Kirin
The kirin is the Japanese form of the Chinese qilin: a one-horned beast with a deer’s body and an ox’s tail that treads without a sound, harms no living thing and appears only under wise rulers. In modern Japanese the word also means giraffe.
Meaning
The name joins two Chinese characters, ki for the male animal and rin for the female, the JAANUS dictionary of Japanese art explains. In the Chinese classics it has the body of a deer and the tail of an ox, hoofs, legs and a horn like a deer’s that are symbols of benevolence, and five-coloured hair, yellow underneath; it appears in times of good government, and in legend appeared to Confucius and to Emperor Wu of Han. Henri Joly (1908) gives it a deer’s body, a horse’s legs and hoofs, the head of a horse or a dragon and the tail of an ox or a lion, with one horn that is fleshy at the tip, and calls it the chief of the 360 hairy creatures, so gentle that it hurts nothing living and appears only under wise rulers as a lucky omen.
Origin and history
In Japan, JAANUS notes, few early pictures of the kirin are known, apart from one segment of the second scroll of the Chōjū jinbutsu giga (the Frolicking Animals, mid-twelfth century) at Kōzan-ji in Kyoto. In the Edo period it was sometimes painted by Kanō school artists who admired things Chinese. Chamberlain wrote in 1905 that the “unicorn” and the phoenix scarcely appear except in art.
The kirin in netsuke
Joly calls the kirin fairly common in Japanese art. As a netsuke it crouches with its horn lying along its back, its body shown with scales or with lumps that may be meant to make it look like a piebald horse, and often surrounded by flames.
Often confused with
Joly notes that the kirin’s horn and flames are sometimes added to the karashishi, the Buddhist stone lions of Chinese origin with large eyes and curly manes. A kirin has hoofs and one horn; a karashishi or komainu has paws and a curly mane. In Han China the kirin was painted on tomb walls with the dragon and the phoenix.
Kirin and the giraffe
In modern Japanese kirin is also the word for the giraffe, and JAANUS warns against confusing the two.
Read next
- Next in Yōkai and creatures of Japanese folkloreKitsune (fox)The fox of Japanese folklore: a shape-shifter that takes a woman’s form, possesses people and lights foxfire. In Shinto the fox belongs to Inari, the kami of rice, and pairs of stone foxes guard Inari’s shrines.
- The kirin was painted with the dragon and the phoenix (JAANUS)Japanese dragon (ryū)The dragon (ryū, or tatsu) of Japanese art and belief: a scaled, serpent-bodied creature from China that rules water, rain and the sea. Japanese art usually gives it three claws on each foot.
See also
Komainu (guardian lion-dogs), Tanuki (raccoon dog), Bakeneko and nekomata (cat yōkai), Jorōgumo (spider woman), Tengu, Kappa.
Sources
- kirin (JAANUS), JAANUS: Japanese Architecture and Art Net Users System, “kirin 麒麟”, JAANUS (Japanese Architecture and Art Net Users System), entry text
- Henri L. Joly, Legend in Japanese Art (1908), Henri L. Joly, Legend in Japanese Art: A Description of Historical Episodes, Legendary Characters, Folk-lore, Myths, Religious Symbolism Illustrated in the Arts of Old Japan, London: John Lane, 1908, John Lane (Internet Archive, University of Toronto copy), entry 469, Kirin
- Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Japanese (1905), Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Japanese: Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with Japan, fifth edition, London: John Murray, 1905, John Murray (Internet Archive, University of Toronto copy), “Supernatural Creatures”, p. 444
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves or lines.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
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