Monkeys in Chinese culture

Monkeys, particularly macaques and gibbons, have played significant roles in Chinese culture for over two thousand years. Some examples familiar to English speakers include the zodiacal Year of the Monkey, the Monkey King Sun Wukong in the novel Journey to the West, and Monkey Kung Fu.

The Chinese language has numerous words meaning "simian; monkey; ape". Some diachronically changed meanings in reference to different simians. For instance, Chinese xingxing 猩猩 originally named "a mythical creature with a human face and pig body", and became the modern name for the "orangutan".

Within the classification of Chinese characters, almost all "monkey; ape" words – with the exceptions of nao 夒 and yu 禺 that were originally monkey pictographs – are written with radical-phonetic compound characters. These characters combine a radical or classifier that roughly indicates semantic field, usually the "dog/quadruped radical" 犭 for simians, and a phonetic element that suggests pronunciation. For instance, this animal classifier is a graphic component in hou 猴 (with a hou 侯 "marquis" phonetic) "macaque; monkey" and yuan 猿 (with yuan 袁 "long robe") "gibbon; monkey".

Note that the following discussion of "monkey; ape" terminology will cite three fundamental sources. The oldest extant Chinese dictionary, the (c. 3rd century BCE) Erya () glosses seven names for monkeys and monkey-like creatures in the 寓屬 "Monkey/Wild Animal" taxonomy. The first Chinese character dictionary, the (121 CE) Shuowen Jiezi defines many names of simians, primarily under the () in Chapter 11. The classic Chinese pharmacopoeia, Li Shizhen's (1597) Bencao Gangmu () lists medical uses for five Yu 寓 "monkeys" and three Kuai 怪 "supernatural beings". The latter are wangliang 魍魎 "a demon that eats the livers of corpses", penghou 彭侯 "a tree spirit that resembles a black tailless dog", and feng 封 "an edible monster that resembles a two-eyed lump of flesh".

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