I WONDER whether there will be a fenghuang to be found in the Chinese exhibitions at Asian Art in London (AAL), although I am not sure whether to hope so or not. This highly coloured creature—the ho-ho bird of the Japanese—is sometimes misleadingly called a Chinese phoenix, although, unlike the European version, more than one can exist at a time. Fenghuang are deemed the most honourable of birds because they eat no living thing, but, and this is what could make them inappropriate at the moment, they only appear in times of peace and prosperity.
I wrote about them in my 1998
