Not exactly a Daily Llama

No, in fact, this one is an alpaca.

An alpaca is generally reckoned to be the closest analogue of China's mythical 'grass mud horse'.

Forgive me, fellow China hands - I know this is getting to be a bit of a stale story for us by now, but our friends overseas may still be missing out (unless they read the New York Times article on it a couple of weeks ago). I had been meaning to write about this for a month or so now, and may have left it a bit too late. Oh well.

Chinese Netizens, you see, can be a fractious bunch, and are much given to abusing each other in colourful terms. From time to time, the government launches a moral crackdown on this free-and-easy obscenity. But the online community is endlessly inventive in finding ways to circumvent such censorship. In fact, it's not so very hard, because the Chinese language has such a huge number of homophones that generating dirty puns often seems more like an unavoidable accident than a creative challenge.

At the beginning of this year, in response to an attempt to filter and block comments including the favourite expression of abuse 操你妈 (cao ni ma - "F**k your mum!"), one Chinese forum created the alternate phrase 草泥马 (same pronunciation - though different tones, I think - but the nonsense meaning "grass mud horse").

Before long, it had spread all over the Internet and beyond. For 8 or 10 weeks, it has been one of the biggest pop culture phenomena in China. Elaborate stories were developed about this non-existent creature: its habitat in the Malegebi Desert (I won't tell you; you can guess; or consult the ChinaSmack glossary of online slang) was said to be under threat from the incursions of 'river crabs' (this, 河蟹, is a near-homophone for 'harmonious', Hu Jintao's favourite political buzzword, now co-opted by the country's Netizens as a synonym for censorship - "Oh no, I've been harmonized!" meaning that someone's comments, or a whole blog, have been deleted).

The humble 'grass mud horse' has spawned numerous cartoons, and even a song (which I had been hoping to embed, but....) which was one of the funniest things I've seen on the Internet in a long, long time: cute pictures of llamas and alpacas accompanied by what appears to be a children's nonsense song - but is in fact an absolutely filthy lexicon of contemporary Chinese profanity. There were dozens of variations of this starting to appear on YouTube.... until a few days ago. Now, they've all been pulled. Boo!

I wonder if that NYT article is responsible. The Chinese government was probably getting a bit hacked off with this joke anyway, but when it starts gathering "unfavourable" publicity overseas, then it's definitely time to act. I gather the Kafka Boys are trying to sweep the Internet clear of the offending phrase (I hope I don't get myself blocked again!). We'll just have to come up with something else.