the greatnesse therof but only by the sea coastes. Yet is it described in this maner. Fyrste from the Equinoctiall towarde the south, is a greate region of Ethiopians which bryngeth furth whyte elephantes, tygers, and the beastes cauled Rhinocerontes.
An English-language reference to white Asian elephants, with a reference to ownership by royalty, appears a few decades later in a 1579 version of the travels of Marco Polo:
The wilde Elephantes feede vpon grasse, and vpon the trees of the fields. He that hathe charge of them, ruleth them with a rodde of yron, or a ring whiche he putteth round about his head. The Elephants haue so much prouidence, that manye with their feete, pull away the Speares from their enimies, for that they shoulde not hurt those that be vpon their backes. The King rideth vpon a white Elephant, which hath a chayne of golde about his necke, being long vnto his féete, set full of many precious stones.
A decade later, we get a 1588 account of a war fought between Pegu (i.e., now Bago in Myanmar) and Siam (Thailand) over a white elephant. This war will continue to be referenced in English writing over the course of the next several centuries:
Running fro[m] this kingdome of Malaca by the north & northwest cost is the mightie kingdome of Pegu, the which is in bignes greater thē Samatra, & equall in riches, especially of pearls and al sorts of stones, & very fine christall: there is great store of prouision and an infinite number of people, and the king thereof is mightie: to who[m] (as we haue said) ye king of Cyan doth pay tribute, because he ouercame him in a battaile which he had w[i]t[h] him, in the yeare 1568. according vnto the common opinion: the occasion was, that vnderstanding, how that the saide king of Syan had in his power a white Elephant (whome those of the kingdome of Pegu do worship for God) the king sent to buy the same, and to giue for it so much as he would esteeme or value it: but he vtterly denied the same, and saide that he would not let him haue it for all that he had in his kingdom: the which caused so great anger vnto the king, that hee called together all the souldiers that he could make, with determination to get by force of armes, that which he could not by faire meanes and great ritches: in the which he did so great diligence, that in a fewe dayes hee had ioyned together an armie of a million and sixe hundreth thousande of men of warre, with whome hee departed vnto the saide kingdome of Syan, which was from his kingdome two hundreth leagues, and did not onely performe his pretence in bringing away the white Elephant, but did also make the king tributarie, as he is vnto this day, as hath bin declared vnto you.
And Jeremy Collier’s 1721 encyclopedia tells how the white elephants owned by the king of Thailand were cared for and indulged, at great expense to the treasury:
Those of Bengal worship a white Elephant, which is so uncommon, that they reckon it a holy Creature. The Indian Kings often fight bloody Battels to make themselves Masters of them: ’tis said there is none to be found but in the Kingdom of Siam, and that the Kings of this Country have treated the Elephants, time out of Mind, with as much Respect as they would do some neighbouring Princes, who made them a Visit. M. L’Abbé de Choifi reports in his Travels, that in the second Court of the King of Siam’s Palace, he saw the famous white Elephant, the getting of which cost 5 or 6000 Men’s Lives, between this Prince and the King of Pegu. This Animal, as he relates, is considerably large, strong made, but old and wrinkled, and that he has four Mandarins, or Indian Lords, to fan him. They are likewise furnished with Branches of Leaves to drive away the Flies, and Umbrellas to shelter him from the Sun when he walks abroad. This Elephant is always served in gold Plate, and Monsieur Choifi saw two Vessels of Gold before him, the one to eat, and the other to drink in. The Water he drinks has been kept six Months, for the older ’tis the more wholsom. ’Tis said when this old Elephant drops off, there is a young one ready to succeed him.
That same year we see white elephant being used in an extended metaphor for the cost of war in a 9 December 1721 letter to the London Journal. The anonymous writer, using the pseudonym Cato, opines that martial honor and victory are empty and not worth the cost of blood and treasure that war entails:
White Elephants are rare in Nature, and so greatly valued in the Indies, that that King of Pegu hearing that the King of Siam had got Two, sent an Embassy in Form, to desire one of them of his Royal Brother, at any Price: But being refus’d, the thought his Honour concern’d to wage War for so great an Affront. So he enter’d Siam with a vast Army, and with the Loss of Five Hundred Thousand of his own Men, and the Destruction of as many of the Siameses, he made himself Master of the Elephant, and retrieved his Honour.
Darius (I think it was Darius the Mede) found his Honour concern’d to chastize the Scythians for invading Asia, a Hundred and Thirty Years before; and lost a great Army to vindicate his Honour, which yet was not vindicated; that is, he missed the white Elephant. For,
In short, Honour and Victory are generally no more than white Elephants; and for white Elephants the most destructive Wars have been often made. What Man free, either by Birth or Spirit, could, without Pity and Contempt, behold, as in a late French Reign he frequently might behold, a Swarm of slavish French men, in wood Shoes, with Hungry Bellies, and no Clothes, dancing round a May-pole, because their Grand Monarque, at the Expence of a Million of their Money, and Thirty or Forty Thousand Lives, had acquir’d a white Elephant, or in other words, gain’d a Town or a Victory.
Instances are endless, or else I could name other People, who have employed themselves several Years in catching white Elephants by Sea and Land.
The idea of white elephants being a ruinous gift arises in the West by the mid nineteenth century. Thai kings bestowing white elephants as gifts to courtiers was never an actual practice—white elephants were too highly prized to give away.
A 23 July 1851 letter by Geraldine Endsor Jewsbury uses a metaphorical white elephant to refer to a man whose efforts to help her cause more trouble than they are worth. The idea of a gift is implicit, but she does use the term bankrupt. The passage indicates that the metaphor of a white elephant as a ruinous gift was in circulation at the time:
If —— were not so frightened of doing wrong, he would oftener do right, and anyway be less of a bother. His services are like so many white elephants, of which nobody can make use, and yet that drain one’s gratitude, if indeed one does not feel bankrupt.
The idea of white elephant as a gift is explicitly stated in the preface of an anonymous 1859 volume of poetry. Here the locale is not Thailand, but the Kingdom of Ava, in what is now upper Myanmar. Pegasus here is being used to refer to he poetic impulse:
Indeed, the most eminent Poets of all lands and all ages have been the most eminent in their different professions or avocations—for you will find very few instances of a man who has been all his life a Poet, an entire Poet, and nothing but a Poet. In fact, that would be impossible, unless he had inherited broad acres or buoyant consols; for Pegasus is very much like the white elephant which the King of Ava presents to obnoxious courtiers,—he confers an inestimable honour upon the possessor, but he is a terribly expensive animal to keep, and would soon eat a man of moderate means out of house and home.
There is a pithy little bit of advice once bestowed by Mr. Punch upon “Persons about to Marry,” which would apply equally well to persons about to poetize: it is contained in one word—“Don't!”
So, while white elephants, the literal kind, were indeed revered and kept at great expense by the kings of Thailand, the notion that they were bestowed as gifts is a Western invention. But a metaphor does not need historical veracity to become ensconced in the language, and the metaphorical white elephant as a ruinous gift does indeed come from the false idea that Thai kings used them this way.
Sources:
(I’m indebted to Peter Jenson Brown’s two blog posts on the phrase for providing the historical framework of the development of the metaphor.)
Brown, Peter Jensen. “Two-and-a-Half Idioms—The History and Etymology of ‘White Elephants,’” Early Sports and Pop Culture History Blog. 23 June 2014.
———“The Gift of the Nabob—A Regular-Old Elephant Update of the ‘Gift of the White Elephant,’” Early Sports and Pop Culture History Blog, 30 October 2014.
Collier, Jeremy. An Appendix to the Three English Volumes in Folio of Morery’s Great Historical, Geographical, Genealogical and Poetical Dictionary. London: George James, 1721, s.v. elephant.
Eden, Richard. “The Seconde Vyage to Guinea.” In Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, The Decades of the Newe Worlde. Translated by Richard Eden. London: William Powell, 1555, 356v. Early English Books Online.
Jewsbury, Geraldine Endsor. Letter 116, 23 July 1851. Selections of the Letters of Geraldine Endsor Jewsbury to Jane Welsh Carlyle. Edited by Anne Elizabeth Nicholson Ireland (pseud. Mrs. Alexander Ireland). London: Longmans, Green, 1862, 414.
de Mendoza, González. The Historie of the Great and Mightie Kingdome of China. Translated by R. Parke. London: I. Wolfe for Edward White, 1588, 395–96. Early English Books Online.
The Most Noble and Famous Trauels of Marcus Paulus. London: H. Bynneman for Ralph Newbery, 1579, 142. Early English Books Online.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2015, s.v. white elephant, n.
“To the Author of the London Journal.” The London Journal, 9 December 1721. Gale Primary Sources: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Nichols Newspapers Collection.
A Volume of Smoke in Two Puffs, with Stray Whiffs from the Same Pipe. London: Arthur Hall, Virtue, 1859, x.
Image credit: Anonymous artist, late nineteenth century. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work of art.