Still pumped about having invented paper, China was big in the bookmaking business around the 12th century. Publishers in Southeastern China commissioned scholars to crank out reams of the brush-and-ink philosophy volumes that were their era’s bestselling discount paperbacks. Slammed with deadlines, old-school Chinese authors employed the next best thing to editorial assistants: monkeys.
According to Chinese lore, “ink monkeys” were an itty-bitty variety of primate trained to mix ink, pass brushes, and turn pages. After a rough calligraphy session with, say, the 12th-century idealist philosopher Zhu Xi (who was said to keep a particularly loyal little buddy), these highly intelligent monkeys would bed down in a desk drawer or brush jar overnight, ready to pop back up like furry, 7-oz. versions of the Windows paper clip. (“It looks like you’re writing the Confucian canon. Would you like help?”) Scholars fed their ink monkeys peanuts and soybeans. And while their classic works survive, ink monkeys are said to have died out, lovable, undernourished, and overworked: miniature interns with tails.
In the spring of 1996, Chinese news service Xinhua reported that live ink monkeys had been discovered in the Wuyi mountain region of Southeastern China. Newspapers around the world picked up the wire story, despite its striking lack of detail. “According to yesterday’s People’s Daily,” The Times (London) reported on April 23, 1996, the ink monkey, “traditional pet of Chinese scholars, has been found in the mountains of Fujian province. The newspaper gave no information about the species of the creatures and did not say how many had been discovered.” Nothing more on the subject ever emerged.
The disappointingly dubious report of ink monkeys’ return might be related to another minimonkey finding that same year. A Northern Illinois University research team at a Chinese limestone quarry did find fossil remains of some foot bones belonging to history’s tiniest premonkey, a thumb-sized lower primate whose existence 45 million years ago has since helped fill in some evolutionary gaps leading from primates to humans. (No adorable ink monkeys swung out of the forest to assist in writing up the team’s findings, which presumably explains why their discovery wasn’t published in the Journal of Human Evolution until 2000.)
The Wisconsin National Primate Research Center and at least one evolutionary primatologist at UT-Austin agree that there’s no scientific proof that ink monkeys ever existed, let alone to support their rediscovery. Even the Web site of the Chinese Wuyi Mountain nature preserve (in the region where the ink monkey rediscovery supposedly occurred) acknowledges somewhat mournfully that ink monkeys are not among the wildlife found there. Perhaps a Chinese wire-service reporter, in need of an ink monkey of his own to proof those English translations, spun fossil remains into wee living monkeys for newspapers worldwide in a kind of global game of telephone. Or perhaps, we’d like to believe anyway, somewhere in a forest in Southeastern China there’s a smug former wire-service reporter with a credenza full of live monkey love. 
This article appears in August 5 • 2005.