The crane is the bird of long life in Chinese and Japanese art. The bird behind the symbol is the red-crowned, or Manchurian, crane: tall and white, with a red patch on its head and black on its neck and wings. Chinese writers called the crane xian qin (仙禽), the bird of the immortals.
The real bird: Grus japonensis
The red-crowned crane's scientific name is Grus japonensis. It nests in large wetlands of northeast China and the Russian Far East, and one population lives year round on Hokkaido in Japan. The IUCN Red List last assessed it in 2021 and lists it as Vulnerable, with about 2,000 to 2,650 mature birds. Sources differ on the trend: the IUCN records a decline, while the International Crane Foundation reports numbers rising.
The bird of the immortals
In Daoist lore the crane carries immortals through the clouds. Shoulao, the god of longevity, is sometimes shown riding on a crane's back. The Ming painter Qiu Ying painted one of the Eight Immortals flying on a crane across a gold-flecked fan, now in the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. In 1112 Emperor Huizong of the Song recorded a flock of cranes over the palace gates of Kaifeng as a good omen, in his handscroll Auspicious Cranes.
Crane and pine
Painters pair the crane with the pine. In a late 19th-century court painting by Chen Zhaofeng at the Met, crane, pine and rock appear together as three symbols of long life, fit for an imperial birthday. A Ming painting of crane and pine at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art adds that the pair could also wish a couple a happy marriage.
The crane also meets the plum blossom in the story of Lin Bu, a Song poet and hermit at West Lake in Hangzhou. He was known for treating plum trees as his companions and cranes as his children.
Cranes on officials' robes
From 1391, Ming court rules had officials wear rank squares on their robes: birds for civil officials, animals for military ones. The crane marked the first and highest civil rank. A Ming portrait at the Met shows a gentleman with two cranes on his badge, though the museum notes that portraits sometimes stretched the truth. The Qing kept the system, and Qing badges usually show a single crane facing a red sun, which stood for the emperor.
A thousand paper cranes
A Japanese proverb says cranes live a thousand years and turtles ten thousand. A string of a thousand folded cranes, called senbazuru (千羽鶴), is offered as a prayer for health, safety and peace. A Kyoto publisher printed patterns for linked paper cranes as early as 1797.
The custom reached the world through Sadako Sasaki. She was two when the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima and was diagnosed with leukemia in February 1955. That August she heard the saying that a thousand folded cranes grant a wish, and she began folding. She died on October 25, 1955, at 12. The Peace Memorial Museum puts her count at more than 1,300 cranes, though an older account said 644. Her classmates campaigned for the Children's Peace Monument, unveiled in 1958, where about 10 million paper cranes are left each year.
